Survival of the Richest

The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

Illustrations: Matt Huynh

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where
I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential
investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about
these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in
them. But money talks, so I took the gig.
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a
microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me:
five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of
small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology.
They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly
but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really
building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it
die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had
nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority
over my security force after the event?”

For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future.

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion,
unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to
protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was
worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered
using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear
disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards
and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future
of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process,
or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a
digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with
transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present
danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and
resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might
benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision
for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is
human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology
philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of
reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and
then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These
billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest
business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital
future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the
counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human
future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too
many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock
futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article,
study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol.
The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than
a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less
a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this
was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of
the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract
and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for
foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of
its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA
undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with
the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate
capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think
Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these
downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for
humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at
passively.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and
global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave
labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the
ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now
sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys
human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children
and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve
covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer
we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become.
This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more
desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the
problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less
as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad
behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human
savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with
an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected
with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our
consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary
successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our
development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-
apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows
invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one
group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction
novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are
simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us
can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck,
even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their
lives in a computer simulation.

The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all
depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from
them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more
than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and
somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on
Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the
human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their
security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well,
right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family.
And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply
chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an
“event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely
more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid
a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they
can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever
money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on
the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better
options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can
become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can
remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.
Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have,
it will be together.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of the upcoming book Team Human (W.W. Norton, January 2019) and
host of the TeamHuman.fm podcast.