Beware San Fran’s rationalist cult They dream of erasing you

A few weeks ago, after the first preview of my play about artificial intelligence in San Francisco, I found myself talking to Edward (not his real name), an agreeable programmer with a ponytail who didn’t make much eye contact but was eager to discuss the performance and the tech world more broadly. “Have you heard of Iain Banks’s The Culture”? Edward asked. I hadn’t. The Culture, I would later learn, is a sci-fi series about a far-future, post-scarcity utopia run by godlike AIs, where death, suffering, and even traditional economics are obsolete.

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognisability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimised overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimised?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighbourhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimise my body. You start to like rationalist civilisation. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasised self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techo-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labour — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimising, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilisation they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimise? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat — not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also not hard to imagine that those bodyguards will, at some point, be unnecessary.

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Matthew Gasda is a playwright, author, and columnist for UnHerd, based in New York City.

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