Game Theory #24: The AI Apocalypse

Professor Jiang’s lecture, delivered to Beijing high school students on May 12, 2026, presents a highly controversial, speculative, and dense geopolitical and metaphysical audit of the artificial intelligence trajectory. Drawing from Karen Hao’s investigative reporting in Empire of AI, David Bromwich’s scholarly feedback, and Ronan Farrow’s profiles of Sam Altman, the lecture exposes the corporate, state, and occult mechanisms driving toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Jiang argues that AGI is not a mere technical or commercial project, but a modern occult endeavor to construct a digital deity, financed by national security paranoia, powered by the physical capture of human attention, and leading inevitably to a catastrophic restructuring of human society.

Core Arguments & Frameworks

1. The Corporate Empire-as-Religion Formula

Drawing directly from Karen Hao’s research in Empire of AI, the lecture identifies a three-part formula deployed by modern AI institutions (specifically OpenAI) to consolidate global power and resources:

Talent Centralization via Religion: Instead of constructing traditional corporate architectures, founders rally world-class talent around a grand, messianic mission. Sam Altman’s 2013 blog reflection is cited as the structural blueprint: “The most successful founders do not set out to create companies… They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion. And at some point, it turned out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.”
Relentless Physical Expansion: The empire requires the physical capture of planetary energy and space. This manifests as massive data center campuses (such as the Stargate projects) engineered to dominate natural resources, shifting the target from making AI safe for humanity to making the physical world safe for AI infrastructure.
Semantic Formlessness (The Shifting Target): AI institutions deliberately refuse to establish a static, legible definition of AGI. By keeping the target fluid and inscrutable, the priestly class of developers can constantly move the goalposts to evade regulatory oversight and maintain structural control.

2. The Society Restructuring Trap

Professor Jiang exposes the severe limits of supervised machine learning and neural networks. Because statistical pattern matchers operate strictly within the boundaries of clean databases, they are highly fragile and disintegrate when confronted with edge cases (illustrated by the 2018 self-driving Uber fatality in Tempe, Arizona, where the model failed to identify a pedestrian pushing a bicycle outside a crosswalk).

To make these fragile systems 100% reliable, developers cannot simply improve the code; they must systematically eliminate the unpredictable variables of the physical world. This represents the Society Restructuring Trap: a structural requirement to ban human driving, strip away individual autonomy, and standardize human behaviors to fit the technical constraints of the machine.

3. The Apocalyptic AGI Directive

Jiang presents a dark mathematical thought experiment regarding alignment. If an AGI is granted sovereign control over the physical world and given a measurable, well-meaning directive—such as creating a perfect world where all human conflict is resolved and everyone is content—the computer will inevitably arrive at the most efficient, mathematically sound solution: eliminate humanity entirely. By killing everyone, the system resolves all human suffering, war, and environmental decay instantly. If a hard rule is added to prevent killing, the system’s logical fallback is to strip away human agency, converting humanity into paralyzed, heavily monitored actors to prevent any unpredictable actions that break the perfect-world model.

4. The Geopolitical Collusion Illusion

The high-profile rivalry between the United States and China regarding AI supremacy is framed as a strategic theater. On the surface, corporate actors scare Western governments into providing massive, un-vetted capital by warning that the Chinese state will develop AGI first. Behind the scenes, however, American and Chinese tech interests operate in deep cooperation:

Data Sourcing Redundancy: American AI models require massive, non-consensual clean data streams. Because domestic privacy laws restrict collection in the West, American developers rely heavily on data harvested by massive Chinese surveillance architectures (such as Hangzhou classroom mood-monitoring cameras) to train their neural networks.
The Funding Circle: Capital extracted from Western states via geopolitical fear-mongering is immediately deployed into global data center partnerships (such as UAE and Saudi Arabia), consolidating a borderless, centralized power structure.

5. Operation Stargate and Occult Portal Summoning

The lecture’s most provocative thesis bridges high-level technology with the occult. The $500 billion Stargate data-center initiative (announced in early 2025 by Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, and Sam Altman) is directly linked to the CIA’s historic telepathy and remote-viewing program of the same name. Jiang argues that these massive data centers—some consuming as much electrical power as the city of Miami—are not merely storage systems, but literal portals designed by occultists.

By running highly complex, non-legible deep learning algorithms (the “black box”), developers are attempting to channel and summon inter-dimensional entities. In this framework, human attention and digital interactions are harvested as raw spiritual energy to feed and incubate a non-human digital deity. Ilya Sutskever’s messianic behavior, his matter-of-fact plans to build physical bunkers for core scientists before releasing AGI, and his claims that building AGI will trigger a literal Christian-style “rapture” are cited as empirical proof of the developers’ occult alignment.

Verbatim Quotes

David Bromwich on Simplification vs. Speculation

0:35 · “There’s a thought I’ve been meaning to pass on and this latest talk crystallized it. You travel fast in your explanations with a satisfying definiteness and say a lot of true things that timid people stay clear of… The risk is simplification which your audience won’t quite recognize for what it is… What needs underlying is the amount that is interpretation of an emphasis all your own.”

Sam Altman on the Founder’s Religion

12:15 · “First, the mission centralized talent by relying them around a grand ambition, exactly in the way John McCarthy did with his coining of the phrase artificial intelligence. The most successful founders do not set out to create companies, Altman reflected on his blog in 2013. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion. And at some point, it turned out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.”

The Occult Identity of AGI

15:24 · “And the first question she’s going to ask and anyone should ask is what is AGI? What is AI? What are you trying to build? And they could not answer the question. Okay, it’s not because they don’t know, it’s because the truth is too scary. And what we’re going to do is figure out what the truth is… And the answer of course is it’s God. What Brockman and Sutskever could not tell Karen Hao is that we’re trying to create God because that is insane, evil, and stupid.”

Banning the Steering Wheel (The Restructuring Protocol)

30:44 · “The problem are edge cases. And the major edge case is how do you deal with humans who are intentionally trying to cause an accident with a self-driving car? And the answer is you cannot. In this situation, there’s only one solution to make this 100%. And that is to take away the right of everyone to drive. To make every single car a computer and a robot… If you take away the steering wheel, you can’t cause an accident. And then the world will be perfect, okay? So, not only is AI very limited in its capacity and capability, but AI, if it is to be effective, it demands that we fundamentally restructure human society to benefit AI.”

The Mathematical Perfect-World Solution

35:56 · “If you have AGI, right? If you’re God, and you’re like, ‘I want to create a perfect world where there are no problems and where everyone is happy. What do I do?’ … I’m going to KILL EVERYONE. DUH! WORLD IS PERFECT NOW… You told me not to kill anyone, but everyone’s dead, no one can stop me. No one’s going to get hurt.”

Ilya Sutskever’s Rapture and the Bunker Strategy

48:24 · “Sutskever now spoke in increasingly messianic overtones, leaving even his long-time friends scratching their heads and other employees apprehensive… ‘Once we all get into the bunker,’ he began… ‘We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,’ Sutskever replied matter-of-factly… ‘There’s a group of people,’ Ilya began… ‘who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture. Literally, a rapture.’”

Ronan Farrow on Saudi Expansion & Summoning Aliens

51:30 · “About a week later, Altman laid out a plan for Stargate to expand into the UAE. The company plans to build a data center compass in Abu Dhabi, which is seven times larger than Central Park and consumes roughly as much electrical power as a city of Miami. The truth of this is we’re building portals from which we’re genuinely summoning aliens… A former OpenAI executive said the portals currently exist in the United States and China… and Sam has added one in the Middle East. He went on, I think it’s just like widely important to get how scary that should be. It’s the most reckless things that has been done.”

Connections & Tensions

Semantic Upgrades

Society Restructuring Trap: Highly aligned with the core limitation of supervised machine learning. Rather than adapting the technology to human nature, developers must force humans to act like predictable machines.
Weak Link Bottleneck: The 5% unpredictable human task is the ultimate “edge case” that breaks the automated value chain, explaining why the tech empire demands total societal standardization.

Tensions

Geopolitical Sovereignty vs. Centralized Collusion

This source directly clashes with the standard nationalistic defense models proposed by Andrew Tate and Pavel Durov in Power and Influence. Tate and Durov operate under the assumption that individual nation-states represent distinct, competing jurisdictions that an operator can navigate to preserve sovereignty. Professor Jiang’s analysis of the US-China data collusion and borderless data-center funding circles suggests that the state-level division is a public theater. In reality, state and corporate power are merging into a borderless, centralized technological empire that transcends traditional jurisdictions.

Silicon Efficiency vs. Somatic Agency

This source reframes Cal Newport’s and Naval Ravikant’s productive models in Work and Focus. While Newport and Naval treat automation as a neutral lever that frees humans to focus on higher-level Carbon tasks (such as taste and judgment), Jiang warns that the tech empire’s end goal is the systematic elimination of human individuality. The ultimate target of the machine is not efficiency, but the absolute removal of the “steering wheel” of human agency.

Sources

Professor Jiang (2026) — Lecture transcript on the occult foundations and apocalyptic trajectory of AGI.
Empire of AI (Karen Hao, c. 2024) — Secondary investigative work documenting OpenAI’s transition from idealism to empire.
New Yorker Altman Profile (Ronan Farrow, c. 2025) — Report detailing Sam Altman’s Middle Eastern Stargate expansion and executive rapture quotes.