Tech Billionaires Seem to be Doom Prepping. Should We All be Worried?

jelizondo writes:

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.

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