Thiel: All right. Well, I could talk about it for a long time. I think there’s always a question of how we articulate some of these existential risks, some of the challenges we have, and they’re all framed in this sort of runaway dystopian science text. There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.

I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance. What do you do about nuclear weapons? We have a United Nations with real teeth that controls them, and they’re controlled by an international political order. And then something like this is also: What do we do about A.I.? And we need global compute governance. We need a one-world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke, to make sure people don’t program a dangerous A.I. And I’ve been wondering whether that’s going from the frying pan into the fire.

The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.

Now, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but one question is — and this was a plot hole in all these Antichrist books people wrote — how does the Antichrist take over the world? He gives these demonic, hypnotic speeches and people just fall for it. It’s this demonium, Ex-Machina —

I want to suggest a middle ground between those two options. It used to be that the reasonable fear of the Antichrist was a kind of wizard of technology. And now the reasonable fear is someone who promises to control technology, make it safe and usher in what, from your point of view, would be a universal stagnation, right?

Thiel: Well, that’s more my description of how it would happen.

Douthat: Yes, but you’re saying the real Antichrist would play on that fear and say: You must come with me to avoid Skynet, to avoid the Terminator, to avoid nuclear Armageddon.

Thiel: Yes. This is I Thessalonians 5:3 — the slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.”

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