In a surprising trend, Silicon Valley billionaires are acquiring vast tracts of land equipped with underground spaces that are primed for conversion into luxury bunkers. This real estate strategy has garnered attention as influential figures in technology express increasing concern over the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential implications for society.
OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever recently proposed a radical solution. To protect them, he suggests constructing a vast underground shelter for the organization’s top researchers, before launching a super intelligent AI technology. The alarm driving such protective moves lays bare a deeper apprehension among tech executives over where AI is headed.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms, recently spent a reported $110 million on nearly a dozen properties in Palo Alto, reinforcing a trend among tech elites who appear to be preparing for uncertain futures. As a result, New Zealand has become a high-profile destination for these acquisitions. Most of us think that buyers are looking for fortified places to build gated communities there.
Elon Musk has weighed in on the matter, endorsing the concept that super-intelligent AI could lead to a time of “universal high income.” He imagines a world in which “each of us gets the best health care, nutrition, housing, mobility and so on. Sustainable abundance,” he remarked. Musk’s rosier predictions could not be more different than the warning remarks recently made by a number of other industry leaders.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has written about the concept of “apocalypse insurance.” He describes these investments as smart financial investments in protection against future potentially catastrophic disasters. He added, on breaking beyond our borders, “Claiming you’re ‘purchasing a property in New Zealand’—that’s the wink, wink, say no more. This goes to show that even the smartest tech moguls know how crucial it is to have a Plan B.
The timeline for when — or even if — we will attain artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a matter of fierce contention. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, previously stated that AGI could arrive “sooner than most people in the world think,” while Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, has predicted its emergence within the next five to ten years. It’s worth noting that Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic, suggested that “transformative AI” might emerge as soon as 2026.
As AI discourse captures the world’s attention, specialists warn we should not stop focusing on essential safeguards. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, warned that if AI surpasses human intelligence, it must be kept contained. He articulated this concern succinctly: “If it’s smarter than you, then we have to keep it contained.”
Ilya Sutskever’s increasing belief that AGI would be created in the near term was clear by the middle of 2023. He told us of his deep conviction that the field of computer science was at a turning point. As OpenAI released ChatGPT during this period, usage surged among hundreds of millions globally, showcasing both the potential and risks associated with such technology.
Those are compelling reasons, and governments are starting to react to these growing bothersome flies-in-the-ointment. In 2023, President Biden signed an executive order requiring companies to inform federal officials of the outcomes of any safety tests. This action highlights the increasing bipartisan acknowledgment of AI’s potential risks and the importance of regulatory oversight.
Even the most myopic doomsayers thought there was some hope, even after making a slew of too-optimistic predictions about AI’s capabilities. A speaker mentioned that developing AGI “requires so much compute, so much human creativity, so much trial and error.” This sentiment nods to the fact that notwithstanding truly impressive leaps in technology, big barriers exist still between the tech and its full potential.
The motivations behind the purchases of underground properties among Silicon Valley billionaires indicate a profound unease regarding the future landscape shaped by AI advancements. Their behavior prompts serious considerations over their judgment about risk and their readiness for possible social unrests.