Jason Weakley 🇺🇲 Celebrating America 250

I’ve been intrigued by Peter Thiel’s thinking around the antichrist since I first encountered it at the end of 2022, when in the midst of COVID, The Pamphleteer was starting to get its sea legs. So, it feels like something of a full circle moment for him to come to Nashville to discuss the topic at length. It’s never been more pertinent either. Dominating the current news cycle are attempts by frontier labs to paint artificial super intelligence in apocalyptic terms, demanding a coordinated government response to fend off scenarios that could result in human extinction. This line of argumentation is familiar to all of us by now, as it colored the coordinated response to Global Warming, COVID-19, and even the employ of nuclear power. These lectures grapple with how civilizations respond to rapidly advancing technologies like ASI. Thiel frames this dilemma, in Christian terms, as a choice between Antichrist and Armageddon. In other words, do we coordinate a global response to ASI in order to squelch its civilizational death grip, building out the infrastructure that could create the conditions for the emergence of an authoritarian, Antichrist-like figure. Or, do we do nothing, refuse to fall prey to the hysteria, and allow the technology to run its course, chancing Armageddon. “The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop,” Thiel told Ross Douthat in a NYT interview last year that's been floating around the past few days. How the country responds to and facilitates the development of ASI is one of the two or three most pressing questions facing the Western world right now. His four-part lecture series scheduled over consecutive Mondays will explore these dynamics in depth, away from the insular world of Silicon Valley, in Nashville, the emerging cultural epicenter of the country.