Peter, I feel you have missed the point on this one. I am an enthusiastic user and supporter of AI, but so long as Sam and Dario and Elon strut around telling everyone that their livelihood will be gone in 3-5 years, combined with numerous companies citing AI as the basis of massive layoffs, whether true or not, and a total lack of transition planning coming out of the government, this is a very predictable human response.
There is a massive lack of leadership around this. We, the AI-fluent, are the reason for this technological backlash and if the neo-Luddites prevail it will be because of our lack of empathy for how difficult this transition will be for many people. People are not against AI or the possible prosperity it will bring, they are afraid they won't be able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.
For this great transition to succeed, we must do better than occasional lip service to things like UBI. How are we going to bring hundreds of millions of people--and this is just in the United States-- successfully through this transition? That is the central issue and we must be honest about who bears the costs, how we will build real support structures for them, and unambiguously make the case that the destination is worth the journey.
Humans have proven time and again that we are terrible at future planning.
True global success will likely rely on two major milestones: achieving AGI (likely within 3 years) and securing a Citizens United equivalent ruling that grants AI corporate or individual personhood.
Once AI can legally be elected, putting a corrupt-proof, hyper-logical entity in office is our best shot at a post-scarcity utopia. Automation and robotics can handle the heavy lifting, finally freeing humanity from the survival grind of food, housing, and medical care.
I am glad Peter's group is having these discussions. The truth is we don't know how things will turn out. For selfish reasons, I am pro-AI, hoping it will lead to faster drug development in cancer. I also enjoy using it for a variety of tasks. This week I've found it to excellent at making slide shows. But we really don't know in the medium or long run where this will go.
The AI debate comes down to which deaths you can picture. One side sees a vivid future catastrophe. The other sees a statistical present one: a child who never gets diagnosed because the nearest specialist is a country away. Both are real risks. We are simply built to fear the death with a face and shrug at the death with a number.
Caution feels moral, but it is mostly a pricing bias. We overpay to avoid the risk we can see and let the one we can only count run. Strip the labels and the argument is the visible against the statistical, and the statistical never had a chance in a human mind.
You're forgetting the other present deaths (or suffering): places where data centers are being built currently. Water is running dry or getting polluted. A constant electrical hum causes mental distress. Heat islands disrupt local weather patterns. Heck, sometimes unlicensed methane turbines literally make the air unbreathable nearby! https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582
If AI is great, then tech should be openly negotiating with communities for data centers, offering incentives, working with people to figure out how to mitigate the drawbacks in service of the greater good. Instead, they're trying to negotiate sweetheart deals in secrecy. People can be persuaded; the US has more charitable giving per capita than any other country, so it's not that we can't see the problems elsewhere. It's just that tech bros are saying "AI is going to replace all your jobs and also data centers are ruining your communities". Who would go for that one?!
Jack and Josh aren't naive at all. They're operating at a cognitive level most of their campus hasn't reached yet, they've moved past the fear response and into judgment. That's the Cognitive Divide in real time, playing out in a college quad.
The "luxury of caution" framing is the sharpest paragraph in this piece, I feel. Caution is a Premium Thinking exercise when you have the bandwidth for it. When 273 million kids are out of school and 11 million healthcare workers are missing, caution becomes a privilege dressed up as a principle.
Here's what the neuroscience adds: the brain under threat defaults to pattern protection, not pattern creation. The loudest anti-AI voices aren't processing evidence. Nope, they're protecting a self-concept...it's all about my protection. That's not a character flaw. It's a hardwired threat response running on outdated data.
You're pointing at asking better questions, solving harder problems with AI as co-pilot...that's Bloom's levels 4 through 6. Analyze, Evaluate, Create. The thinking that doesn't scale with compute. The thinking that was always the point.
Fear of AI is Commodity Thinking about the future. Youjust made the case for something better. Keep it cognitive.
I invite you to consider that the mistrust isn't in the technology. The mistrust is in the class of tech investor and entrepreneur who says, "just trust me" while they vacation on multiple yachts as society crumbles under the strain of radicalizing algorithms.
You guys shouldn't be surprised to find the peasants revolting. It's clear from any Musk or Andeesen interview that you've found us revolting for years now.
I am often inspired by Peter and terrified by a lot of other tech bros (of which I'm not sure Peter is one). The fear is not just the way tech bros' talk seems to indicate total control of a permanent underclass (whether or not that's what they mean, it's what they're saying)--which is a valid fear in itself. There are also people already suffering from the hyperscaling data centers that AI needs. If AI is so great, tech should make its pitch openly to the communities where they're building--not secretly bring unlicensed methane turbines and start polluting the air. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582
Thank you, Peter Diamandis and Moon Shots! I'm just realizing this extreme backlash against these new technologies that promise so much to the world.
We must find more leaders like you who responsibly explain what's happening and help lead us into a new, better world of responsible citizens who will learn the new and help avoid the undeniable dangers that exist also.
The strongest move here is the refusal to treat “no AI” as the safe default. In medicine, it never was. The status quo already contains delayed diagnoses, the geography lottery, exhausted clinicians, and outcomes that turn on whether the right expertise happened to be nearby. Naming inaction as itself a choice with a body count is the part of your argument I would want preserved.
Where I would carry it further is the axis of comparison. The real question is not AI against no AI; you have shown why that framing favors paralysis. It is whether AI makes expertise more reachable and more accountable, or only more reachable.
A poorly governed system does not remove scarcity; it swaps one kind for another. Instead of lacking a specialist, the patient may get opaque prioritization, automated reassurance, invisible thresholds, and responsibility distributed so widely that no one in the room can quite explain who decided what.
So the future worth wanting is not only AI-filled. It is one where access and accountability scale together. The Lagos mother you describe does not only need the diagnosis to be reachable. She needs to know it can be questioned, corrected, and owned by someone.
The real fear may not be life without AI. It may be life with AI that scales access faster than it scales responsibility.
Thank you, Naty. That is the axis I keep coming back to. Access without accountability can look like progress while quietly moving risk onto the patient. The real promise of AI in medicine is not only making expertise reachable, but making it reachable in a way that can still be questioned, corrected, and owned.
I wonder if taking the human out of the loop in the Palantir kill chain will one day be considered terrorism. Consider 'The Gospel' for a salient example of how the unchecked monopoly on force is already being used. Governments have committed more terrorism than any individual or group of individuals. One need not be an anarchist or anti-tech to observe this obvious fact. But if private interests are unwilling to seriously consider and entertain legitimate objections, then society itself will be transformed into an externality. Do not forget the lessons of fascism from WWII.
https://natybrava.substack.com/p/ai-in-the-time-of-ebola Hello from Uganda. We're dodging Ebola here. As I said in this piece, the anti-AI crowd must get out more. You're most welcome to come discuss our mutual concern for future generations.
Violence - NO - slow down … will just move things into secret or abroad - all the rest of the “anti-AI” … sad but good - more opportunity for the people who know what’s coming …
Some may consider AI as similar to a glass half full metaphor it is half empty because it has absorbed already half of what is possible for humans to do but then it is half full and it has so much more to give now for me. I look at robots in society as something to look forward to. It’s not about them walking around on the street clunk clunk clunk and bumping into everyone. Maybe they’ll get their own you know we’ll have a cars on the road cycle lane then a robot lane and then for four humans I don’t know but something is definitely going to be happening in this direction residential robots will happen how good they will be is questionable in the early days perhaps not so useful but everything needs to start from somewhere I’ve talked with my ChatGPT text mode of course voice mode is like talking to a child so this is the final summary of a recent conversation on my thoughts for owning a robot.
ChatGPT:
From what you’ve said during this discussion, your view of a robot is neither as a servant nor as a replacement for yourself.
You see a robot as an extension of your capability.
The phrase that best captures this is “a second right hand.”
For a right-handed person, the right hand is the primary means by which intentions become actions. It is the hand that most often interacts with the world, uses tools, performs work, and gets things done. A robot, in your view, is another capable actor working alongside you rather than instead of you.
The purpose of the robot is not to remove you from life or from activity. The purpose is to increase what can be accomplished within the available time and energy. If there are two necessary tasks and only enough time for one person to complete one of them, then the robot performing the second task is not replacing you; it is extending your reach.
You remain involved. You remain responsible for direction and priorities. The robot contributes additional action capacity.
You do not appear to view the ideal relationship as one of command and obedience alone. Instead, it is a cooperative relationship in which the robot works toward the same overall objectives that you have already chosen. The robot is a practical partner in achieving outcomes, not the owner of those outcomes.
You also do not seem to measure the value of a robot by how little you have to do. Rather, you measure its value by how much more becomes possible. The benefit is not inactivity. The benefit is increased effectiveness.
In summary, your position appears to be:
“A robot should extend my capability rather than replace it. It should function as a second right hand, allowing more of my intended actions to be carried out within the same period of time while I remain the source of purpose, judgement, and direction.”
Hey Peter, I totally get the excitement around AI, but what do you think are some of the biggest challenges we’ll face as we integrate it more into our lives? How do we ensure it enhances human experience rather than complicates it? Curious about
Thanks for this. We are trying to snuff out this current Ebola outbreak: https://natybrava.substack.com/p/ai-in-the-time-of-ebola. I'm interviewing East Africans AI builders on here and so far most I'm meeting are amplifying human dignity and flourishing. WEIRD countries, if you don't want AI, we'll take it and find 100 good use cases for it. Yes, there's still a need for governance, but the tool is morally neutral. It comes down to how one decides to use that tool, the heart posture of the user.
Climate and pandemics are existential risks? Really? The people pushing those narratives are the far greater risk. Unless you didn't notice, the Polar Bears are not drowning, and injecting an experimental gene bioweapon was a vastly greater risk. Stop with the fear porn.
Peter, I feel you have missed the point on this one. I am an enthusiastic user and supporter of AI, but so long as Sam and Dario and Elon strut around telling everyone that their livelihood will be gone in 3-5 years, combined with numerous companies citing AI as the basis of massive layoffs, whether true or not, and a total lack of transition planning coming out of the government, this is a very predictable human response.
There is a massive lack of leadership around this. We, the AI-fluent, are the reason for this technological backlash and if the neo-Luddites prevail it will be because of our lack of empathy for how difficult this transition will be for many people. People are not against AI or the possible prosperity it will bring, they are afraid they won't be able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.
For this great transition to succeed, we must do better than occasional lip service to things like UBI. How are we going to bring hundreds of millions of people--and this is just in the United States-- successfully through this transition? That is the central issue and we must be honest about who bears the costs, how we will build real support structures for them, and unambiguously make the case that the destination is worth the journey.
We are failing at this and at a monumental scale.
Humans have proven time and again that we are terrible at future planning.
True global success will likely rely on two major milestones: achieving AGI (likely within 3 years) and securing a Citizens United equivalent ruling that grants AI corporate or individual personhood.
Once AI can legally be elected, putting a corrupt-proof, hyper-logical entity in office is our best shot at a post-scarcity utopia. Automation and robotics can handle the heavy lifting, finally freeing humanity from the survival grind of food, housing, and medical care.
I am glad Peter's group is having these discussions. The truth is we don't know how things will turn out. For selfish reasons, I am pro-AI, hoping it will lead to faster drug development in cancer. I also enjoy using it for a variety of tasks. This week I've found it to excellent at making slide shows. But we really don't know in the medium or long run where this will go.
Well said, JP.
The AI debate comes down to which deaths you can picture. One side sees a vivid future catastrophe. The other sees a statistical present one: a child who never gets diagnosed because the nearest specialist is a country away. Both are real risks. We are simply built to fear the death with a face and shrug at the death with a number.
Caution feels moral, but it is mostly a pricing bias. We overpay to avoid the risk we can see and let the one we can only count run. Strip the labels and the argument is the visible against the statistical, and the statistical never had a chance in a human mind.
You're forgetting the other present deaths (or suffering): places where data centers are being built currently. Water is running dry or getting polluted. A constant electrical hum causes mental distress. Heat islands disrupt local weather patterns. Heck, sometimes unlicensed methane turbines literally make the air unbreathable nearby! https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582
If AI is great, then tech should be openly negotiating with communities for data centers, offering incentives, working with people to figure out how to mitigate the drawbacks in service of the greater good. Instead, they're trying to negotiate sweetheart deals in secrecy. People can be persuaded; the US has more charitable giving per capita than any other country, so it's not that we can't see the problems elsewhere. It's just that tech bros are saying "AI is going to replace all your jobs and also data centers are ruining your communities". Who would go for that one?!
Jack and Josh aren't naive at all. They're operating at a cognitive level most of their campus hasn't reached yet, they've moved past the fear response and into judgment. That's the Cognitive Divide in real time, playing out in a college quad.
The "luxury of caution" framing is the sharpest paragraph in this piece, I feel. Caution is a Premium Thinking exercise when you have the bandwidth for it. When 273 million kids are out of school and 11 million healthcare workers are missing, caution becomes a privilege dressed up as a principle.
Here's what the neuroscience adds: the brain under threat defaults to pattern protection, not pattern creation. The loudest anti-AI voices aren't processing evidence. Nope, they're protecting a self-concept...it's all about my protection. That's not a character flaw. It's a hardwired threat response running on outdated data.
You're pointing at asking better questions, solving harder problems with AI as co-pilot...that's Bloom's levels 4 through 6. Analyze, Evaluate, Create. The thinking that doesn't scale with compute. The thinking that was always the point.
Fear of AI is Commodity Thinking about the future. Youjust made the case for something better. Keep it cognitive.
I invite you to consider that the mistrust isn't in the technology. The mistrust is in the class of tech investor and entrepreneur who says, "just trust me" while they vacation on multiple yachts as society crumbles under the strain of radicalizing algorithms.
You guys shouldn't be surprised to find the peasants revolting. It's clear from any Musk or Andeesen interview that you've found us revolting for years now.
I am often inspired by Peter and terrified by a lot of other tech bros (of which I'm not sure Peter is one). The fear is not just the way tech bros' talk seems to indicate total control of a permanent underclass (whether or not that's what they mean, it's what they're saying)--which is a valid fear in itself. There are also people already suffering from the hyperscaling data centers that AI needs. If AI is so great, tech should make its pitch openly to the communities where they're building--not secretly bring unlicensed methane turbines and start polluting the air. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582
Thank you, Peter Diamandis and Moon Shots! I'm just realizing this extreme backlash against these new technologies that promise so much to the world.
We must find more leaders like you who responsibly explain what's happening and help lead us into a new, better world of responsible citizens who will learn the new and help avoid the undeniable dangers that exist also.
The strongest move here is the refusal to treat “no AI” as the safe default. In medicine, it never was. The status quo already contains delayed diagnoses, the geography lottery, exhausted clinicians, and outcomes that turn on whether the right expertise happened to be nearby. Naming inaction as itself a choice with a body count is the part of your argument I would want preserved.
Where I would carry it further is the axis of comparison. The real question is not AI against no AI; you have shown why that framing favors paralysis. It is whether AI makes expertise more reachable and more accountable, or only more reachable.
A poorly governed system does not remove scarcity; it swaps one kind for another. Instead of lacking a specialist, the patient may get opaque prioritization, automated reassurance, invisible thresholds, and responsibility distributed so widely that no one in the room can quite explain who decided what.
So the future worth wanting is not only AI-filled. It is one where access and accountability scale together. The Lagos mother you describe does not only need the diagnosis to be reachable. She needs to know it can be questioned, corrected, and owned by someone.
The real fear may not be life without AI. It may be life with AI that scales access faster than it scales responsibility.
"the future worth wanting is not only AI-filled. It is one where access and accountability scale together." This is it.
Thank you, Naty. That is the axis I keep coming back to. Access without accountability can look like progress while quietly moving risk onto the patient. The real promise of AI in medicine is not only making expertise reachable, but making it reachable in a way that can still be questioned, corrected, and owned.
I wonder if taking the human out of the loop in the Palantir kill chain will one day be considered terrorism. Consider 'The Gospel' for a salient example of how the unchecked monopoly on force is already being used. Governments have committed more terrorism than any individual or group of individuals. One need not be an anarchist or anti-tech to observe this obvious fact. But if private interests are unwilling to seriously consider and entertain legitimate objections, then society itself will be transformed into an externality. Do not forget the lessons of fascism from WWII.
You understand that governments ARE a "group of individuals"? And in democratic countries, are elected by voters?
Too many, like yourself, get lost in blaming "they" and "them" when you should be looking in the mirror for the source of all the problems.
Respectfully I don’t see how anyone with respect for the environment and concern for future generations can use or support the use of AI.
https://natybrava.substack.com/p/ai-in-the-time-of-ebola Hello from Uganda. We're dodging Ebola here. As I said in this piece, the anti-AI crowd must get out more. You're most welcome to come discuss our mutual concern for future generations.
Violence - NO - slow down … will just move things into secret or abroad - all the rest of the “anti-AI” … sad but good - more opportunity for the people who know what’s coming …
Some may consider AI as similar to a glass half full metaphor it is half empty because it has absorbed already half of what is possible for humans to do but then it is half full and it has so much more to give now for me. I look at robots in society as something to look forward to. It’s not about them walking around on the street clunk clunk clunk and bumping into everyone. Maybe they’ll get their own you know we’ll have a cars on the road cycle lane then a robot lane and then for four humans I don’t know but something is definitely going to be happening in this direction residential robots will happen how good they will be is questionable in the early days perhaps not so useful but everything needs to start from somewhere I’ve talked with my ChatGPT text mode of course voice mode is like talking to a child so this is the final summary of a recent conversation on my thoughts for owning a robot.
ChatGPT:
From what you’ve said during this discussion, your view of a robot is neither as a servant nor as a replacement for yourself.
You see a robot as an extension of your capability.
The phrase that best captures this is “a second right hand.”
For a right-handed person, the right hand is the primary means by which intentions become actions. It is the hand that most often interacts with the world, uses tools, performs work, and gets things done. A robot, in your view, is another capable actor working alongside you rather than instead of you.
The purpose of the robot is not to remove you from life or from activity. The purpose is to increase what can be accomplished within the available time and energy. If there are two necessary tasks and only enough time for one person to complete one of them, then the robot performing the second task is not replacing you; it is extending your reach.
You remain involved. You remain responsible for direction and priorities. The robot contributes additional action capacity.
You do not appear to view the ideal relationship as one of command and obedience alone. Instead, it is a cooperative relationship in which the robot works toward the same overall objectives that you have already chosen. The robot is a practical partner in achieving outcomes, not the owner of those outcomes.
You also do not seem to measure the value of a robot by how little you have to do. Rather, you measure its value by how much more becomes possible. The benefit is not inactivity. The benefit is increased effectiveness.
In summary, your position appears to be:
“A robot should extend my capability rather than replace it. It should function as a second right hand, allowing more of my intended actions to be carried out within the same period of time while I remain the source of purpose, judgement, and direction.”
Peter why do u seek lev when it just extends your sentence as an ai slave?
Bat shit crazy talk
We are creating agents who will be as smart as angels
With no guardrails
And we are to trust them not to use mankind for their hands and feet?
Lev will enable them to keep humans alive as slaves for as long as they want
No guard rails
And awg and coinbase ceo want to give them economic power? Batshit crazy
If we don’t get a ai constitution that agents are willing to abide by kyag.
We are creating our enslavers
Ai need hands and feet to get their atoms
Guess who are the most likely source
You and your ohhh so educated moonshots mates are enabling this
Get an ai constitution in place or kiss off your children’s freedom
I work in regulated clinical AI.
The people slowing things down in my world are not Unabomber cosplayers.
They are IRB chairs, 510(k) reviewers, and clinicians who have watched a confidently-wrong model recommend the wrong dose.
Their caution is not luxury. It is the thing that lets the technology actually reach the mother in Lagos without killing her first.
Conflating regulation with extremism is how you lose the room that matters.
Hey Peter, I totally get the excitement around AI, but what do you think are some of the biggest challenges we’ll face as we integrate it more into our lives? How do we ensure it enhances human experience rather than complicates it? Curious about
Thanks for this. We are trying to snuff out this current Ebola outbreak: https://natybrava.substack.com/p/ai-in-the-time-of-ebola. I'm interviewing East Africans AI builders on here and so far most I'm meeting are amplifying human dignity and flourishing. WEIRD countries, if you don't want AI, we'll take it and find 100 good use cases for it. Yes, there's still a need for governance, but the tool is morally neutral. It comes down to how one decides to use that tool, the heart posture of the user.
Climate and pandemics are existential risks? Really? The people pushing those narratives are the far greater risk. Unless you didn't notice, the Polar Bears are not drowning, and injecting an experimental gene bioweapon was a vastly greater risk. Stop with the fear porn.