The dark and distressing way that Silicon Valley talks about A.I. can be traced to a philosophy that influenced many tech executives.
Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
We asked a group of writers to consider the forces that have shaped our lives in 2017. Here, science fiction writer Ted Chiang looks at capitalism, Silicon Valley, and its fear of superintelligent AI.
Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass
The people building A.I. fear that we have only a short time before advanced A.I. disrupts the labor force.
Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty
This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘d...
Take it from the insiders: Silicon Valley is eating your soul | John Harris
Former Google and Facebook executives are sounding the alarm about the pervasive power of tech, writes Guardian columnist John Harris
When Silicon Valley’s AI warriors came to Washington
Effective altruism is increasingly described as a cult. But as the movement’s billionaire adherents pour money into D.C., its obsession with the AI apocalypse is remaking the capital’s tech policy landscape.
The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion (Published 2025)
The Rationalists, a community focused on the risks of artificial intelligence, regularly gather with tech figures and other like-minded people in a complex that covers much of a city block.
Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem | Aeon Essays
Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future
Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass - The …
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The AI safety vibe shift
Once a fringe obsession of Bay Area rationalists, existential risk is suddenly all anyone is talking about
Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares — Common Notions Press
Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fear
Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want
Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?
AI Billionaires Are Starting to Get Scared
The world's tech billionaires are starting to moderate their rhetoric on AI automation, but that doesn't mean it's all in good faith.
Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism
I’ve got a longer draft in the works, but I don’t think that’s going to become a blog post, so I figure it might be useful to publish something here and solicit feedback, or just plant a flag in the ground that this was a thing I did. Last week Several weeks ago I gave a talk at Wayne State University titled “the uncanny pessimism of techno-optimism”. In this post I’m going to breeze through some of the stuff I talked about and give a sense of what’ll be coming. Eventually.
The scent of Musk: Power, charisma and paranoia in Silicon Valley
More Everything Forever
This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death...
