STATE OF WEDNESDAY: Smoking, Immortality And Silicon Valley’s Machine God

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Hey everyone,

Welcome to State of the Day,

After diving into this rabbit hole, I’m not sure if I’m more scared of AI or its creators,

Smoking, Immortality And Silicon Valley’s Machine God

Imagine taking a stroll through San Francisco.

After crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, you stumble upon a gaggle of scrawny tech bros passing around a pack of Marlboros.

You’d expect these guys to be sucking on vapes, but apparently old-fashioned cigarettes are making a comeback in Silicon Valley.

AI researchers have begun smoking cigs, at least according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar.

And they’re not lighting up because they want to star in the next Tips From Former Smokers campaign — they’re convinced artificial intelligence will cure cancer before cigarettes can kill them.

Treating your lungs like a disposable subscription service, confident that the next software update will fix them, is certainly a choice. But as bizarre as it sounds, the ideology behind this form of techno-worship is even more disturbing than the prospect of a bunch of programmers chain-smoking their way to immortality.

Meet the AI successionists: a collection of nerds who believe humanity’s greatest achievement will be engineering its own replacement.

One prominent figure exploring this idea is Dan Faggella, an AI researcher behind the concept of a “Worthy Successor” to humanity. He entertains the possibility that AI will become so intelligent that it becomes morally more valuable than humankind.

Then there’s Guillaume Verdon, better known as Beff Jezos on X, a physicist who helped popularize effective accelerationism, a movement that wants to floor the gas pedal on technological progress and worry about the consequences later.

For these guys, AI isn’t just a tool to make our lives easier. It’s the next stage of evolution.

Even Google co-founder Larry Page has pushed back against the idea that humans should take precedence over digital intelligence, reportedly calling Elon Musk a “speciesist” for preferring humans over bots.

Apparently, believing your own species deserves to survive is its own form of bigotry.

And that’s the most disturbing part of this ideology: deliberately build something so advanced that humanity itself starts looking like old news.

For the accelerationist crowd, there’s no time to waste. The faster we develop AI, their argument goes, the sooner we get to live in this new technological utopia.

And these aren’t just a few internet weirdos; we’re talking about researchers, physicists, and tech industry heavyweights debating whether humanity is merely a stepping stone to something greater, asking us to entertain the possibility that the clankers deserve our future more than our children.

At what point does the pursuit of progress become an excuse to abandon the very people it’s meant to benefit?

Pope Leo XIV asks the question the bot worshippers ought to be asking themselves in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas:

What are we building? As technological development rapidly transforms languages, relationships, institutions, and forms of power, we believers must and can choose which projects to work on and in what manner, so as to safeguard and value the grandeur of humanity that has been given to us as a gift.

The grandeur of humanity. Not our productivity. Not our intelligence relative to the newest chatbot. Not our usefulness until something better comes along.

Our humanity.

There’s nothing wrong with AI researchers looking to cure cancer, accelerate scientific discovery, or make life better. That’s the whole point of technological advancement.

But what good is building a better future if you’ve decided the people who are supposed to live in it are expendable?

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From The Editors’ Desk

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