There's no libertarian approach to preventing the end of the world

[Jilly_in_VA]

By Haydn Belfield

Peter Thiel — tech billionaire, libertarian polemicist, Trump donor — recently gave a speech at the Oxford Union, one of the oldest and most prestigious student debating societies in the world, to kick off its 200th year. That’s hardly news — we’ve all heard Thiel’s spiel many times before on campus conformity and how only tech can save us.

But my ears pricked up this time as he specifically criticized my field. I’m an existential risk researcher at Cambridge University, where my colleagues and I study the risks from nuclear and biological weapons, climate change, and emerging technology such as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. All of these technologies pose incredibly high risks — we think it’s plausible that one or more of them could lead to civilizational collapse or extinction, affecting everyone alive today. As many in the effective altruism community have argued, I think tackling these risks is a key priority of our time.

Thiel seems to have had a passing interest in these topics a decade ago, speaking at some conferences and donating some money. But to my knowledge he has not engaged with the existential risk reduction community for as long as I have been involved. Instead, he seems increasingly interested in seasteading and the alt-right.

So why was he criticizing the field of existential risk reduction? Thiel seems to suggest we in the community are Luddites, bearing some responsibility for the stagnation in real wages and technological progress since the 1970s. He claims a leading cause of stagnation is that scientists effectively have become too scared of their own technology. He told the Oxford Union audience that “the single answer as to why it is stalled out on the part of the universities is something like science and technology are just too dangerous.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/3/7/23618766/peter-thiel-existential-risk-oxford-union-silicon-valley-technology-artficial-intelligence

Is it an accident that on first glance I read this as Peter Thiel being a "libertarian polecat"? I think that fits better anyway.