Billionaire prepping is mushrooming across the globe. Billionaires are digging inโliterallyโseeming to share a collective sense that the world is headed to an “age of apocalypse.” Some chalk it up to paranoia, others believe they may be onto something. One article referred to it as “Utopias, dystopias, and Star Wars fantasies.”
This week, a BBC headline read: “Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried?”
The article details:
Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014.
It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine.
A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road.
Asked last year if he was creating a doomsday bunker, the Facebook founder gave a flat “no”. The underground space spanning some 5,000 square feet is, he explained, “just like a little shelter, it’s like a basement”.
That hasn’t stopped the speculation – likewise about his decision to buy 11 properties in the Crescent Park neighbourhood of Palo Alto in California, apparently adding a 7,000 square feet underground space beneath.
Then there is the speculation around other tech leaders, some of whom appear to have been busy buying up chunks of land with underground spaces, ripe for conversion into multi-million pound luxury bunkers.
What seems to be driving their deepest fears is artificial intelligence (AI) as well as its next phases, which are being called artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI)โwhen machines are able to outthink, outplan, and perhaps outlive human beings.
As the Chief Scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever is an authority on the subject of artificial intelligence and also part of the prepping frenzy:
By mid-2023, the San Francisco-based firm had released ChatGPT – the chatbot now used by hundreds of millions of people across the world – and they were working fast on updates.
But by that summer, Mr Sutskever was becoming increasingly convinced that computer scientists were on the brink of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) – the point at which machines match human intelligence.
In a meeting, Mr Sutskever suggested to colleagues that they should dig an underground shelter for the company’s top scientists before such a powerful technology was released on the world.
They genuinely seem to believe that what they’re unleashing on the world has the potential to destroy our planet, or at least life as we know it now.
Billionaire Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and a surveillance company called Palantir, has been talking incessantly in recent days about the Antichrist and Armageddon. He even gave closed session lectures in San Francisco on the Antichrist.
Thiel has also bought huge chunks of land in New Zealand, where he is attempting to build a massive bunker. Many tech billionaires are going to faraway places such as New Zealand and Alaskaโplaces that are seen as fairly safe and stable to build these underground bunkers where they think they can ride out the apocalypse.
Another publication called Fortune has a headline that says: “Numerous Billionaires Preparing for End of SocietyโGuns, gold, and bunkers galore.”
The article says this:
Figures like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever,ย who now helms the rival AI firm Safe Superintelligence, among others, haveย voicedย their concern that still-unrealized AGI, or an AI system that’s generally more intelligent than humans, will send human society into irreparable chaos.
“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever reportedly once told the OpenAI team,ย according to the journalist Karen Hao’s bookย Empire of AI.
Many of these folks are putting their money where their mouths very often are: Altman, for instance, is known to have a stockpile of guns, gold, sprawling properties, and other resources he can turn to in the event of AI-inflicted armageddon.
There is no doubt that AI is changing and will change our world in ways we probably can’t imagine right now. Even these tech billionaires who really understand this better than anyone else probably have a greater fear of it than anyone else. These tech billionaires believe that some dramatic change is coming, they’re afraid of it, and they’re preparing for doomsday.
So what do we make of all this?
There is no doubt that the Antichrist will leverage artificial intelligence and maximize it to control the world. What about all this prepping that’s going on? If these tech billionaires are doing this, should we be doing the same?
Well, here’s my opinion. I think it’s probably wise to make some common-sense preparations for natural disasters or disruptions in supply chains or some other unforeseen problems that temporarily disrupt commerce. However, giving in to fear of the future and doomsday prepping to the extent these people go through is not our calling as Christians. We have to remember: we are waiting for Christ, not the Antichrist. He’s our Blessed Hope, and our lives are filled with hope for the future, not horror.
The rapture is the next event on God’s prophetic calendar. We have not been given a spirit of fear, but we have been given, as believers, a surge of faith. We are to live in faith and anticipation of the coming of Jesus Christ.
That doesn’t mean that we stick our heads in the sand and don’t see what’s happening in the world around us, but our ultimate hope is that Jesus is comingโmaybe very soon. We prepare for that every day, not by building bunkers, but by building believers and by sharing the good news of the gospel with other people around us. We also build up our own spiritual lives.
My prayer is that we will be found faithful to that calling when Jesus comes, and indeed, maybe very soon.
