AI utopianism masks the fears of tech billionaires: Douglas Rushkoff

For media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, the glossy promises of a silicon-powered utopia are little more than a smokescreen for an elitist exit strategy.

Rushkoff, professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College/CUNY, and author of Survival of the Richest and Team Human, made these comments during a recent interview on the Repatterning Podcast with host Arden Leigh. In the interview, he delivered a scathing critique of the tech billionaire class, arguing that those who evangelize artificial intelligence are less interested in “saving the world” than in surviving its potential collapse due to the technology they have unleashed.

“The billionaires are afraid of being pulled in on themselves,” Rushkoff said. “They are afraid to deal with the consequences of their actions.”

He pointed to tech titans, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, who are reportedly investing in bunker construction while at the same time SpaceX CEO Elon Musk preaches space colonization, betraying their public optimism and secretly expecting a social and environmental collapse instead of a technological golden age.

“What they’ve done by building their bunkers and revealing their various space plans is they’ve exposed the fact that they don’t believe the things they’re making will save the world,” Rushkoff said. “They believe that the things they make will save them and the rest of us will perish.”

Rushkoff also challenged the idea that AI reduces human labor. Rather, he said, technology is shifting work to less visible and more exploitative forms, rather than eliminating it.

“We don’t really see a reduction in the workforce as a result of AI,” Rushkoff said. “What we are seeing is a decline in skills in the labor market.”

While technologists, including Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev, argue that AI will fuel a wave of new jobs and industries. Rushkoff said the global infrastructure needed to maintain AI systems, from mining to data preparation, is a core contradiction in claims about the benefits that automation will bring.

“You need a lot of slaves to get rare earth medals, and you need a lot of people in China and Pakistan to tag all this data,” Rushkoff said. “There are thousands and thousands of people behind AI. We’re going to need people building power plants and inventing new energy sources, digging up more coal and extracting more oil. So far there are a lot of jobs, just not the jobs we want.”

Rushkoff argued that this hidden labor undermines the promises of a future after work, even as creative and professional workers face displacement. The result, he said, is not liberation, but a redistribution of damage.

He also criticized the ideology driving the elite’s AI narratives, describing it as a form of transhumanism that treats most people as disposable.

“They have a kind of religion,” Rushkoff said. “Where they look at you and me as people who are in the larval stage of humanity.”

In that worldview, he said, wealthy technologists imagine escaping biological limits through machines, while the rest of humanity becomes expendable.

“They are the ones who grow wings and leave the planet or upload to the cloud,” Rushkoff said, while “the rest of us are just matter, fuel for their escape.”

Others in the computer science and technology fields rejected the idea that Silicon Valley’s leaders are knowingly hiding a collapse.

“I would avoid extremes because the truth probably lies in the middle,” said David Bray Declutter.

As chairman of the Accelerator and a leading member of the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank focused on security, governance and emerging technology, Bray has pushed back on the idea that technology leaders are knowingly using utopian AI narratives to hide an impending collapse, warning that such interpretations risk “setting aside an overly hopeful message for an overly bleak one.”

However, Bray acknowledged that many optimistic claims about AI oversimplify what is needed to manage large-scale technological change.

“When I hear people giving a utopian vision, on the one hand I celebrate that it is not fear-mongering,” he said. “But I am afraid that the fact that things need to be done that go beyond just the technology itself is being ignored.”

Bray echoed Rushkoff’s warning that the costs of AI are often hidden, noting the environmental damage and human exploitation embedded in the supply chains that make advanced technologies possible.

“We are increasingly in an interconnected world and we need to be aware of what I would call a ‘farm to fork’ vision,” he said.

Bray described the AI ​​transition as disruptive but familiar, drawing a line back to the 1890s, railroads, telegraph machines and the Industrial Revolution. “We’ve been here before,” he said. “We will get through this, but there will be a period of unrest.”

According to Lisa Simon, chief economist at human resource information company Revelio Labs, labor market data already reflects some of that unrest.

“The most exposed occupations have seen the biggest declines in demand, especially in entry-level positions,” Simon shared Declutternoting that the effect is concentrated where employees have the least influence.

At the lower end of the wage spectrum, Simon says the dynamic is more like direct displacement, and as workers use AI tools to increase production, employers may simply need fewer people.

“We see this particularly in low-wage work, where the complexity of the tasks is slightly lower and the ability to replace entire parts of a profession with automation is a given,” she said, adding that these roles also see some of the weakest wage growth.

Simon also said that many of the costs associated with AI infrastructure remain poorly accounted for. “I don’t think the environmental costs for these huge data centers are fully appreciated,” she said.

While Simon said she remains broadly optimistic about AI’s long-term potential, she described the current moment as one that requires policy intervention. To maintain social cohesion amid displacement and uneven profits, she said, governments may need to “consider more redistributive policies such as universal basic income.

“I don’t think it will be utopian or dystopian one way or the other,” NYU professor Vasant Dhar told me. Declutter.

Dhar, who teaches at the Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science, said AI will likely deliver uneven results rather than a clean post-work future. He warned of what he called a “split of humanity,” with technology “empowering some people” and “boosting productivity,” while leaving others powerless and using AI “as a crutch rather than an amplifier.”

He said these gains also come with relocation risks. “I think we’re going to see a lot of job losses,” Dhar said, adding that it remains unclear what types of new jobs will emerge to replace those losses.

Ultimately, according to Dhar, the outcome will depend on governance and not just technology. “The outcomes will depend on the choices we make,” he said, asking: “Will we rule AI, or will they rule us?”