Taylor Lorenz’s Power User Tech Billionaires Want Us Dead
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Jan 19, 2026 Dive into the chilling ideology sweeping Silicon Valley, where tech billionaires envision AI as humanity's successor. Explore how early thinkers like Moravec and Vinge laid the groundwork for a pro-extinction belief system—dubbed Tescreal—pushing the narrative that machines could replace flawed humans. Discover the culture of minimalist design and automation erasing visible human labor, while figures like Musk and Altman fuel the fantasy of uploadable consciousness. Uncover the environmental costs of rapidly deployed AI and the moral dilemmas surrounding the future of society.
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Tech As Transcendence Became Mainstream
- Silicon Valley elites have long framed tech as a path to transcend human limits and create post-human successors.
- That cultural lineage explains why some billionaires now openly contemplate a future without biological humans.
Foundational Thinkers Normalized Obsolescence
- Early thinkers like Hans Moravec and Vernor Vinge argued superhuman machines would end the human era and be our successors.
- Their ideas seeded a Silicon Valley culture that treats human obsolescence as an acceptable outcome.
Nectome's Fatal Upload Promise
- Y Combinator–incubated Nectome offered a brain-preservation service that required a fatal procedure to enable future uploads.
- Sam Altman invested, showing how mainstream pro-upload ideas became in elite tech circles.
