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"Having established their suzerainty over our species, they reassured us that they were doing their best to mitigate risk. They made plea for government regulation.Their cry for help hinted at some sort of pathology. There was something a little kinky about it–a sort of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! vibe"

The oligarchs do seem to believe in their extinction narrative. But extinction is not what they are selling us. Progress,glory & the good of mankind are the marrow of their sales pitch.Thiel has even gone so far as to call critics & those calling 4 regulation “Anti-Christ” who are courting the devil

"Interestingly, the oligarchs seem to be a lot more comfortable with Jacob Coxon than they are with some other whistleblowers. They did not rally in defence of Meredith Whittaker who resigned from Google in 2019 after she called out its contract to build machine vision technology for US drones."

"There was no outbreak of oligarch support when Timnit Gebru, one of the very few black women in a senior technical role in Silicon Valley, was fired from Google in 2020 for refusing to take down a research paper she had co-authored"

"Why would Whittaker & Gebru & their very specific indictments worry the oligarchs more than the prophets of all-out extinction like the AI scientist-turned-critic Hinton, or Jacob Coxon? Perhaps because, like a big fireworks display, Hinton and Coxon’s warnings add frisson to the atmospherics"

"They end up augmenting the oligarchs’ power play, which, when their companies go public, as they are set to do soon, will serve them very well indeed. Their valuations will depend on how sophisticated – and, in the case of AI weapons systems, how lethal – their models are."

"Who are these billionaires who claim to hold the power of life and death over humanity? They give the impression that they have already disaffiliated themselves from the human race, & from this planet we call home. Are they satyrs? Half-human, half-machine? Let’s call them Cyclopes– “pees”, plural"

"Cyclopes’ extinction orgy appeared to many industry watchers as a set piece staged to persuade an increasingly angry, agitated public how central, important, irreducible and un-roll-backable AI companies are to the US economy, and to the security and future of its people."

"Asking to be regulated is an attempt to graft the industry onto the state, to shut out every last chink of daylight between the government and these corporations. The oligarchs’ hope is that this regulatory embrace will give them the blank cheque they so badly need."

Because the scale of money, land, water and energy that they require can only be provided by the government. Not to put too fine a point on it, what they really want is government permission to self-regulate. Legitimacy without ceding control."

"This sort of delicate manoeuvre needs to be performed like a kabuki play. It needs a villain, a bogey man, to scare an increasingly restless public, and any incoming governments who may not be as malleable as the Trump regime. Enter, stage left, China."

"Translated into direct speech, it goes something like this: we’ll market ourselves as the cutting edge of human enlightenment, and the manager and disburser of human knowledge sans frontières. But in truth, we’ll be map-shaped. "

"We’ll fuse ourselves to our nation, its economy, its intelligence grid and its security apparatus until you won’t be able to tell us apart from yourself. Except for our bank balances. In exchange, you can pretend to regulate us until we achieve our mission to colonise the moon and outer space."

"No frontiers, no fears. Then we’ll kick away the ladder that you so kindly lent us. We won’t even need to replace you. You simply won’t exist. We will run your people, your cities, your comms, your finance systems, your courts, your army and your police. If not us, it’ll be China that runs you."

"The merger between corporations and countries is well on its way. The science of AI may be new. But the way it is being foisted on us is as old as colonialism itself. "

"Cyclopes is holding up the Machine God, still in his infancy, in its bloodless arms, and inviting us to bow down before him. Trust Him and give Him your everything and, in return, He’ll give you His razzle-dazzle."

"Colonisation always comes bearing shiny gifts. But AI is colonisation of a kind few of us can even imagine. It’s capitalism’s final destination."

"To train its Machine God, Cyclopes needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved. It wants to mass transfer the cumulative accomplishments, the fruit of the combined labour of millions of us, over thousands of years, ...

...including literature, art, music, mathematics, chess, academic research – everything – into company holdings. It will bank this knowledge, find ways of controlling it, sanitising it, politicising it, and deciding who can have access to it and who cannot. And at what price?...

Let’s call it the privatisation and corporatisation of the history of human endeavour, of civilisation itself. All you need to do is allow your soul to be digitised and turned into data. What remains of you will be human sludge and slurry. Industrial effluent."

"As a result of a class-action suit, I received a notice offering to throw me a couple of thousand dollars per title as a settlement. These are books that took me a lifetime of living, and several years of writing."

"Now that the machine has been trained on my work, I fear that very soon, when I write – like myself – in a language that I have laboured for decades to make uniquely mine, I will be told that it doesn’t sound like my work. That it’s actually AI."

"What shall I do for the rest of my life? Dodge around my own way of writing? Find a new language? What shall we call this? Heart-mining? Brain-mining? Life-mining?"