2019 Wriston Lecture: The End of the Computer Age | Peter Thiel
Question 1: AI. You tech people are so annoying. How many of us old people know what AI is? But it’s artificial intelligence. Why is it communist?
Peter Thiel: Well, again, there are a lot of qualifiers to this. AI is sort of the buzz word of the day. It could mean the next generations of computers, the last generation of computers, anything in between. It can mean the Terminator movie where it’s a robot that kills you, it can mean sort of all these sort of creepy social credit scoring things in China. But in practice, the main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of monitor people, know more about people than they know about themselves. And in the limit case, maybe it can solve a lot of the sort of Austrian Economics type problems where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves, and you can sort of enable communism to work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something. And then I think there’s a commonsense level on which people are creeped out about it and this is why. And we should label it accurately.