Billionaires like Altman, Musk and Thiel probably read a lot of science fiction novels in their teenage years. Giving them glimpses of a possible future in which intelligent robots took over virtually all human jobs and mankind had all the time to be lazy. Not having to work sounds like utopia for the pleonasm that is a lazy teenager so the current leaders in A.I. development embraced the idea.
If only their teenage selfs had known the books they so loved were actually warnings against a future in which humans would forget how to think and supercomputers controlled everyday life. Creating not a utopian but a dystopian civilisation.
Except for a series of PC games by Sid Meier, a civilisation is a bunch of people working and living together. For a period of time because every civilisation always collapses in the end. Well, of course in the end, because it would be weird if a civilisation collapsed, only to end centuries later.
Every civilisation always thinks it's the best civilisation ever.
We now know for instance that the American civilisation isn't.
It's unlikely the US will last longer than the empire of the Maya. The 'Land of the Free' is currently not much older than the Aztec civilisation.
We know a few things about civilisations that existed a few hundred and even a few thousand years ago. But if a civilisation existed a million years ago, could we ever know about it?
In tv series like Star Trek: Voyager the audience is shown alien species that might have evolved from creatures from Earth. And who knows? Perhaps some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction event, evolved and moved to other planets.
Perhaps the dinosaurs didn't all die and are still living on Earth, hidden beneath the crust as Silurians. Or on the surface, disguised as the billionaires who in reality rule the planet.
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