The night before his award, Peter Thiel is asked: “So why do we always moralize new technologies [like AI]?”
The answer is one of the scariest quotes I’ve ever heard.
Thiel says it’s better to be “evil” than “bad… If you’re evil, maybe you’re kind of good, because least you’re getting something done.” He follows up with a comparison to Faust.
This is what a Dark Tetrad personality sounds like. There is no conscience here, no care for humanity. Thiel is the closest approximation to biblical evil on the planet.
“Yes, I'm gonna get in trouble for what I’m about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. And there's always a question, I like to ask, what is the antonym of good? And the moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad.
A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn't get many miles per gallon. They are a trubby, is a bad car. It works less good than a golf cart. The former East German car. And so if you're evil, you're at least competent. And if you're evil, you're not bad. And therefore maybe you're actually kind of good because you're at least getting something done.
And if you contrast the Faust books of moral versus good to, in moral those Faust, those the 16th century Faust story, Faust is a fake scientist. He's sort of like a magician, sort of a fake alchemist and it's bad science. And he goes straight to hell.
In Goethe’s Faust, he has a pact with the devil and he sort of gets his knowledge by morally dubious means. But it always works out more for the best. And Goethe’s Faust gets redeemed. And I think it's better to be good than evil, or to be very clear.
But perhaps I prefer Goethe’s Faust to Marlowe's Faust. And then the moral question, the moral question are society is, if we have all these good versus evil debates and we're just we're full of badness. It's most the time, those things are not even evil. They're not even good. They're just merely bad.
And so if you're in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent. That's the problem we should actually be talking about.”
Tonight at an award ceremony, Peter Thiel is asked why he considers himself German.
Thiel mentions speaking German until age 12 but doesn’t say he was not in Germany but SW Africa in an apartheid town pretending to be a Nazi village. The everyday greeting was “Heil Hitler.”