The Terminal Generation
How Cyclical History and Accelerationism are Hurtling Humanity Toward the Apocalypse: Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
The Designated Survivors
As we had discussed previously, accelerationism has its movers and shakers. These come from each end of the political spectrum; right-wingers are pushing this philosophy just as much as those on the left. They each have different approaches, but they each seek the same ends: a machine-driven utopia, where mankind is the servant.
The means to getting there is a crisis, one that is as yet not very well defined, but one which must inevitably come. Not all will survive, but some will, believing they will enjoy it immensely, because they will be the ones in charge.
Those who survive the coming crisis will be those who had shaped the crisis, for they had done so in order to shape its aftermath. There are those to be named, among others, who will ensure that we get there. These are the designated survivors.
The Privileged and Powerful
Who has the privilege and power to survive this self-imposed crisis, for the sake of shaping what comes after it? Among those would be the Jasons, discussed in Chapter Eleven, and the federal agencies that go to them for advice. It would be the rich and powerful who operate on the world stage, for the sake of meeting globalist goals.
The Engineer
It would be those like Klauss Schwab. Born in 1938, he is an engineer and an economist. More importantly, he is also the founder of the World Economic Forum, or WEF. As the Capital Research Center’s Influence Watch tell us, he is also “a proponent of left-of-center economic policies, particularly socialist ‘stakeholder theory.’”
They add, “Schwab is the author of the ‘Davos Manifesto’ and the ideas behind the ‘Great Reset,’ a controversial proposal to use the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to structurally overhaul the world economy.”
The Bank-Breaker
Another with such privilege and power would be George Soros. Although, considering his age, the designated survivor in this case may be Soros’s son, Alexander.0
Born in 1930, in Hungary, Soros is known as “the man who broke the Bank of England,” and can easily be labeled an influence peddler. As Influence Watch tells us of him, he is a “left-of-center political donor and philanthropist.” They add the following detail:
Soros is one of the United States’ top political and advocacy donors, spending billions on campaigns, think tanks, start-ups, and nonprofits that promote his agenda. His principal philanthropic network centers on the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Foundation to Promote Open Society (FPOS), two multi-billion-dollar left-of-center advocacy grantmaking foundations. Through OSF and FPOS Soros has funded the vast majority of the most prominent left-progressive advocacy groups in the United States. He also created the Institute for New Economic Thinking to promote his unorthodox left-progressive economic policy viewpoints.
Soros is a globalist. He also has his hand in groups like Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is among those that find crises useful, and he does not have the interest of the U.S. in mind, but that of the world. As a leftist, he has financed the political campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Soros explicitly touts what he believes to be the virtues of the New World Order. In 1993, he published “Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO,” available on his website GeorgeSoros.com.
The left-wingers, like Soros, are the globalists. The globalists are the left-wingers. They are interchangeable.
And this is where they have succeeded: in demonizing anyone who would advocate for their own nation above the interests of the world as a whole. They demonize anyone who opposes the globalists themselves.
The Soros globalists position themselves as the rational ones. In their minds, they are the ones with the right ideas. For their part, those who oppose them—i.e., those who want to put their national interest above that of other nations—are in the words of President Joe Biden, “extreme MAGA Republicans.” They go so far as to say that anything right-wing is far right, and therefore conclude that “far-right extremism is a global problem.”
Technocrats
Who else would be privileged enough to survive the fourth turning? The answer, as we’ve seen with accelerationism’s proponents, is not necessarily contained to those on the left. It is also those loved by those on the right.
Those on each side of the political spectrum have found a way to create some common ground. Those that would introduce them to this ground would be scientists and inventors; it would also include those willing to invest in the designs of these scientists and inventors.
The Amazonian
Among them would be the founder of Amazon and owner of the left-leaning Washington Post, Jeff Bezos. Born in 1964, Bezos is heavily invested in the biotechnology research company Altos Labs, which was founded in 2022. The mission of Altos is to develop therapies that can possibly stop or turn back the clock on the human aging process.
According to Altos, they merge “the best of academia and industry to discover and develop medicines that can transform people’s lives.” If they could, they would “reverse disease, injury and the disabilities that occur throughout life by restoring cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation.”
How would Bezos’s Altos accomplish this? Through what we’ve been illuminating: through what they term “A powerful computational ecosystem.”
Because they “embrace[] machine learning and computation,” they seek to “enhance our ability to understand fundamental biological systems.” Altos, we’re told, is “developing multi-scale generative models to unravel the language of cell health, organ health and the complex relationship between them, across biological hierarchies.”
To Altos—and its investor, Jeff Bezos—human aging can be reversed. The means to achieving this is the computational ecosystem that will be mankind’s genetic savior. This is the cheery optimism that feeds accelerationist thought.
Bezos’s altruistic goal of turning back the clock on human aging is something that both left and right can get behind, causing the unaffiliated to put politics aside.
However, most, when considering this goal, do not consider the transhumanist agenda behind it or that Jeff Bezos, is more than just somewhat left wing. He is firmly planted in the left wing of American politics. As a Donald Trump hater, Bezos joked once that he would like to “strap Trump to a rocket and send him to space,” referring to his own rocket company Blue Origin.
The altruism of Bezos is what enables the politically uninitiated to look more at the virtue of transhumanism than his condemnation of a right-wing president.
Mr. X
Another survivor would be Elon Musk. Born in 1971, Musk is the founder and CEO—as well as chief technology officer—of SpaceX. He is also the CEO and former chairman of the electronic vehicle manufacturing company Tesla.
An American citizen born in South Africa, therefore a favorite African-American among conservatives, Musk is the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, where he has been a champion of free speech, a cause primarily associated with the political right.
Musk is also the cofounder of the neurotechnology company Neuralink, which looks to develop fully functional, implantable brain-computer interfaces, known as BCIs. He also cofounded in 2015 the Artificial Intelligence research organization known as Open AI, which has developed the AI interface known as ChatGPT—a HAL 9000-like system, à la 2001: A Space Odessey—though not as murderous, “at least not at this point.”
While Musk’s Neuralink may sound like the stuff of science fiction, it is not. Launched in 2016 in Freemont, California, with a cadre of prominent university neuroscientists, it began work in 2019 on a device that could implant threads into the brain.
This experiment was performed on lab rats. It wasn’t until May of 2023 that Neuralink began human experimentation.
Then, Musk announced—on February 19th, 2024—that “The first human patient implanted with a brain-chip from Neuralink appears to have fully recovered and is able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts.” While Musk’s stated goal is that of treating “conditions like obesity, autism, depression, and schizophrenia,” the goal is to facilitate the merger of man and machine. This is a goal that, by now, should sound familiar.
This technology had been entirely in the realm of science-fiction, as it was first visualized in 1982’s film Firefox (Warner Brothers. Dir: Clint Eastwood). The Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) provides a prescient synopsis of the film, telling its readers this: “A pilot is sent into the Soviet Union on a mission to steal a prototype jet fighter that can be partially controlled by a neuralink.”
Could this be where Elon Musk had gotten the idea for his brain-computer interface?
Over four decades ago, when Musk was eleven years old, Clint Eastwood and his writers—Alex Lasker, Wendell Wellman, and Craig Thomas—conceived of and produced a fictional work that depicts what Musk is now actually doing. IMDB even used the same term that Musk would eventually use for the name of the company that does what Eastwood depicted in his film: the neuralink.
While the scale of each is much different—i.e., an entire jet aircraft, versus a computer mouse—the goal is the same. Its objective is to merge man and machine so that one could control the other.
However, a question remains. If this merger is progressively successful, and the aim is for man to be able to control a machine with his thoughts, what’s to stop the control from going in the other direction?
Who (or what) will have authority over whom? The question of who will be submitting to whom (or what) will be further discussed in a future chapter.
The Keyboardist
Another certain fourth turning survivor would be Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientist who pioneered the technology of pattern-recognition, the ability to locate order among complex data sets. He was a child prodigy, working for the U.S. Health and Human Services Head Start program when he was just fourteen years old.
At MIT, Kurzweil wrote a computer program which assisted high-schoolers in their quest to find the right college. He was a friend of Stevie Wonder; this led him to found a business in 1982 that would create professional music synthesizers. These keyboards, which carry his name on them, are likely the ones used by your church’s band, if it’s not made by Roland.
Kurzweil is also a believer in the merger of man and technology. In 2018, he wrote an essay for Britannica.com, entitled “Nonbiological Man: He’s Closer Than You Think.” There, he writes, “The very nature of what it means to be human is being both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.”
Kurzweil is among those who would deride our God-given genetic legacy. In “Nonbiological Man,” he later adds that “we will ultimately merge with our machines, live indefinitely, and be a billion times more intelligent … all within the next three to four decades.”
Kurzweil is the perfect mix of genius and hubris. He is just what Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had warned about in her 1818 work Frankenstein—subtitled The Modern Prometheus—where another scientist, believing he need not answer to God also combined such ingredients to make another sort of hybrid.
Shelley’s scientist was the prototype of what Kurzweil would become. Dr. Frankenstein would merge the sacred with the profane. Kurzweil would come along centuries later and attempt the same sort of abomination.
As man was made in the image of God, he was made to image his creator in a holy embrace; this is the sacred. Here, the nineteenth-century scientist sought to take the place of God as the creator of life; this is the profane.
Now, we have the machines that man had created, the devices—both centralized and the democratized—that now know almost all things, from science to literature, from the beautiful to the pornographic. This is the man-made, twenty-first century creation that Kurzweil would have us merge with.
Dr. Frankenstein was, as Shelly had subtitled her book, the Modern Prometheus. He was as the god who had taken fire from the Olympian deities and gave it to humanity via technology, knowledge, and civilization. Frankenstein was arrogant, believing he could do as he pleased with human life and the human form, yet with his ego he had created a monster.
Kurzweil is the modern Frankenstein. He operates with as much hubris as Shelly’s protagonist, believing he doesn’t answer to God and can likewise do as he pleases. He, too, will create a monster.
The Materials-Handler
An additional thinker that falls into this category—of looking forward to the fourth turning, to the point that he would advocate for its arrival—is the lesser-known computer scientist Hans Moravec. Born the same year as Kurzweil, 1948 (in Austria), Moravec is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and one who has influenced the field of robotics, particularly in the area of spatial awareness.
More than for his work in robotics, Moravec is perhaps more known for his published opinion on robots: specifically, that they would one day soon overtake humans. His estimate for this is the year 2040. He is a futurist and another who is fixated on transhumanism.
Moravec has even argued that humans—as they are, made of strictly organic, biological material—would eventually become extinct, in evolutionary terms. These views were published in 1988, under the title Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 176 pages), and later, in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 240 pages).
Moravec cofounded the Seegrid Corporation in 2003. This is a robotic firm that seeks to develop a fully autonomous robot that can navigate its environment apart from any guidance from a human. His firm is seeing some success in the materials handling arena, where his robots are taking the place of man-operated fork-lifts.
This begs a certain question. If Moravec’s robotics can handle warehouse materials, will it later develop to a point where it will then be handling humans, as well? As a transhumanist, this would have to be one of his goals.
As we continue, we will come to understand that transhumanists, such as those discussed above, maintain this sort of thinking not only in the back of their minds. It’s in the front of their minds as well. It’s there in a well-organized philosophy which they use as the foundation of all the actions they take, both in their business ventures and in their private deliberations.
An historian from Hebrew University in Jerusalem will help us to understand how transhumanism is more than a philosophy: it is the accelerationist’s means to achieving godhood. It’s as much theology as it is philosophy.