[jordanb]

It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.

I'm forever grateful to Thiel for that clip, and to Musk for his crippling Twitter addiction. It was pretty impossible to get regular people to understand that folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers when all they ever see about these people is professionally managed public relations content.

[jacquesm]

The list is getting longer and longer, but a good touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.

[toomuchtodo]

Indeed. Empathy and the levels of wealth accumulation in scope are incompatible imho. They are the paperclip maximizers we were warned about.

[sznio]

I thought about the same recently, in the context of the Epstein files.

You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost opportunity to make more money. You start with smaller things, then your standards slide more and more, until you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't anything for you to do except make more money.

Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's island not because they like diddling kids, but because they needed to network with Epstein to make more money. How many actively participated just to be in his in-group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so corrupt that they would do anything for business.

[savanaly]

Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

[yoyohello13]

You can make a huge amount of money that way, but not the MOST money.

[cootsnuck]

"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.

[ambicapter]

"relatively small scale" is doing all the work in this sentence, no?

[tsimionescu]

Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.

[troosevelt]

Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.

[trinsic2]

> There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.

I'm calling this out.

That's a personal belief, not everyone sees the world this way. Some of us believe that some things are objective and deontological.

IMHO our move toward too much utilitarianism has created the corrupt conditions we are living in

[keybored]

Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.

> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.

The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138558

[PunchyHamster]

You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire.

It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.

[mystraline]

Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work.

It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.

Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.

Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.

[sillyfluke]

>It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers

Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this. I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.

But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).

Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.

[troosevelt]

Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's slave morality?

I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.

I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense?

If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels?

[mikkupikku]

> slave morality

I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse."

That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."

[trinsic2]

Yeah but I don't think this is being said here.

Are you just trying make a point outside of what is being said? I'm hearing people saying the first part in many of these responses.

[shevy-java]

> I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates.

I am not sure about that.

Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party.

[jacquesm]

> on an island where underage girls party

on an island where they traffic underage girls and rape them.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> an island where underage girls party.

What an absolutely gross mischaracterization of what happens there.

[jacquesm]

This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga: so many people knew about this. And yet, the mutually assured destruction of having been associated with Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of silence on all of them.

[frm88]

Have you ever heard of the Bohemian Grove? The birthplace of the Heritage Foundation? There you have them all, in one club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove

[jacquesm]

No, I never heard of them, so thank you for the pointer.

[BlueTemplar]

Oh yeah, plenty of that, even scientists and thinkers were tempted, we had plenty of details even before the 'files', thanks to Maxwell's phone book :

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyo...

[bityard]

If making increasingly immoral decisions is all it takes to be a billionaire... then man, I have truly been wasting my life's potential

[toomuchtodo]

You also have to be lucky. Have you tried being more lucky?

[overfeed]

Necessary - but not adequate.

[johndhi]

Where do you guys come up with these ideas?

Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?

[jacquesm]

> Where do you guys come up with these ideas?

By thinking.

[shimman]

Thinking, experiencing the world, knowing that throughout our entire history of a species that tales of "excess greed" were also cautionary tales on how greed ruins society throughout the entire world.

[johndhi]

Excess greed is a different thing than excess wealth. Bill gates is giving away all of that wealth - is that a greedy action?

[_DeadFred_]

My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:

Zuckerberg 2.1%. Ballmer 3.7% Bezos 1.6% Sergey Brin 2.5% Michael Dell 2.6% Ken Griffin 5%

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame...

[triceratops]

> the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy

If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society.

Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.

[Otterly99]

In general (not always, but it is mostly true) philantropy from billionaires and very profitable companies tend to be overshadowed by how much they profit from a system biased toward enriching them (see: The divide by Jason Hickel). A small metaphor to illustrate: are you a philantropist if you film yourself giving away 100$ to homeless people but make tens of thousands from posting the video?

[cratermoon]

If you gave away as much money proportionately, you'd have about 75 fewer dollars in your pocket.

Tell me again how generous billionaires are.

[johndhi]

Gates has pledged 200 billion - 99 pct of his wealth - and has already given 60 billion (close to half of it). Is that generous or not?

[toomuchtodo]

Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on. There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am not too concerned about broad support for them in a world with 8-10 billion people.

"Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power.

"Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator.

> Where do you guys come up with these ideas?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

https://medium.com/roaring-rivers/are-all-billionaires-socio... | https://archive.today/nX2Fh

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/bil... | https://archive.today/Gb2RF

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellamalmgren/2025/09/09/america... | https://archive.today/nLx78

https://www.google.com/search?q=billionaires+sociopaths

[e2le]

People aught to be questioning more the future vision of those in positions to shape it. Someone who struggles with such simple questions around humanity while simultaneously building the tools of a surveillance state probably should not be one of the individuals driving our future.

It's quite clear that my vision of the future is nothing like theirs.

[dijit]

It's a lot more comforting to believe that the people who have influence over us are there by some right of some kind.

Wether it be because they're "smarter than us and have completed capitalism" (that's how Gates, Ellison and ironically Trump/Musk are thought of)

or by "divine right" as it used to be with Kings.

It's horribly sobering to realise that, actually, they're just people. Like, pretty ordinary unremarkable people who have access to different information than we do and have been exposed to different things. Rarely are they more than a single standard deviation from the norm in intelligence.

They're people, flawed, egotistical, easily manipulated, easily dragged into thinking weird things, persuadable and unless they're really self-aware: will be surrounded by sycophants that just repeat what they want to hear (because, that feels pretty good) until they have a warped "echo of an echo" understanding of the world.

I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it's terrifying to believe that you would be insulated from all direct criticism while being told that everything you do is the right thing no matter what it is. You can't trust your own fucking reflection in that situation.

But we do that to people, people who have enormous influence over us, and they get confused when we don't like them, and we get confused about how they can be so out of touch and unlikable.

But they're just people.

[rurp]

A frustrating aspect of the AI debates has been the number of people who believe people like Sam Altman who say that the immense wealth created by AGI would be distributed to the masses to improve their lives. The notion that the mega wealthy Elon/Sams/Bezos elites are going to willingly give up unprecedented wealth because millions of people have become unemployed and impoverished is so wildly out of step with how those people have behaved their entire lives. Someone who says they have enough billions and want to improve millions of lives don't make it to those positions.

The only way that wealth gets shared will be unprecedented government coercion or worse.

[cootsnuck]

Yea, it's puzzling to me that this isn't asked of folks like Altman and Amodei in every interview. Maybe it's because Altman would just start shilling his eye scanning orb and start repeating "WORLD COIN" ad nauseum. Either way, they should be getting pressed on this by all media.

[mrguyorama]

It's not puzzling. Journalism was murdered because it asked Nixon too many questions. So now unless you softball interviews, you just don't get to interview anyone, so the only news orgs with content to monetize are the ones just printing Press Releases and being a backboard for "interviews".

It sure is fun how the party who screams about "personal responsibility" seems to get very upset if you ask a responsible person to explain themselves and their actions.

[simianwords]

This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of wealth.

Wealth is not taken from our consumers and given to Sam Altman. Sam and his company are creating wealth - increasing the pie.

Of course it benefits everyone while also benefiting them.

Wealth need not be redistributed to improve lives. Just the mere invention of ChatGPT and letting people purchase it and use it is enough to improve people’s lives. Redistribution does not solve any poverty problem other than transfer power.

Sam redistributing money will not sustainably change anything about prosperity or poverty.

[rurp]

You're talking about normal technological developments that yes generally follow Econ 101 patterns. But AGI isn't like that. If AGI or something like it comes about it won't be a normal technology. The upside case for investors is that frontier models eliminate millions of jobs and remain controlled by a small group of owners. That's why they are investing sums unprecedented in human history. If all white collar work and an increasing amount of blue collar work is supplanted by AI how do those masses of newly unemployed folks make a living without wealth redistribution?

If AI capability plateaus and ends up as a normal technological development then I agree with you that it will mostly work out for the best. But that's not the scenario I'm worried about and plenty of folks in the industry are warning that's not the most likely path at this point.

[simianwords]

I might agree with you on this edge case. I don’t believe we will reach that soon.

But interestingly, people who are against AI tend to also believe that they genuinely can’t replace anyone.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of wealth.

As long as we're in a capitalist society, wealth is certainly zero-sum.

Every technological advancement that made jobs easier just allows corporations to increase their margins or increase the workload. If I automate some of my work and now only need to work 20 hours/week, I don't get 20 more hours/week of free time, I'm just given more work to do.

If someone gets completely automated out of their job, they don't get to relax and enjoy free time. They have to find a new job to pay the bills. With more and more people getting automated out of a job, UBI will become a necessity. We will need to increase taxes on corporations to fund it.

[axus]

So far prices have generally gone up, which indicates the pie available is scarcer.

I am looking forward to the day where more electricity, electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI; but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would do more to bring the price back down.

[simianwords]

Qualitatively, I now have access to ChatGPT.

How much do you think you would have paid for such a tool in 2010? and we are getting it almost for free.

[fzeroracer]

Great, you have access to a hallucinating chat bot. The rest of us are losing access to basic computing and entertainment thanks to skyrocketing prices so that these companies can create more refined bots for you to chat with.

[axus]

While ChatGPT is a partial substitution for a college education, it doesn't satisfy the other needs I listed. I do think in the long term we'll get there, but the current situation matters.

[hn_acc1]

For how much longer?

[simianwords]

its only going to get cheaper.

[unethical_ban]

Claiming that wealth isn't zero sum, and demanding people have faith in the US system of capitalism, is not reassuring.

[jacquesm]

It's beyond naive. But there are also still people believing Elon Musk is going to put humanity on Mars for keeps and out of altruism.

[rurp]

For sure, I've been rolling my eyes at the Mars colony stuff for probably a decade or more now. I get that it's a fun futuristic thought experiment for nerds but the idea that Elon's going to send up some modern day Mayflower in the near future that builds a thriving settlement is obvious nonsense.

[jcgrillo]

Hope somebody smuggles a decent screw jack onboard otherwise they're fucked.

[mrguyorama]

Well, the average person is so utterly illiterate in physics, science, and math that no, it's not obvious nonsense to them.

They don't really think through anything at all, because the human brain is hyperoptimized to not think, as thinking is energetically expensive, and even with that optimization to drastically reduce energy usage by just not using it, the brain still consumes a significant fraction of a human's energy budget.

We all have this problem. Even if you train for years to think "like a scientist" and critically analyze your beliefs and poke holes in the things you take for granted, you will always be vulnerable to ignoring something you shouldn't and missing something important.

I do get upset that people are so adverse to just doing some rough calculations about things. However, I've recently come to the conclusion that I just enjoy recreational math more than the average person. But I'm frustrated about all the people who sat next to me in math class saying "When will I ever use this?" and now going through their lives with zero literacy in math.

You had a chance to learn! To improve yourself! How could you squander that?! What else were you doing with that time? You were required to go to school for about 16 years, why didn't you just suck it up and make the most of that time?!

It hurts me how willfully ignorant people can be.

[PunchyHamster]

> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.

One "good" thing that came out of that thing.

I think main problem is that many people just think of them as "just a normal person but richer". But no. You don't get to that level of power by staying normal.

Hell, I remember when people pointed at Bill Gates going "see, you can be billionaire that puts their money to good", and while even before PDFiles got posted he had long history of being a piece of shit, now at least that stopped

[shevy-java]

> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad

This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin to question what they see.

There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich in Denmark or Sweden for instance.

[trinsic2]

That is my favorite film :D

[Imustaskforhelp]

The only non-evil Billionaire I know are the South park creators although they aren't tech Billionaires. I consider everyone else for the most part to not-be-good people.

Because south park decided to personally say essentially bad words to paramount using their episodes, the company which gave them a billion dollars.

So they took a billion dollars and they were still consistent with how they've been for decades at this point. All of this is truly remarkable in the particular world we live in.

[AceyMan]

I'd think that original creators such as J.K. Rowling, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen & Taylor Swift (among others) would be other members of the !evil bucket.

[ufo]

J.K. Rowling is now infamous for using her vast wealth to lobby against transgender rights.

[AceyMan]

Oof.

[andigh]

She's promoting women's rights actually.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Taylor swift does seem to be using AI or something. I mean she's nice but not as nice as South park creators imo.

I have heard so much about Steven Spielberg but I must admit that I don't know much about the man but to me it does feel like you must be correct that he's a good guy, though I do see some controversies of steven spielberg on internet but South park is infamous with controversies as well.

There are 3028 billionaries from Forbes list and many many more almost-billionaires yet we have at most so few good billionaires that you can count them on your fingers.

[heliumtera]

>It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad

By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two things: First, the difficulty you describe is not on the past. Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the behalf of tech billionaires.

[e2le]

Some might even agree with their dystopic vision of the future.

[mrguyorama]

One outcome of the Epstein files release is getting direct evidence, very clearly, how goddamned stupid and crass and uninteresting these assholes are.

They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats. They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish are and how that is definitely why they are starving. They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two sentences about high school level philosophy topics, and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to questions that really shouldn't even have wrong answers. All the while, they misspell everything because apparently they are outright illiterate too.

Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.

And yet, still some morons all over the US think they must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so bad people will still insist you must be magically genius and only pretending to be stupid.

Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape of a little girl please" emails?

[jacquesm]

They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class and believe that those in power may at some point come to review their voting behavior on HN. For instance, YC asked for your HN username on the application form.

Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling effect for you and technically they have that ability. And they definitely look at the comments.

[trinsic2]

>They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class

Same thing happened in WWII Nazi Germany. This timeline has an eerie similar feeling as the masses line up to the slaughter.

[ryandrake]

I don't know. What percentage of HN commenters really have serious aspirations for being a YC founder? 0.01%? 0.001%? Im not sure "What will YC think of me" is really that much of a driver of commenting behavior here.

People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never will. But, there are enough of them and their billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large followings. This is widespread behavior and not about wanting to be a startup founder.

[jacquesm]

That's a good question. Probably a low percentage but with the amount of people on HN that still adds up to a sizeable number of participants.

[edgyquant]

For me it’s because Peter Thiel has been pretty anti-transhumanism etc and he wasn’t stumped by the question he’s repeatedly answered it. Anyone who’s worldview is shaped by clips from tik tok should be downvoted

[trinsic2]

Bro you pair that with his other behavior and you can clearly see this is not a good guy. It's likely he is at least an accelerationist (Of the bad kind) of not more.

[timacles]

A lot of the older folks are also not well versed in their language or whatever you want to call it, so they can’t even connect comprehend these guys are compulsive liars and paranoid man children with no scruples.

They just think they are eccentric and by the virtue of their wealth they must be smart upstanding humans with a strong character.

[jordanb]

Yeah but I'd argue that the eccentric billionaire trope itself is the creation of the PR industry. "We've got this guy with rancid vibes, how do we make him palatable?"

[barbazoo]

> Peter Thiel on Transhumanism and the Future of Humanity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSp07P8jvYs

[simianwords]

It’s very naive to think this is the interpretation.

That humanity should survive is a deeper question than it looks. Ask any transhumanist.

[nailer]

> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.

He was thinking about convergence. You're probably smart enough to be aware of that, so you're deliberately twisting his words.

> folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers

On HN a decade ago this would have been moderated into oblivion. The recent manual un-flagging of poolitical posts by the mods (dang has openly discussed this) has changed the site for the worse.

[trinsic2]

Actually It woke people up to the fact that there is clearly bad things going on. The people that take the politically correct standpoint have a lot to learn. Talking about things that are going wrong in society is important. If you don't like that, go live on an island somewhere where you can cut yourself off from humanity.

Discourse is good for society, unless you think that society shouldn't exist, or freedom shouldn't exist...

[unethical_ban]

Ah, clearly he was thinking about transhumanism! That thing all normal people understand and agree with.

[nailer]

Nobody was suggesting normal people understand or agree with transhumanism.

[trinsic2]

That guy has a strong Nazi feel. I'd stay far, far away from anything he creates

[EQmWgw87pw]

So someone is evil because they answer questions by thinking through them? There are no questions in the universe that can’t be stopped and pondered over. In fact, it’s dangerous to even suggest that, that’s the exact mechanism that propaganda runs on.

[Spivak]

Actually evil, no. Forever changed by their enormous wealth which messes you up mentally in a lots of fun unique ways, changes the nature of every relationship you'll have post wealth, and feeds into your ego and all your latent neurosis further and further alienating you from and believing yourself above your fellow man, yes.

Evil is just a shorthand.

[EQmWgw87pw]

What you’re saying isn’t necessarily wrong, I just don’t think it adds up cleanly to “evil”. Skipping nuance is bad, I think

[pfraze]

Ah yes, the real danger to the world isn’t a powerful man feeling ambivalent about our survival. The real danger is society using that moment as propaganda.

This regarding Thiel, a man who most recently tried to make a “Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist” meme stick.

[stale2002]

Question 1: If a human modifies with themselves with enough sci-fi tier technology are they still "Human"? (And therefore if humans "ascend" past their biology, humanity technically wouldn't survive)

Question 2: If a person cannot conceive that the 1st question is an interesting question, with multiple nuances, are they basically an idiot?

[monocasa]

The question wasn't "should all humans not modify themselves", but "should humanity survive".

We currently legally protect mostly pre-contact civilizations like Sentinelese, so it stands to reason that regardless of what some people choose, other people will forgo transhumanist modifications, and "humanity" will survive regardless of what technology occurs or where your definition ends.

Unless of course the end goal is only a few billionaires get to live with their AI ppowered city states at most using servitors and decraniated as robots.

[EQmWgw87pw]

Hesitating to answer a question that may have nuance is not being “ambivalent”. He literally says “there’s multiple questions implicit here” in response to the question asked of him. I genuinely think people like you making sweeping assumptions about others are way more dangerous. People who refuse to critically think or analyze a situation and jump to conclusions.

[trinsic2]

You pair that with his behavior and you can see pretty clearly the guy does wants to control the world. Stop trying to see this in isolation of that one event.

[ozmodiar]

Not to mention that he and his cohorts had such close ties to Epstein that I find it impossible to imagine he didn't know exactly what was going on. This is someone who's known for building profiles of anyone who mentions him online, not some ambivalent rich guy.