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The far -right technological investor Peter Thiel sat on an interview with the New York Times Ross Douthat and spoke of the recent political escapades of the billionaire and the future of humanity. Thiel also discussed his reflections on the Antichrist, a subject that the Times chose to highlight, giving the written version of the interview the Salace title, “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist. “”
But it is Thiel’s thoughts on her friend Elon Musk who were undoubtedly the most enlightening for those of us interested in the current collision of politics, business and technology, especially since Thiel suggested that Musk does not really believe in many of what he says. Either that, or the musk is simply not very brilliant, another possibility that Treal was subtly suggested was on the table.
Since Musk launched his “robot” in 2021, who was actually only one person in a robot costume, Tesla’s CEO made everyone have a personal humanoid robot in their house. In fact, Musk thinks that these robots will be so popular that there will be a billion in the United States in the 10 years. But Thiel thinks that if it will happen, Musk worries bad things about his policy.
Musk is obsessed with budgetary deficits and maintained America’s debt as one of the main reasons why he supported Donald Trump in the presidential election of 2024, throwing at least a quarter of a billion dollars into the race. Well, there was debt and other passionate musk projects, such as demonizing trans and immigrants. But the debt was definitely a high priority for Musk.
Thiel said to New York Times He thought that if Musk really believed in his robot revolution, the deficit would take care of itself.
I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago on this subject. He said we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the United States in 10 years. And I said: Well, if it’s true, you don’t have to worry about budget deficits because we are going to have so much growth, growth will take care of it. And then – Well, he is still worried about budget deficits. This does not prove that he does not believe in billions of robots, but it suggests that he may not have thought about it or that he does not think that it will be as economically transforming, or that there are large error bars around him. But yes, there is a way to think about these things.
Thiel’s point of view is actually quite common in Silicon Valley, although it is never formulated in this way. The guys of the all-in podcast, for example, are all Friends with musk Also speak and in the same way that growth will take care of budget deficits. The difference is that they talk about it as a means of rationalizing their support for tax reductions while insisting on their deficit. Trump’s so-called “Big Beau Bill” will increase the deficit by 2.4 billions of dollars, according to the Budget Office of the non-partisan congress, largely because it gives tax reductions biased for the elderly and the rich. But all-in bros believe that AI growth will repair everything while insisting that deficits will go bankrupt the economy.
But Thiel takes a slightly different angle on its version of our future filled with robots, and it is the one that anyone is intellectually honest should take seriously. If robots will really deliver this revolutionary productivity, a future where we are all seated while robots do the work for us, why are the Republicans like Musk so worried about deficits?
Tesla’s version of the humanoid robot is called Optimus, and Musk has tried to catch up with other robot companies like Boston Dynamics and Figure. The Boston Dynamics Atlas made Backflips almost ten years agoWhile Optimus is still tapping for musks Smoke and Mirrors Shows.
In January 2024, Musk published an Optimus Pling Linen video, but it was later revealed that there was nothing autonomy on this subject. If you looked closely, you could see a hand sliding in the frame, showing that a human was doing real work, which was imitated by the robot, a technology that has existed since the middle of the 20th century.
The promise of robots doing all the work while humans have embraced a kind of leisure society has existed for over a century. It was extremely common in the 1960s so that very serious people predict that we were working on average from 16 to 30 hours By 2000. They thought that automation would make such a future inevitable. And Musk promised exactly the same thing. He even suggested that humans should have a sort of guaranteed basic income because there would be a lot of work for humans to commit.
It’s a fantasy, of course. At least it is a fantasy if you apply the version of Musk’s policy for this future. And it is extremely likely that Musk understand it as a fantasy. Even if humanoid robots had become commonplace and did most of the manual work in society, this does not mean that everyone gets a free pay check. In fact, Musk fought exactly this idea, insisting that the independent attendants should not benefit from the government’s advantages. And this is where Thiel is absolutely correct at 100%. Musk does not understand the political implications of his own technology. It would take a radically different policy to give everyone a universal basic income. Because in a world where productivity is radically increased, the richness created will not be shared with workers.
American productivity has radically improved since the 1970s, while wages remained stagnant, compared to this growth. All we have seen is a transfer of wealth to the richest people in the world, while everyone has trouble. Over the past decade, the highest 1% have seen their wealth increase by at least 33.9 dollars, according to figures published today by Oxfam International.
It’s not just robots where Thiel thinks Musk does not understand his own technology. Thiel, who has known Musk since the 1990s, when the two were in Paypal, also suggested during his interview with The Times that Musk would not obtain how it would apply to Mars. Thiel had been a big supporter of Seasonading, the movement to build artificial island nations and create an entirely new libertarian world on the ocean. And Musk’s vision for Mars was not entirely different.
As Thiel said to Times:
There is a political dimension to come back to the future “. You cannot – it is a conversation that I had with Elon in 2024, and we had all these conversations. I had the Seasonading version with Elon where I said: If Trump does not win, I just want to leave the country. And then Elon said: there is nowhere to go.
And then you always think of the right arguments to make later. It was about two hours after our dinner and I was at the house I thought of: Wow, Elon, you don’t think you are going to Mars. 2024 is the year when Elon has stopped believing in March – not as an idiotic scientific technology project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project; It was building an alternative. And in 2024, Elon came to believe that if you were going to Mars, the Socialist American government, the awakened AI would follow you in Mars.
Musk has been obsessed with going to Mars, even with high -level SPACEX puts in recent months. And it’s really interesting to hear Thiel discuss these subjects because he is absolutely right. If Musk really believed in the things he sells, his political perspectives would be radically different. But it is stuck in this 20th century mode while tinkering with its silly scientific projects, as Thiel says.
Thiel, a fascist who does not believe that women should be capable of votingis a very dangerous man. But at least he seems to understand the world he is trying to create. Douthat called Thiel during the interview as a “policy venture capital”, a funny change of brand of the term oligarch. But Musk does not seem to understand the world he creates. Whether it turns out to be better or worse for humanity is less clear.
