Regulating AI Hastens the Antichrist, Says Palantir's Peter Thiel

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

pseudolus

58 points

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thetimes.comTechstory

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AI RegulationPeter ThielReligion and Technology

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AI Regulation

Peter Thiel

Religion and Technology

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, has stated that regulating AI could hasten the coming of the Antichrist, sparking a discussion on the intersection of technology, regulation, and religious beliefs.

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Discussion (33 comments)

Showing 33 comments

saubeidl

3 months ago

1 reply

Well, straight from the horse's mouth I suppose...

layer8

3 months ago

1 reply

Palantichrist.

lioeters

3 months ago

Executive order announced to designate anti-Antichrist movement as threatening to the oligarchy.

mikestew

3 months ago

2 replies

He has previously suggested that Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist…

“Devout Christian faith” I have no problem with. “Whack-a-doodle religious nut with access to levers of government”, eh, I’m not entirely comfortable with.

ImJamal

3 months ago

1 reply

He didn't actually say this though. He said that the type of person who would be the Antichrist is somebody like Greta who is trying to save the world. He did not say that she was the Antichrist.

mikestew

3 months ago

1 reply

He said that the type of person who would be the Antichrist is somebody like Greta who is trying to save the world.

Thank you for the correction. Though I do not know if that’s an improvement: whack-a-doodle and doesn’t read his holy text with comprehension.

ImJamal

3 months ago

1 reply

I agree Thiel isn't great when it comes to the Bible, but the difference is important. Saying one specific person is the Antichrist is quite a bit different than saying the Antichrist will have certain traits and a mission similar to that person.

cowboylowrez

3 months ago

I can simply remove "antichrist" and substitute it with "sin" which is a much less scandalous and accusatory term, and it still seems like Thiel is describing government regulation as a sin against God. I'm thinking thats enough for me to understand where he's coming from.

krapp

3 months ago

>“Whack-a-doodle religious nut with access to levers of government”, eh, I’m not entirely comfortable with.

You're gonna have a rough couple of years I think, the lunatics are already running the asylum.

robotnikman

3 months ago

5 replies

I don't think that is mentioned anywhere in the bible.

layer8

3 months ago

Any statement can be proven from a contradiction.

nitwit005

3 months ago

No need to read the Bible to declare everything you don't like satanic.

ozim

3 months ago

I guess if you have his level of wealth you get to decide what is and what isn’t mentioned in the Bible.

s1110

3 months ago

My guess is that it is The Revelation

riku_iki

3 months ago

I am sure he can ask some frontier model: hey, find me justification and reputable references for statement X, do research as deep as required to come with results.

bko

3 months ago

1 reply

It's pretty clear that proper meaningful AI regulation would require the equivalent of a one world government. Few AI alarmists talk about this, but to his credit, Eliezer Yudkowsky openly speaks about what he would like in terms of regulation:

> Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

> Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

In that regard, it's not too far of a stretch to consider a state that can effectively regulate math you perform as the Antichrist.

Same goes for climate change. Humans will produce carbon, and effective regulation on emissions will eventually lead to population control.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-do-ai-doomers-want?...

marstall

3 months ago

2 replies

for an example of a global risk that was mitigated without a world government, take a look at nuclear arms treaties like START, SALT, etc.

Dig1t

3 months ago

1 reply

Well if you apply the approach used for nuclear to AI the result would be invasive and authoritarian. The United States largely polices other countries nuclear efforts, at least in its sphere of influence. If we allowed it to police computation in the same way it polices nuclear, the result would be a massive invasion of privacy and autonomy that would result in a system which would be easily abused.

There are people talking seriously about drone striking data centers which are running unapproved AI models.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/be-willing-to-des...

marstall

3 months ago

well i'd suggest most countries are already regulating AI and will continue to do that with existing laws that protect privacy, the environment, worker safety, limit hate speech, etc. some of those regulations extend beyond national boundaries, like GDPR, etc. in the EU.

I think the fearmongering around AI may be overblown by its investors and promoters, but to the extent that some models may morph what it means for a country to be militarily secure, there's no reason why diplomacy, negotiation and de-escalation won't be the same powerful tools they often have been in the very human drive to mitigate the risk of conflict ...

marcus_holmes

3 months ago

1 reply

And banning CFCs so the hole in the Ozone layer started healing. We don't need population control to reduce carbon emissions to reasonable levels (note we don't need to prevent all emission of carbon; that's not the goal)

blooalien

3 months ago

> "note we don't need to prevent all emission of carbon"

Yeah, we only need to cut back carbon emissions to the point that the Earth's natural carbon cycle systems can actually cope with it (and drastically cut back on the unchecked destruction and poisoning of Earth's natural coping systems in general while we're at it).

ChrisArchitect

3 months ago

EA as Antichrist: Understanding Peter Thiel

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45324231

labrador

3 months ago

I'm glad that people who are deep into religion are taking AI seriously. I want to hear what they have to say. Like The Pope recently saying he won't authorize a pope AI and that AI poses risks. I'd like to hear Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc... take for example.

I consider AI my own personal mirror that is interesting to explore. I'd also like to see what results when it mirrors major schools of thought and belief system, so I welcome Thiel's comments - but that doesn't mean I take them seriously.

akomtu

3 months ago

IMO, what's remarkable is that words AI and Antichrist appear in one sentence. This will make people think. If Antichrist is to come, he will need a monopoly on AI - nothing less will let him rule unchallenged.

pseudolusAuthor

3 months ago

https://archive.ph/6C1yA

jfengel

3 months ago

So... would banning it entirely get the Antichrist here now?

Cuz I'm getting tired of waiting. Let's get the Tribulation started, so we can get to the good part at the end.

davesque

3 months ago

So many examples of the corrupting effects of ultra wealth to pick and choose from nowadays.

Havoc

3 months ago

Is there are good article or summary somewhere explaining why the dude is so obsessed with the term?

4ndrewl

3 months ago

Listening to this guy talk about religion makes as much sense as asking a potato about quantum physics.

treetalker

3 months ago

How conveeeEEEeeeniennnt!

red_rech

3 months ago

German sodomite rambling on about the antichrist. Is he hinting at a new blackened death metal album?

cafard

3 months ago

What is there about these guys? We had J.D. Vance explaining to not one but two popes about St. Augustine, now Peter Thiel is an authority on eschatology.

jschveibinz

3 months ago

I've recently read about Roger Bacon, the medieval polymath and Franciscan monk who promoted and developed the study of science, magic, and philosophy coming out of the Arab world. He was convinced that the only way to defeat the antichrist was to have all of the "technology" and wisdom that the antichrist would use.

Peter Thiel may have been reading some medieval religious literature?

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