Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Misreading of Science Fiction

Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer’s Odyssey , or Christopher Nolan’s ? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a “historically accurate” version of the The Odyssey —turning epic poetry into atrocious slop—even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.

The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut. An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires who, seeking escape from the prison of their own bodies, intend to have their heads frozen when they die and, possibly, consciousnesses uploaded onto computers, an idea that, like much of what they want, comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys.

The dream of life in outer space, of immortal life, and of colonizing other planets all have a place in the dream of the Artificial State. The thinking goes something like this: Democracy and the liberal nation-state have to be abolished to free corporations from the restraining force of any government so that they might marshal all the resources of this planet toward the accelerated development of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence possible, artificial intelligence that will at once make it possible to escape the prison of the earth and, perversely, make such an escape necessary.

For a time, in the very recent past, some of the merchant princes of Silicon Valley paid lip service to the idea that ordinary people, or the democratically elected governments of nation-states, ought to have a role, a vote, in deciding what to do with technologies that—corporate leaders pledged—were about to usher in a new era in the history of humanity. But none of the promised democratic or constitutional structures were built. No world-governance board was established, or even seriously contemplated. No one held an AI constitutional convention or anything close to it.

Instead, the architects of the Artificial State told astounding stories, straight from the pages of science fiction, about existential threats from artificial intelligence that could only be avoided by accelerating its development, all for the sake of driving investment in their corporations, even to the cost of catastrophe for the planet. In 2025, OpenAI ’s Sam Altman said he guessed that pretty soon most of the surface of the earth would be covered in data centers, but, he mumbled, “ maybe we put them in space .”