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In June, SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) briefly created the world’s first trillionaire in the person of Elon Musk. While the initial frenzy around the IPO eventually died down, Musk remains worth more than $900 billion, and SpaceX retains a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion. A major component of SpaceX’s pitch to investors hinges on the claim that the tech industry is on the verge of creating “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) or “artificial superintelligence” (ASI), a class of inorganic, sentient, omniscient and omnipotent beings that would surpass any individual person’s intellect, domain knowledge, and wisdom — or possibly all of humanity’s combined. The idea is that this AGI/ASI will be able to solve all of humanity’s problems rationally and efficiently, so developing it as quickly as possible, using any resources necessary, is a moral imperative, not to mention the investment opportunity of a lifetime.

If that sounds like typical Silicon Valley speculative hype, that’s because it is. But this particular hype is grounded in a particular set of beliefs that are no longer held merely on the fringes of the tech industry or the more esoteric corners of the internet. What’s more, many of the conclusions rooted in these beliefs (i.e., that AI is the most transformative technology of all time, promising/threatening seismic changes to the workplace, the economy and world politics, to which we can only adapt) are currently treated as settled fact in mainstream discourse. But at the same time, the more eyebrow-raising tenets of these beliefs are brushed under the rug, too bizarre to be discussed in polite company — at least inside the Beltway and the Brussels Bubble.

According to this belief system, these synthetic, all-knowing beings may be morally equivalent to people, as they will contain “the light of consciousness,” to use Musk’s preferred phrase, whatever that means. What’s more, believers anticipate uploading their "consciousness" to the cloud and merging it with AGI to create “posthumans” or “transhumans” who will eventually succeed homo sapiens as the universe’s apex species — a “worthy successor” to humankind. And they are so excited about this grim future, they’re willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get there.

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