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Doomsday mom8/14/2023 ![]() He worries about hyperinflation (“which is happening as we speak”), credit collapse, various natural disasters, and electromagnetic pulses from nuclear bombs, biological weapons, or solar storms destroying the electrical grid. will go to war with Russia and China sometime in the next year. “I don’t worry about AI right now,” he said, “because I think we won’t get there.” He’s pretty sure the U.S. Cole, who runs a prepping business called American Heritage Farms, outlined 13 “Gray Swan” events he believes are both imminent and powerfully destructive. Nobody I talked with in the world of doomsday prepping was sweating AI very much, compared with all the other threats they perceive. “What matters is nukes and Yellowstone and meteors,” Hubbard said. Even the tech billionaire he recently worked with didn’t bring up AI as a concern. Hubbard, one of the biggest names in commercial prepping, told me that his archetypal customer is a 60-year-old man who recently sold his business for $30 million, bought a ranch, and now wants a bunker. ![]() This AI freakout is exposing what has long been true about Silicon Valley’s doomsday preppers: a disaster-proof compound might not save the richest tech moguls, but perhaps that was never the whole point. “I don’t think a single person has brought up AI,” he said. I asked Hubbard if anyone had cited AI to him as their motivator for purchasing a bunker. So this should be a moment for AI-doomsday preppers, with frazzled Silicon Valley millionaires shelling out enormous sums of money to shield themselves from whatever AI does to us all. “If we go ahead on this everyone will die,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, the senior research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, has written, “including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.” That’s scary.” Other people have gone further. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. ![]() “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he told The New York Times. Earlier this month, the pioneering researcher Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google and warned about the dangers of AI. And a 2016 New Yorker profile of Sam Altman quoted the OpenAI CEO as saying he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to” in the event of super-contagious viruses, nuclear war, and AI “that attacks us.”Įxtreme predictions about what AI could do to the world have since grown louder among a vocal minority of those who work in the field. In 2018, Bloomberg reported that seven tech entrepreneurs had purchased bunkers in New Zealand. In his book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Douglas Rushkoff delves into what he calls “The Mindset”-the idea among Silicon Valley doomsday preppers that “winning” means earning enough money to escape the damage that befalls everyone else. Many of his clients work in tech: Although the prepper movement in America spans the upper and middle classes, the left and the right, Silicon Valley has in recent years become its epicenter. “When the war broke out in Ukraine, my phone was ringing every 45 seconds for about two weeks,” he said. Lately, interest in his underground bunkers has been booming. His Texas-based company sells bunkers with bulletproof doors and concrete walls to people willing to shell out several thousand-and up to millions-of dollars for peace of mind about potential catastrophic events. “World War III, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Joe Biden-you know, everything that’s messed up in the world,” Ron Hubbard, the CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, told me. ![]() If you’re looking for a reason the world will suddenly end, it’s not hard to find one-especially if your job is to convince people they need to buy things to prepare for the apocalypse.
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