anti-christ vs. armageddon
"The political slogan of the anti-Christ is peace and safety. ... and you get it when you have a sort of a homogenized, one-world, totalitarian state. What I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would do well to be a little bit more scared of the anti-Christ, and a little bit less scared of Armageddon."
Peter Thiel likes to present his ideas in cryptic theological terms because he probably thinks it's the only way to convey the magnitude of the crisis he's trying to address. The similarly grandiose title of his talk, "the end of the future," which he ends with the above quote, is similarly an indicator of the extreme urgency with which he wants to move the world.
Like most nerds, I spent the last couple of days interacting with ChatGPT. I've asked it to explain the merits and critiques of neo-reactionary political philosophy, followed up by an ask to code up a game of Tetris in C using ncurses, then a tweet thread written by the prophet Isaiah. I don't remember being this flabbergasted by technology since the first time I held an iPhone.
The correct response, in my view, to this kind of inconceivably powerful technological progress, is to embrace it, and try your damned hardest to make sure it doesn't end humanity. I'm with Peter on this; the only other option is to ban it completely, and hope your enemies follow suit.
The Muslims banned printing presses because they feared the production of counterfeit holy scriptures containing errors. The Chinese banned Jesuit astronomy following a political dispute. I think it's fair to say that the unintended consequences of these policies, in retrospect, were net negative.