largely<\/a> on the causes of what Thiel sees as \u201ctechnological stagnation,\u201d debating income inequality, the failures of clean energy technology, and the gridlock of US infrastructure projects like high-speed rail.\n <\/p>\n\n But while their previous talk centered on economic questions, this time, the pair framed the broader fate of Western democracy in more drastic terms. Fukuyama is known for his \u201cEnd of History\u201d thesis, in which he proposed that, after the Cold War, liberal democracy might represent the final form of government. During the Aspen panel, Fukuyama argued that the greatest danger is abandoning institutions that have sustained democracy.\n <\/p>\n
\n Thiel countered this by arguing that those institutions themselves have become engines of paralysis, and that decades of technological stagnation have pushed Western politics toward greater instability: \u201cThe weird ways that politics has gone haywire is telling me something very deep.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Thiel\u2019s political views have drawn criticism from some writers and thinkers, who say his distrust in democratic institutions and enthusiasm for elite-led governance amount to a form of \u201ctechno-authoritarianism.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Responding to Fukuyama\u2019s argument that, despite growing extremism, liberal democracy remains humanity\u2019s best political system, Thiel warned that far-left forces are increasingly dominating American politics.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI think there\u2019s going to be a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,\u201d Thiel said.\n <\/p>\n
\n His comments come as self-identified democratic socialists have gained influence within the Democratic Party, most notably with last year\u2019s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, followed this year by a series of victories by democratic socialist candidates in mayoral and congressional primaries.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe Republican Party doesn\u2019t matter that much. It\u2019s the less important one,\u201d Thiel said. \u201cWhen the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States\u2019 adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thiel also argued that the American Revolution has been fundamentally misunderstood.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThere are all these anti-Trump protests: we don\u2019t want kings, we want rule of law,\u201d Thiel said. He framed the American Revolution not as a campaign against King George III, but as a revolt against an all-powerful British parliament, whose lawmakers exercised \u201ctotalitarian\u201d control.\n <\/p>\n
\n In Thiel\u2019s telling, the US Constitution was designed as a corrective to Britain\u2019s \u201ctyrannical rule of lawyers,\u201d with a presidency, he said, built to be \u201cmore powerful than King George III.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n He contrasted the United States\u2019s constitutional system with that of today\u2019s European Union, which he described as a stagnant, rule-bound bureaucracy, under which people are \u201cNPCs\u201d \u2014 non-player characters in video games \u2014 with no power to make decisions.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe EU is rule of law,\u201d Thiel said. \u201cIt is like bad AI.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
Palantir and the Deep State<\/p>\n
\n Thiel spoke about Palantir, the software company he co-founded, and its close contracting relationship with US federal agencies including the Pentagon and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.\n <\/p>\n
\n Despite doing billions of dollars of business with the national security establishment, the company is \u201cnot joined at the hip\u201d with the \u201cUS deep state,\u201d Thiel said. He called the company\u2019s leaders \u201cloyal-dissident-type people\u201d and said that neither he nor Palantir\u2019s current CEO, Alex Karp, hold government security clearances. Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.\n <\/p>\n
\n The formidable influence wielded by tech companies, Thiel said, is \u201cone of the things that\u2019s really healthy about the US,\u201d because it means \u201cthe power centers are distributed in this country.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n As an example of the multiple power centers, he offered an unsupported conspiratorial claim that the AI firm Anthropic \u2014 a \u201cwoke liberal company\u201d that he credited with \u201cwinning the AI race\u201d \u2014 would \u201crig the elections in 2028\u201d in support of Democrats. Anthropic, Thiel said, would use its industry-leading AI models to \u201ccompletely outwit\u201d any ideological efforts Elon Musk might make in the opposite direction through X.\n <\/p>\n
\n Anthropic declined to comment, pointing instead to one of its recent blog posts<\/a> on election integrity and political bias.\n <\/p>\n\n Despite his own right-wing libertarian politics, Thiel said he preferred the idea of the US having competing power centers to a situation like \u201cRome or Russia,\u201d since \u201cyou don\u2019t want this whole thing to be fused in DC.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Thiel also discussed Palantir\u2019s name, which was inspired by the magical seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s \u201cThe Lord of the Rings.\u201d Critics have noted that characters who try to use the powers of the palant\u00edr end up being manipulated by the story\u2019s archvillain, Sauron.\n <\/p>\n
\n Thiel argued that those people misunderstand Tolkien\u2019s story. \u201cToward the end, it gets used by the good guys,\u201d Thiel said. The hero and king-to-be, Aragorn, uses a palant\u00edr to confront Sauron, showing him he now possesses the reforged sword of his ancestors. (Sauron then misinterprets this intelligence, leading him to make a fatal strategic blunder.)\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cAnybody who tells you a different story of Tolkien,\u201d Thiel said, \u201cdoesn\u2019t even know what they\u2019re talking about, on the level of literature.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a series of provocative warnings and predictions about the future of artificial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":566820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,15901,18,19,17,82],"class_list":["post-566819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ctt","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116855738619494004","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}