How Silicon Valley Learned to Love Killer Robots

Some of the most powerful people in the tech world grew up loving science fiction. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman all spent hours as kids reading stories about robots, space colonies, and super-smart computers. A new book argues that these future billionaires missed the real message of the stories they loved. Instead of reading them as warnings, they treated them like instruction manuals for the future.

Historian Jill Lepore explores this idea in her book 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.' She recently won the Pulitzer Prize in History for another book about the U.S. Constitution. In this new work, she shows how Silicon Valley leaders took the wrong lessons from science fiction — and what that could mean for the rest of us.

Elon Musk started reading Asimov's 'Foundation' series at age 10. The books are about a mathematician who tries to save human knowledge before a long dark age begins. The real hero of the story isn't one great man — it's the institutions and future generations that carry the plan forward. But Musk has mostly talked about the books as a story of individual genius and foresight.

Jeff Bezos was a huge 'Star Trek' fan as a kid, watching every episode of the original series many times. 'Star Trek' dealt with serious topics like racism and war, but in his 1982 high school graduation speech, Bezos mostly talked about building space hotels and moving people off Earth. He didn't say much about what would happen to the billions of people who couldn't fit on a space yacht.

Sam Altman leads the AI company OpenAI and has also been influenced by science fiction. Asimov once wrote a story about a computer that picks the U.S. president — as a warning about losing democracy. But Altman has said publicly that an AI president sounds like a great idea. He believes it could understand what every person wants and make decisions for all of them.

The science fiction these men read came from a very anxious time in history. The mid-1900s were marked by fears of nuclear war and the recent memory of the Holocaust. Writers like Asimov weren't just telling exciting stories — they were expressing deep fears about technology running out of control. Asimov even created his famous 'Three Laws of Robotics' to get readers thinking carefully about the dangers of powerful machines.

Lepore also notes that the desire to replace human judgment with machines is not new. In the 1930s, a movement called Technocracy wanted to give scientists and engineers full control of the government. They believed democracy was too messy and that experts could run things better. Musk's grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, was actually a leader in that movement.

A philosophy called 'Longtermism' is popular in Silicon Valley today. It says we should plan millions of years into the future — for a time when Earth might not be livable. Followers think we should focus less on today's problems and more on preparing for life in space or inside machines. Critics say this way of thinking can make it easy to ignore people who need help right now.

Lepore's main argument is that the problem isn't science fiction itself — it's arrested development. Teenagers often get excited about cool ideas without thinking about the consequences. These particular boys seem to have never grown past that excitement, and they came to treat the books they loved as blueprints rather than warnings. When Musk launched a SpaceX rocket in 2018, he put a copy of 'Foundation' inside — completely seriously.

Bill Gates may offer a reason for hope. He also loved science fiction as a kid and recently wrote a long essay saying he is now scared about where AI is headed. His favorite teenage book was Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' and he now says the real lesson is that nothing about our future is certain — not even our technology. He calls that the 'grown-up' lesson, and he hopes others in tech will start learning it too.