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The BBC published a rambling report on AI and Tech billionaires building large fully-autonomous "basements" in different locations. I love the quote "I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own 'bunker', who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking."
Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014
It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine.
Asked last year if he was creating a doomsday bunker, the Facebook founder gave a flat "no". The underground space spanning some 5,000 square feet is, he explained, "just like a little shelter, it's like a basement".
Then there is the speculation around other tech leaders, some of whom appear to have been busy buying up chunks of land with underground spaces, ripe for conversion into multi-million pound luxury bunkers.
Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has talked about "apocalypse insurance". This is something about half of the super-wealthy have, he has previously claimed, with New Zealand a popular destination for homes.
So, could they really be preparing for war, the effects of climate change, or some other catastrophic event the rest of us have yet to know about?
In the last few years, the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has only added to that list of potential existential woes. Many are deeply worried at the sheer speed of the progression.
Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and a co-founder of Open AI, is reported to be one of them.
In a meeting, Mr Sutskever suggested to colleagues that they should dig an underground shelter for the company's top scientists before such a powerful technology was released on the world, [...] according to a book by journalist Karen Hao.
"We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI," he's widely reported to have said, though it's unclear who he meant by "we".
What's more, it's unlikely to arrive as a single moment. Rather, AI is a rapidly advancing technology, it's on a journey and there are many companies around the world racing to develop their own versions of it.
But one reason the idea excites some in Silicon Valley is that it's thought to be a pre-cursor to something even more advanced: ASI, or artificial super intelligence - tech that surpasses human intelligence.
It was back in 1958 that the concept of "the singularity" was attributed posthumously to Hungarian-born mathematician John von Neumann. It refers to the moment when computer intelligence advances beyond human understanding.
Those in favour of AGI and ASI are almost evangelical about its benefits. It will find new cures for deadly diseases, solve climate change and invent an inexhaustible supply of clean energy, they argue.
Elon Musk has even claimed that super-intelligent AI could usher in an era of "universal high income".
"If it's smarter than you, then we have to keep it contained," warned Tim Berners Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, talking to the BBC earlier this month.
Governments are taking some protective steps. In the US, where many leading AI companies are based, President Biden passed an executive order in 2023 that required some firms to share safety test results with the federal government - though President Trump has since revoked some of the order, calling it a "barrier" to innovation.
Meanwhile in the UK, the AI Safety Institute - a government-funded research body - was set up two years ago to better understand the risks posed by advanced AI.
And then there are those super-rich with their own apocalypse insurance plans.
"Saying you're 'buying a house in New Zealand' is kind of a wink, wink, say no more," Reid Hoffman previously said. The same presumably goes for bunkers.
But there's a distinctly human flaw.
I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own "bunker", who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.
Neil Lawrence is a professor of machine learning at Cambridge University. To him, this whole debate in itself is nonsense.
"The notion of Artificial General Intelligence is as absurd as the notion of an 'Artificial General Vehicle'," he argues.
"The right vehicle is dependent on the context. I used an Airbus A350 to fly to Kenya, I use a car to get to the university each day, I walk to the cafeteria... There's no vehicle that could ever do all of this."
"The technology we have [already] built allows, for the first time, normal people to directly talk to a machine and potentially have it do what they intend. That is absolutely extraordinary... and utterly transformational.
Current AI tools are trained on mountains of data and are good at spotting patterns: whether tumour signs in scans or the word most likely to come after another in a particular sequence. But they do not "feel", however convincing their responses may appear.
Ultimately, though, no matter how intelligent machines become, biologically the human brain still wins. It has about 86 billion neurons and 600 trillion synapses, many more than the artificial equivalents.
"If you tell a human that life has been found on an exoplanet, they will immediately learn that, and it will affect their world view going forward. For an LLM [Large Language Model], they will only know that as long as you keep repeating this to them as a fact," says Mr Hodjat.
"LLMs also do not have meta-cognition, which means they don't quite know what they know. Humans seem to have an introspective capacity, sometimes referred to as consciousness, that allows them to know what they know."
It is a fundamental part of human intelligence - and one that is yet to be replicated in a lab.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday October 20, @11:46AM (9 children)
Even for selfish people, it's not normal to become a billionaire.
Somewhere between $1.5-200 million, you talk with your financial advisor, and they tell you that you can live comfortably the rest of your life without having to work anymore. (That range is determined by what you count as "comfortably": Are you happy with 1-2 homes and nice hotel rooms, or do you want a home everywhere you frequently visit? Do you want a fancy private jet with all the staff that go with it, or are you OK flying first-class commercial? Do you want a full-time household staff, or is a weekly visit by the cleaners and landscapers enough? That sort of thing.) Faced with the difficult choice of going into the office 5-6 days a week and/or working late at night reading contracts and such versus enjoying the pleasures in life, most will say "You know what? I like option B. Retirement party is set for 3 months from now so I have plenty of time to hire or promote somebody to do my work."
The main exception to that rule is the people who find something meaningful about doing the work that they do: The doctor who knows they can still save some lives. The tenured academic or scientist who loves research and teaching and keeps doing it because they think there's much more to discover in their field. The famous musician who has more music they want to put out to the world. The pro athlete who is trying to break that one last record they care about. But a lot of them give away a lot of what they make, and certainly aren't laser-focused on trying to get even richer, because why bother?
To become an ultra-rich billionaire, you have to decide, over and over, that you care more about money than your family or friends. You have to decide that you care more about piling up money than any charitable causes, hobbies, or fun activities. You also have to be arrogant enough to think that nobody else could possibly do what you do to earn money, e.g. your number 2 person can't run your business just fine without you. There's no possible way for that person to not be pretty messed up in the head. And it's really really really stupid the degree to which we've organized our civilization around catering to the whims of these nutjobs.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Informative) by Whoever on Monday October 20, @02:03PM
Many years back, I watched a documentary in which they asked various already rich people how much money they would need to have in order to feel secure. The answer was pretty universally three times what they already have. This was true for someone with $1M, someone with $10M and someone with $100M. The documentary was old enough that $1M would be enough to live on for the rest of your life.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Monday October 20, @02:20PM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 22, @03:51AM
In other words, normal people with wealth. What's the point of casting a mundane though greedy pursuit of self-interest as if it were a mental illness? Is this rule by the insane (my attempt at catchy label: paranarchia = paranoia + -archy = insanity + rule)?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Monday October 20, @02:52PM (5 children)
I'll bite here. So, there are people that are rich because they inherited money. Others, own companies that exploded in value. At that point, it's not so much "I need more!" (with exceptions), but money generates money. How much has Bill Gates given away and convinced some through The Giving Pledge? Even more, he pledged that the foundation will close its doors and not become one of these perpetual foundations for sake of perpetuating itself (think Nobel Prize). Remember, it used to be $50B pledged.... now, that's $200+B.... while at same time he's spending quite a bit.
Secondly, like everywhere, there are rich people that are greedy bastards just like there are poor people that are greedy bastards. At same time, there are rich people that would prefer for higher income taxes on the ultra-wealthy as they do not want or need as much wealth. An example here is Warren Buffet.
So, I do not believe you can just pigeonhole every billionaire as "greedy bastards". At same time, it's a fair statement.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 21, @02:11AM (4 children)
So about Bill Gates: Yes, he puts a lot of his money into charity. But also, he retains control of that charity, and sometimes that charity does things like buy a bunch of Microsoft stuff, driving up the demand for Microsoft's products, putting even more money in Bill Gates' pocket. And also, critically, he retains control of the money, so he gets to decide what he thinks should be his charitable efforts this year, not either the people ostensibly being helped by it or any elected representatives. And it's also crucially a tax dodge as well.
It's probably better than simply hoarding it, but not by as much as you'd hope.
Contrast that to MacKenzie Scott, who gave away most of her fortune to organizations she doesn't control.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 22, @04:15AM (3 children)
I can see some point to the targets of the would-be charity having some input. None at all to the "elected representatives". They're often part of the problem.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 22, @11:06AM (2 children)
It can be part of the problem, but it can also be not.
As an example: As the Covid vaccines started coming out of testing, a lot of governments wanted to have the formula and manufacturing process for the vaccines be public domain rather than patented so that they could manufacture their own generics of it, thus increasing the supply of available vaccine doses, reducing the cost per dose for everybody and making sure that poorer countries could inoculate their population more easily. But the Gates Foundation, which is involved in vaccination programs in a lot of poorer countries that can't fund it themselves at the pharma company's prices, was key in blocking that move mostly by threatening to withhold funding. Why? Well, for starters, Bill Gates is a big believer in "intellectual property" (unsurprising, his fortune rests on it), and also his foundation owns stock of the companies that would have been adversely affected by generic competition. That decision restricted the supply of Covid vaccines to what the big pharma companies could produce themselves, ensuring that vaccination was both more expensive and slower, and that probably led to a bunch of unnecessary deaths in the countries where the Gates Foundation was "helping". Is that really a decision that Bill Gates, who is neither a doctor nor an epidemiologist nor a public health official, should be making?
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 22, @01:36PM
Would your complaint be even slightly different if Gates were all three? It's not Gates expertise or career that you complain about.
As I see it, those governments could always pay a big pile of money to make said vaccines public domain, if such a thing were truly important to them.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday October 22, @08:03PM
Why it would be stupid to do this anyway? And now proved that it would have been completely stupid to do?
Because manufacturing process of these vaccines is very complex. It took Germany some months to ramp up production of Biontech vaccine. Germany was one of the blockers for this funny "public domain it!" movement. It's akin I public domain the lithography process of ASML used to manufacture currently mostly advanced chips in the world. Will anyone be able to make competing machines in next months? next 2 years? 5 years? The same thing happened with Covid. It's far easier to ramp up production at known sites than to tell someone in South Africa "yo! here's the sources, good luck mate!".
You want another example? The processing and refinement of rare earth minerals is basically public knowledge... It's been half a decade since US has cried about China about their market domination. Why haven't they invested in their own production at scale? And this is a problem YEARS in complaing about.
The Covid vaccine shortages were a few months only.