Over a plate of spaghetti Bolognese and a carafe of the house red, Joe Allen tells me what might happen when artificial intelligence surpasses the capabilities of humanity.
“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”
Allen adds, “I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” but hey—anything can happen.
Another option, he muses between sips of wine, is that we will end up in a Matrix-style hellscape, where humans are made subservient not to the Chinese Communist Party but to a class of sentient computers who survey and control our every move.
