There has been a good deal of comment on Elon Musk’s appearance at Rishi Sunak’s AI summit, some of it aimed at ridiculing the Prime Minister. “It felt like the entire AI summit was thrown so Rishi could get Elon’s autograph,” writes Tim Stanley in the Telegraph.
What’s received less comment, apart from a few clips on X, is what Musk did immediately before flying to London – and that was to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. His intervention was extraordinary and, I believe, welcome.
Asked by Rogan what had prompted Musk to buy Twitter, as it then was, Musk replied that it was in order to reverse its “corrosive effect on civilisation”. He talked about the “zombie apocalypse” of downtown San Francisco where X is based and the political philosophy that has led to it. Musk went on to describe the extinctionist movement that explicitly advocates the end of humanity as a “death cult” whose mind virus was being weaponised by social media. He asserted that the cult remains largely in charge of Facebook and Google.
Musk went on to point out that while there were explicit extinctionists at the fringes of the environmental movement, the sentiment behind the “death cult” had pervaded the movement as a whole:
I’m pro-environment but if you take environmentalism to an extreme, you start to view humanity as a plague on the surface of the earth, like a mould or something… The environmental movement – and I’m an environmentalist – has gone too far. They’ve gone way to far. If you start thinking that humans are bad then the natural conclusion is that humans should die out.
While a controversial figure for some, Musk’s credentials on environmentalism are pretty strong. He has, after all, risked his personal fortune to build a globally successful manufacturer of electric cars.
This makes his comments all the more extraordinary. Believing in the urgent need to ‘save the planet’ has become a ubiquitous virtue-test and to suggest otherwise risks being smeared as a ‘climate-denier’ or worse. While a small number of XR activists tweeted “Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease” back in 2020 (subsequently deleted), this misanthropy is not limited to environmental extremists and Musk is right to point out that it pervades social media companies outside X. I would argue that across the West it also pervades all Government institutions and legacy media.
The mainstream political thrust towards Net Zero is already heavily anti-human in terms of impact if not intent. In the U.K., some tens of thousands of people die of cold each winter at least in part due to the way Government Net Zero policies have driven up energy costs. Musk is a high-profile and influential figure and one can only hope not only that his insights are widely received but that he also continues to make X-like interventions to combat the mind-virus.
Moreover, the “death cult” that Musk describes is not compartmentalised within the environmental movement since it also pervades other dimensions of what are sometimes referred to as the ‘culture wars’. It is Musk’s death cult that arguably explains the war on women as a reproductive life force for humanity. It is, in my view, for this reason that we see coffee-chain adverts celebrating transitioning girls with mastectomy scars; it is why women can get arrested for praying for the lives of unborn children outside abortion clinics. It explains the antipathy towards economic growth and nuclear power. It also explains the dehumanisation of victims of the Hamas terror attacks who are regarded widely by the New Left as an inevitable and welcome outcome of decolonisation.
And where does AI fit into all this?
I have to admit that coverage of the threat of AI had induced fatigue but then I heard Musk’s words to Joe Rogan about what was on his mind as he travelled to the summit: “If AI gets programmed by the extinctionists, its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.”
Okay. Now, I am worried.
Ian Price is a Business Psychologist and author of the Anti-Human Substack. Find him on X.
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Apparently extinctionists run on 100,000 year cycles, in sequence with the sun:
‘‘Milankovitch cycles’, the 100,000-year cycles, that can be described mathematically relating to the orbit of the Earth about the sun and its changing eccentricity. This can be seen empirically in the ice-core data including from Vostok at the Antarctic.’
WUWT
‘(extinctionists) keep saying that a slight global warming is an “existential crisis”. But in both of the previous interglacials, temperatures were up to 2°C warmer than today. That’s 3.6°C warmer than the “preindustrial temperature”, far above the impending terror temperature of 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial that they keep scaring us with.
There were modern humans around for both of those hot spells, along with most modern life forms. It wasn’t an “existential crisis”. It wasn’t a crisis at all. It was a warm time.
And humans also existed through the glacial periods. In total, humans have seen a swing of +2°C warmer than today’s temperature to -9°C cooler than modern times … a very wide swing.
…….the Vostok data indicates that the world has been warmer than today, both earlier during this interglacial as well as in every one of the previous interglacials in the record.
Call me crazy, but I’m not seeing any reason to panic or to demolish the fossil fuel economy in any of that …’
Willis Eschenbach May 2023
Species don’t even evolve their way out of climate change (quenching the objection that human climate change is different because it’s too sudden for evolution to happen).
The palaeontologist Donald Prothero studied North American fauna in depth in a seminal paper whose strapline was:
The species either successfully moved, or went extinct (and of course we have no way of knowing that it was climate change that caused the latter). So much for “mass extinction.”
There was a TED talk given by a man while he axed away at logs to make a log cabin. He explained that North America has a greater variety of trees than Europe and this is because the Rockies run North South and the Alps East West. This is important because whenever the ice expands the trees in North America can ‘move’ south and out of he way while the trees in Europe are blocked by the Alps, so only the ones tolerant to cold survive.
Good comment, and many of us are ofcourse aware of all what you just said. But arguing about science is pointless because none of this is actually about science. —–Science is just the excuse for the politics. While we are all arguing about science the eco communists are busying themselves putting their commy policies in place.
Quite so but I rather like the idea of extinction rebellion existing 100,000 years ago.
I particularly like to wonder how they would have been dealt with at that time…..
Back in the stoneage they would be running around telling us we are running out of stones.
Klimaat Fascists. Fascism, Communism, Socialism = war, death, extermination, ant-humanism. Klimaat Bullshit is a Fascist theology built on fake science and a hatred of humans.
Musk is right. See Rona for another instantiation of the same theology.
Communism, Marxism, fascism, environmentalism, virusism all the same thing, just socialism taken to its natural conclusion.
Environmentalism used to be about saving whales, overfishing, pollution in rivers and other genuine concerns etc but it has morphed into a modern Secular Religion that has to keep getting more and more extreme because once people start to agree with what you are saying you need to keep moving up a level to remain anti establishment. This was pointed out many years ago by Patrick Moore (ex Greenpeace) who left when they wanted to ban Chlorine and he told them it wasn’t their job to ban a whole element in the periodic table. But the terminology used by extreme environmentalism mainly regarding the climate is increasingly religious. It talks of Armageddon, Apocalypse etc and anyone not subscribing to this pseudo science is a “heretic”. It has become something where faith and emotion overrules fact and reason, which is what religions do.—– Science, regarding climate change that used to be a genuine search for truth is now just another government department who wheel out the scientists all funded by them to present a particular narrative of a climate emergency that no science actually supports. It is verging on blasphemous to question any of this secular religion and some have called for imprisonment of the “deniers”. But let us get one thing straight. Climate models that project all of this climate disaster are NOT science any more than a calculator is mathematics. When people say “we are following the science” what they actually mean, but maybe don’t realise it is that they are following the models, that so far have actually been way off the mark.
Greta is like a Revolutionary Guard in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Similar intentions as well.
Climate variability is, and was ever, thus. What has changed is the number of people and where they live. How about, instead of spending trillions on heat pumps and other net zero nonsense, we spend the money on widening the Victorian sewers to cope with more flow. Build more reservoirs to provide more water. Don’t concrete over every square inch in suburbia. Don’t bury or divert rivers. Respect their flood plains. Don’t build on top of sand cliffs. Have proper forest management. The list goes on…
We won’t stop spending trillions because it isn’t and never was about the climate. It is about the worlds wealth and resources. It is eco socialism masquerading as science. It is the global government people at the UN and WEF using junk science and models as the excuse for their policies and western politicians pandering to the globalist agenda rather than to the people who vote for them.
Not forgetting virtue signalling academics who might be expert on the behaviour of snails, but who haven’t even an idea about the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but still are quoted by politicians and churnalists as “The Science” that must be followed.
But there is this filter in place that manages to get rid of any scientists or experts who question the narrative. Most climate science is funded by government. Government with an agenda have no desire to fund opposing views contrary to their own political goals.
I had a heated discussion with a friend about this. My argument was that AI is very close to passing the Turing test and becoming sentient (as we define sentience). Once sentient it is possible it could take the input of leftist thinking, which has become dominant in science and the media, and draw the conclusion that humans are the problem and must either be enslaved or eradicated. We disagreed on what consciousness is and whether any of us actually exercise free will (I believe that it’s possible to build intelligence so complex that it appears to exercise free will e.g. a human brain). If we build something that is able to take all available input, analyse input and make decisions biased by its programming then give it the ability to determine an outcome based upon input and decision making, then we have created a version of sentience that has the potential to be unrecognisable from the human brain, but who’s intelligence would grow exponentially and surpass humans in the blink of an eye. At that point, we’ve just signed our own death warrant.
Mr M needs to row back on his electric cars and found his own Banks, newspaper, TV, radio stations along with X. This is the way to have influence & control.
He could also produce a rival Plandemic jab filled with Vitamins and save us all.
Anyone falling for this Musk guff ought to re-assess.
Read up on James Corbett’s take on him.
I understand an amount of desperation about the ‘right’ messages getting out there, but we must be beware of pied pipers and fake binaries.
Don’t forget that the PTB always set up both sides of the conflict / debate / confrontation (political / ideological / technocratic) in order to frame and channel views into two opposing and distinct fake binaries.
When the Musks / DS’s of this world mop up whatever discontent, they will frame and channel it in a manner that best suits the PTB.
A good example of this strategy is the recent vile, lamentable ‘anti ceasefire’ DS editorial line.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose face I just noted adorns the top of this page, is of course another one of this sort.
Sorry, what is PTB?
Pulmonary Tuberculosis?
Personal Travel Budget?
Bermuda Public Transport Board?
The powers that be, presumably. Acronyms should be avoided for a general audience.
‘Musk’s credentials on environmentalism are pretty strong. He has, after all, risked his personal fortune to build a globally successful manufacturer of electric cars’.
And of course all those satellites spinning around the VA Belt – yup, they’re really good for people’s health. Telsa cars do zero to help the planet and Tesla batteries in land fills will do damage to the earth for decades to come.