The ‘Godfather of AI’ has become a more widely recognized figure since he resigned from Google in 2023, at the grand age of 75, citing his concerns about the company’s attitude towards AI safety. Since then, he’s settled into his new gig of regularly appearing on national news broadcasts solemnly preaching that there is a good chance that AI is going to kill us all, and that we may only have a short amount of time to avoid this fate. Like his former student Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey left it rather late to come to the conclusion that AI smarter than humans might cause the extinction of humanity. But as an apparently kindly and sweet old man, he doesn’t get the criticism that Ilya does.

As a transhumanist who looks forward to the incredible benefits that ASI could bring to humanity, including radical life-extension, whilst at the same time being aware of the immense risks and challenges controlling and ‘aligning’ such a super intelligence wil involve, I saw nothing wrong in Hinton’s mission. I tended to think only that he was a little too much on the pessimistic side of things. Hinton himself agrees that whatever ultimately happens, AI will bring some huge benefits to mankind initially, above all in regards to disease prevention and cure. I also realized he was very much on the left-wing side of politics, often being very vocal against both Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

However, an interview with Hinton published by CNN this week, and one brief quote from him on life-extension, has changed my view of him entirely.

“I don’t believe we’ll live forever,” Hinton said. “I think living forever would be a big mistake. Do you want the world run by 200-year-old white men?”

So it isn’t about AI killing us all that Hinton cares about. At least not in terms of the individual deaths, of billions of human beings. As he wants biology to continue harvesting the souls of 62 million people each year (or at least millions of old white people). What he cares about is the death of homo-sapiens. In this, he has an unlikely ally in Elon Musk, who has gone on record as saying that radical life-extension would be a bad thing because it would lead to a moribund society – “most people don’t change their mind. They just die.”

Perhaps Hinton and Musk may have slightly different reasons for objecting to curing aging, but both share a position that could be described as ‘biological fascism’. Both believe that the individual does not matter compared to the ‘fitness’ of the species, even to the point of allowing the deaths of billions when technology could prevent it.