The ideology and language surrounding the development of new technologies like AI often sound akin to futuristic utopias (or dystopias). A new article from the Scientific American illustrates why: many tech billionaires were enamored by science fiction as children. Charles Stross, himself a successful sci-fi novelist, writes,

Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.

-Charles Stross, Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real | Scientific American

Stross notes that these figures mistook sci-fi novels for “instruction manuals.” Instead of heeding prophetic warnings in the writings of Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and others, they’ve built tech empires trying to make these dreams actually come true.

A new commercial for the Apple Vision Pro is additional proof that tech companies are greatly influenced by science fiction. In the advertisement, a montage passes of classic movie characters wearing some kind of mask or headset, from Dr. Frankenstein to Iron Man to the scientist in Back to the Future. Finally, the ad ends with a girl excitedly donning the Apple Vision Pro, ready to imitate those fictional heroes. The Vision Pro will arrive on February 2nd.

So, tech investors and entrepreneurs are self-fulfilling old prophecies. One also thinks of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a dystopian classic published in 1953 that seemed to foresee the invention of the Airpod.

The assumptions in science fiction novels, as Stross notes, are never neutral. All technological innovations involve social and political agendas. Even something as ubiquitous as the automobile had a message: time is money, and we need to get places as quickly and efficiently as possible. Stross goes on to mention the transhumanist project, one of the most overtly ideological movements out there, writing,

Transhumanists seek to extend human cognition and enhance longevity; extropians add space colonization, mind uploading, AI and rationalism (narrowly defined) to these ideals. Effective altruism and longtermism both discount relieving present-day suffering to fund a better tomorrow centuries hence. Underpinning visions of space colonies, immortality and technological apotheosis, TESCREAL (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism) is essentially a theological program, one meant to festoon its high priests with riches.

Transhumanism, then, like some strains of AI optimism, is a religious initiative. It involves ritual, a divine priesthood, and achieving immortality.

Many tech billionaires and futurists are investing insane amounts of money to materialize cautionary tales. We need a group of sages and tech realists, who remember what it means to be human, to temper the hype.