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The narrative surrounding artificial intelligence has become a contest of superlatives. AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has warned of the risk of a deadly loss of control for humanity. Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI –the company behind ChatGPT – has invoked the promise of superintelligence to raise enormous funds. Elon Musk, head of SpaceX and Tesla, wants boundless industrial and military “accelerationism.” These visions do not contradict each other; rather, together they are shifting the domain of politics toward extreme scenarios, seeking to redefine who gets to decide and in the name of what urgency.
In the realm of technological prophecy, billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, occupies a unique position as the herald of the apocalypse. For him, the West is headed toward a moment of revelation, when it will finally understand that it has entered a period of stagnation. Technological progress has stalled, institutions have become rigid and international governance no longer produces meaningful change. Thiel has repeatedly claimed that AI does not represent a true scientific breakthrough, as it does not act upon matter, energy or the structures of reality. Thiel is obsessed with this idea of stagnation, the failure of a system that can no longer invent.
Thiel pushed this logic to its limit with his series of lectures on the “Antichrist.” Stripping the term of its religious meaning, Thiel has used it to designate and denounce a political regime: a homogeneous global order that, in the name of peace, security or ecology, petrifies progress. Conversely, under the term “katechon,” the entity that delays the appearance of the Antichrist, he values the forces that oppose the formation of global governance: entrepreneurs, states still capable of autonomy (notably the United States) or even Donald Trump. Lastly, “Armageddon,” the final battle between the forces of Good and Evil, refers to a clash of civilizations he foresees between the US and China, which he argues will be the major confrontation of the century.
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