Why silicon valley’s vision of AI future should worry you
Silicon Valley’s leading AI figures have increasingly revealed their own versions of this worldview
Everyone has a vision of the future, whether it is a world of abundance, a return to a lost past or, in Silicon Valley’s case, a future where artificial intelligence could surpass human capabilities altogether. Religious studies has a word for beliefs about where humanity is ultimately headed: eschatology, the study of the “last things”.
You do not have to be religious to have an eschatology. Political ideologies have one too, because beliefs about the future shape what people think should be done today.
Silicon Valley’s leading AI figures have increasingly revealed their own versions of this worldview, and understanding those beliefs helps explain why some of the industry’s most powerful figures appear willing to accept enormous disruption in the name of an AI-powered future.
Silicon Valley’s AI eschatology
One example of the way in which opinions about AI's future can influence current actions is exemplified by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. As far back as 2015, before ChatGPT had achieved its current renown, Altman predicted that AI was "probably, most likely" to bring about the end of the world but also noted that there would be several big corporations built from the technology.
His opinion has become much more positive since then. As written in an April 2026 blog post, Altman sees AI as a technology that is able to augment humanity to an incredible extent, and believes that we need to produce enough of it to fulfill our virtually limitless needs.
The problem has been tackled by Elon Musk in another way altogether. He has often warned about the fact that humanity faces the threat of total extinction and has stated that going multi-planetary will ensure survival for humanity from any potential catastrophe.
He has talked about this issue as early as 2013, and mentioned that mankind would have to be multi-planetary or end up dying eventually. His involvement with SpaceX and making humanity multi-planetary thus makes sense through this perspective of survival.
His concerns also extend to AI. During his legal battle with OpenAI, Musk again warned that AI could become a “terminator situation” in which the technology kills humanity. A judge eventually cut off the discussion, telling him that the court understood the argument.
Peter Thiel sees caution as the threat.
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel offers perhaps the most confrontational version of this worldview. He has argued that the greatest threat to technological progress is not necessarily AI itself, but people attempting to stop or regulate scientific development.
Thiel has described the hypothetical 21st-century Antichrist as a “Luddite who wants to stop all science”, pointing to figures including AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and climate activist Greta Thunberg.
His criticism of Pope Leo XIV after the pontiff called for international oversight of AI reflects the same logic: regulation becomes a threat to technological dominance rather than a legitimate democratic concern.
