Post-human predator watch

If Machiavelli in The Prince, written in 1513, after the fall of the Republic of Florence, highlights the condottiero Cesare Borgia – son of Pope Alexander VI – as a model of how a prince who obtains power through wealth should behave (his father appointed him commander-in-chief of the papal armies), Giuliano da Empoli, in his last essay The Hour of the Predators, makes Borgia the archetype defining a new class of politicians, businessmen (often himself), oligarchs and political advisors. These, on the other hand, are not only distinguished by devoting themselves, with a certain amount of insolence and excessive zeal, to predation (which is the least that could be), but they advance as posthuman imitators – the idea used by da Empoli – of the distant condottiero of the Papal States, that is, by cunning, deceit, cruelty and crimes. Such behavior, according to Machiavelli, is explained to the extent that the “lucky” prince lacks his own power and, therefore, without it, dependent on someone else’s power, he maintains the principality with great effort.

The most humane of the predators, the saving distances, featured in the episodes – set in different cities – and the musings of da Empoli, to whom Henry Kissinger (cited in relation to artificial intelligence as a political challenge) still belongs to humanity, is the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. Like Borgia, or almost like this, this Saudi ruler, in November 2017, ordered the cancellation of all reservations and the expulsion of guests from the luxury Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh (the capital of the Kingdom), to forcibly house about three hundred and fifty billionaires and influential figures and subject them, for three months, to interrogation methods (some of them unfriendly) of the paramilitary organization Blackwater, to force them to confess to their crimes. Among other details, the head of the National Guard regained his freedom after signing a check for a billion – the currency is not specified – and Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, the former governor of the Riyadh region, is still in prison today due to acts of corruption.

Next on the scale of proximity to humans, albeit lower, is businessman Nayib Bukele, since 2019 president of El Salvador, the safest country in the West today. Before this record, the “millennial leader” (as the foreign press calls him) had completely reversed insecurity by declaring a state of exception and then ordering the military to arrest anyone with tattoos, on the assumption that the gang members responsible for the violence were tattooed. In this way – with the suspension of constitutional guarantees – eighty thousand tattooed people were imprisoned, most of them criminals, but a percentage of honorable people, and displayed in their underwear, with their heads shaved, kneeling or running to the sound of the prison guards’ whistle, in a shocking video clip that honored Karam Bukele as the most followed president on TikTok. In any case, da Empoli recognizes him, apart from his deceptively authoritarian rhetoric, and his astonishingly bad taste in clothing (ridiculous, in a word), on the occasion of his speech at the United Nations, where he appeared in a suit designed by himself, consisting of a dark blue jacket, collar and cuffs with floral decorations embroidered in gold.

But in the unchecked zone of distress and turmoil in which the predators operate, and where there are no boundaries (only the logic of power, finance and cryptocurrencies rule, and the flow of artificial intelligence and related technologies that they drive), the person best suited to survive – who is already in the ascendancy of the post-human – is Donald Trump. With him, in da Empoli’s opinion, due to his “functional illiteracy”, because he does not read anything (not even the notes that consultants give him for an interview), a kind of Cesare Borgia who only acts is imposed; In other words, he despises knowledge and prefers pure action, which gives him great flexibility in a very turbulent and chaotic context. In this regard, belief in the result (Trump’s popular doctrine) can best be demonstrated by Javier Miley’s statement – referred to by the author – that the difference between a madman and a genius is success. And he, by the way, emits an ideological hum that reminds (unfortunately) of Eichmann in Jerusalem, when Hannah Arendt highlights the moment in the trial where the accused, trying to defend himself, admitted that he admired Hitler for his political success when he came to power, just for this victory, for his successful career.

Of course, as da Empoli points out, an autocrat (such as Mohammed bin Salman) is not the same as an authoritarian politician who is conditioned, at least to some extent, by liberal democracy. However, this, as it applies to politicians, will no longer subjugate – as happened during the Davos Consensus – post-human digital predators. This is the case of businessman Elon Musk, although not the only one, who has supported Bolsonaro, Milley (whose libertarianism he shares), Bukele, and the AfD, the German far-right party. Da Empoli realizes that Trump’s re-election was a reason for strengthening the rapprochement between the Borgias of the world and the masters of technology to crush the old elites, who were fed up with bureaucrats and the hypocrisy of politicians. And there is little they have to achieve this goal, among other weapons, the post-human wisdom of computer scientists like Yann LeCun – the scientific head of the AI ​​Lab at Meta – or the neuroscientist Demis Hassabis – co-founder of Google DeepMind – in machine learning, robotics, and computational neuroscience.

All these figures and others from the new political and economic elite, whom Da Empoli knows personally and whom he describes with some humor (for example, he compares LeCun to Austin Powers, but older and less funny), along with a squad of doctors, advisors and bodyguards, so to speak, on the Titanic. Today, because of technological advances, a military attack is cheaper than a defense – a cyberattack has little cost – and prices continue to fall. In other words, nuclear deterrence is over. In fact, a DNA synthesizer (capable of generating deadly pathogens) costs about twenty thousand dollars, and the latest version of ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI, which is marketing it, can be used to create deadly weapons. According to Da Empoli, an era of violence is coming that will affect democracies. Meanwhile, Trump leads a group of predators, reactionaries and tech tycoons, eager to attack once and for all.