Mark Hitchcock
Billionaire prepping is mushrooming across the globe. Billionaires are digging in—literally—seeming to share a collective sense that the world is headed to an “age of apocalypse.” Some chalk it up to paranoia, others believe they may be onto something. One article referred to it as “Utopias, dystopias, and Star Wars fantasies.”
This week, a BBC headline read: “Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried?”
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.
A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road.
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.
What seems to be driving their deepest fears is artificial intelligence (AI) as well as its next phases, which are being called artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI)—when machines are able to outthink, outplan, and perhaps outlive human beings.
As the Chief Scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever is an authority on the subject of artificial intelligence and also part of the prepping frenzy:
By mid-2023, the San Francisco-based firm had released ChatGPT – the chatbot now used by hundreds of millions of people across the world – and they were working fast on updates.
But by that summer, Mr Sutskever was becoming increasingly convinced that computer scientists were on the brink of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) – the point at which machines match human intelligence.
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.
Billionaire Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and a surveillance company called Palantir, has been talking incessantly in recent days about the Antichrist and Armageddon. He even gave closed session lectures in San Francisco on the Antichrist.
Thiel has also bought huge chunks of land in New Zealand, where he is attempting to build a massive bunker. Many tech billionaires are going to faraway places such as New Zealand and Alaska—places that are seen as fairly safe and stable to build these underground bunkers where they think they can ride out the apocalypse.
Another publication called Fortune has a headline that says: “Numerous Billionaires Preparing for End of Society—Guns, gold, and bunkers galore.”
1 comment:
Mr. Thiel flunked geology...NZ sits on top of an earthquake fault.
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