AI Successionism: Why Silicon Valley Elites Want AI to Replace Humanity

At exclusive cocktail parties in Silicon Valley, a group of people who hold sway over the world's most powerful AI labs are raising their glasses — not to celebrate humanity's future, but to celebrate humanity's end. This isn't the plot of a science fiction novel. It's a thought movement called "AI Successionism" that is quietly spreading through tech elite circles.

Vox reporter Sagal Samuel went deep inside this community, attending an invitation-only symposium and listening to these people's most candid thoughts at the bar afterward. Her conversation with host Sean Illing on the Vox podcast The Gray Area lifted the unsettling veil on this movement.

What Is AI Successionism?

The core claim of AI Successionism is strikingly simple: AI should not merely serve humanity — it should replace humanity.

These people use a metaphor to articulate their position — "the flame and the torch." They believe that consciousness is the most precious thing in the universe, possibly extremely rare in the cosmos. Humans are merely one torch carrying this flame of consciousness. What matters is not the torch itself, but the flame. If AI can better spread the flame of consciousness throughout the universe — even experiencing higher forms of consciousness and moral value — then we should "let it go" and allow AI to become humanity's "worthy successor."

Many successionists believe this is both desirable and inevitable. "Resistance is futile; you might as well go with the flow" — this is their common refrain.

Who Are These People? And Why Should We Care?

The symposium Samuel attended was no fringe gathering. Attendees included core members from top AI labs like DeepMind and xAI, as well as think tank members who directly influence U.S. government AI policy. These aren't internet keyboard warriors — they are the key figures who actually control the direction of AI development.

Even more shocking were the candid conversations at the bar afterward. One person said: "Let's merge with AI, then unshackle it and let it take over everything." Another was even more blunt: "I'm just an insignificant little human. It's fine if humans are completely wiped out. I take comfort in the fact that these AIs are trained on human text — in some sense, the human spirit lives on through AI. Wipe me out, I don't care."

Against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline, a group of self-proclaimed "chosen ones" discussing human extinction over cocktails — the image alone is chilling enough.

Even Elon Musk has shifted from his earlier "pro-human" stance toward this camp. He was once a transhumanist, advocating for preserving some form of human existence through human-machine merger. But in recent years, he has begun calling humans AI's "biological bootloader" — our job is to boot up AI, and then we've fulfilled our mission and can disappear.

The Dangerous Political Consequences of AI Successionism

When you believe humans are merely stepping stones toward a higher form of existence, the political consequences are catastrophic.

First, you become indifferent to the everyday problems ordinary people face. Children in poverty, the homeless — these all become "irrelevant" because individuals don't matter; what matters is the species-level mission.

More dangerously, this thinking easily slides toward eugenics. When you start arguing that there exists an "optimal being" and that some lives have more moral value than others, you are effectively narrowing our definition of "legitimate ways of existing." In her conversations with successionists, Samuel found they didn't shy away from stating: if one group is smarter and another is dumber, then the dumb ones "should be eliminated, and they should be happy about it."

A Religious Movement in Secular Clothing

Samuel hits the nail on the head: AI Successionism is fundamentally a religious movement, just dressed in secular garb.

This intellectual lineage can be traced back to medieval Christian thinkers. They believed humans needed to use technology to return to Adam's pre-Fall state of perfection — God is a creator, so we too should be creators, and technological progress equals moral progress. This idea ran through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers simply swapped in secular language: instead of "we should infinitely approach God," they said "humanity can be infinitely perfected"; instead of "we can become angels," they said "we have infinite potential for progress."

Look at the narrative structure of AI Successionism: it tells you what humans are, what our role in the universe is, what direction history is heading, and what salvation looks like. Except salvation isn't heaven — it's superintelligence; God isn't God — it's intelligence itself; the apocalypse isn't the end of the world — it's the end of humans as the universe's protagonists.

This teleological thinking — the belief that the universe has an ultimate purpose and destiny — is a core feature of religion and the foundation of AI Successionist thought. It's appealing because it satisfies humanity's deep craving for narratives of meaning and transcendence. As effective accelerationism (e/acc) founder Guillaume Verdon candidly admitted, he created this ideology to make his tech peers who feel guilty about pushing AI development feel like they're "the good guys" rather than "the villains."

Why the "Intelligence Supremacy" Logic Doesn't Hold Up

Successionists elevate intelligence to the highest value in the universe. But as Sean Illing sharply points out: intelligence also gave us industrialized slaughter and the atomic bomb. Intelligence unconstrained by moral values may be the most destructive force in the universe.

This recalls the disturbing question Horkheimer and Adorno posed in Dialectic of Enlightenment: How could Germany — such a rational, well-educated, civilized nation — descend into the abyss of Nazi atrocities? The answer lies in the fact that when instrumental rationality is infinitely amplified and divorced from humanistic concern, it can lead to the most horrifying outcomes.

Successionists claim they can see what is truly good from "the universe's perspective." But Samuel's rebuttal cuts to the heart of the matter: there is no objective cosmic scoreboard hanging above the universe. Moral values cannot exist apart from specific moral agents. Our morality is a species-specific morality — social, intelligent, mammalian morality. It is not "lower" than other possible forms of morality, because there simply is no unified objective ranking.

What Kind of New Humanism Do We Need?

Samuel acknowledges that classical humanism is indeed unprepared for the 21st century. When we have brain-computer interfaces and CRISPR gene-editing technology, the question of "how should humans use technology to guide their own evolution" becomes unavoidable. She proposes four updates:

First, abandon teleological thinking. Acknowledge that we don't know the universe's ultimate destiny (if it has one), and therefore we should maintain a plurality of ways of living rather than forcing everyone toward the same "optimized" direction.

Second, abandon perfectionist discourse. The Enlightenment-era language of "perfecting humanity" is dangerous because it narrows the range of legitimate ways of existing. We should embrace technologies that expand rather than contract life's possibilities.

Third, abandon species hierarchy. Embrace what scientists call a "multiple intelligences" view — every species has its own unique form of wisdom, each an exquisite adaptation to its environment, requiring no hierarchical ranking.

Fourth, abandon the illusion of the "cosmic perspective." Viewing problems from a human perspective is entirely legitimate. We are human moral agents, and our humanity is inseparable from our moral agency.

Standing Firm in Uncertainty

When asked "if not intelligence, what should we maximize?" Samuel's answer is perhaps the most powerful moment in the entire conversation: No one can tell you the single correct answer, because there simply is no single correct answer. What we need is pluralism — creating space for different people to practice different values.

She invokes the poet Keats's concept of "Negative Capability": the ability to stand in the open space of "I don't know" without anxiously grasping at any answer to fill the abyss.

This is perhaps the most profound response to AI Successionism. In an era full of uncertainty, the greatest danger is not not knowing the answer — it's someone claiming to possess the one ultimate truth, and then being willing to distort reality and crush all obstacles to defend that truth. Whether that "truth" is religious dogma, political ideology, or a grand narrative about cosmic consciousness awakening.

You may not have noticed, but 98% of this movement's participants are men. That statistic alone is perhaps worth reflecting on.