But he is absolutely right about that. There is in humans a sort of essence. We can't currently fully pin it down, but it is something related to our intelligence, to our feelings, to our consciousness, and to our souls. This is worth preserving.

Then there are these many other things: our skin colors, our two legged locomotion, having five fingers, lungs that breathe air. These things are not required, and could be improved our replaced without losing who we are.

You could imagine fully replacing biological humans with purely electronic robots, but such a thing is not possible at our current poor level of understanding of our essence. There is simply too high risk of losing part of it.

But in the far future with super-intelligent robots and/or genetically engineered post-humans, what could the role of a current-human even be? He would be a living fossil. A circus animal novelty, a pet? A primitive indigenous people with Terra as their reservation?

Or when GitHub launched the Svalbard "artic code vault" to misdirect results about its involvement with ICE.

Yeah, there's always a twinkle of conspiracism that lights up inside me when I see something like that, and I do try to think rationally about it, but I end up coming to the conclusion... that it may not actually be that unlikely!

Naming things is easy: Why not hold a talk about the Antichrist when people have been calling you one? Why not name a single song (or even write one from scratch) to cover up some controversy. Or, of course, why not name a movie "Frozen" when there are rumors about what happened to your founders body.

I feel like the PR benefit, even if maybe intangible or purely hypothetical, is so easy to justify given the low amount of effort involved in it.

Though I do think it's rather gauche to hold a public talk about the Antichrist in Thiels situation, I think that doesn't really dispell the rumors, it just brings him and the topic closer together? No? Maybe he's just trying to tell us something. :)

This wasn’t a religious comment. I was simply saying that he fits an archetype that has existed in western thought for quite some time. Apparently it’s too spicy to say that a radical fascist billionaire who runs a surveillance company fits a mold because it got flagged lol. Can I say that Peter Thiel is duck typed as Antichrist?

The impression I get is that the antichrist gets everyone to follow him by force and fear, rather than by love. They don't worship him because they love him, they worship him because he'll kill them if they don't.

> Evil is so hard to quantify

I would offer to qualify:

Evil

  1; to corrupt or pervert the potential of existential being

  2; the maiming or mutilating of humanity

  3; to willfully destroy the innocent