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I agree there are conscious people exercising power, but I'm arguing that the system they're enmeshed within constrains the actions they're able to make. Rather than choosing maximal extraction as a means to the goal of survivalist bunkers, they're locked into maximal extraction. The more thoughtful may not like it, may try to break out of it, but the logic of capital will only select for someone else who has no qualms keeping the machine at full tilt.
Survival bunkers are just one way of resolving that internal contradiction; "I'm supposed to have all this power, all this agency; yet I can't overcome the momentum of this system without jeopardizing my place at the top of it". So they invent a goal to fit the means they're pre-committed to. A way of rationalizing it.
The "general super-intelligent AI" investor hype is just another way of rationalizing the same contradiction. "Yes, we're destroying the ecosystem, but it's alright, 'cus digital God is gonna end our dependence on human labor and provide us magic solutions to all the problems before we're completely fucked."
and...
...really, the bunker stuff is just a slightly more grounded delusion than the AI pipe-dream. Assuming they actually make it to the bunker, having divined the right moment to step away, it'll have bought them a few decades at the very most. But nothing more.
And anyway, people are gonna know where they are. Someone had to build the estate. Someone had to fly the airplane, captain the boat, or manage whatever sort of logistics was needed to get from there to here. Someone had to do the heavy lifting, loading up the store room.
And how the hell are they supposed to know when it is Time? This isn't gonna be like a market crash, where there's an obvious delineation between yesterday and today. What if it the inflection point isn't reached in one lifetime? Junior gonna inherit the keys to the canned good kingdom?
What if there is no inflection point? Just a graduated slope between us and a distant horizon without mammals?
Frankly, it sounds like the secular version of eagerly awaiting the rapture.
have you really not seen all those thinkpeices that go, "Lets dump our resources into develping AI rather than conservation and renewables, because the AI will magic up a solution for us better than anything actual researchers suggest"?
Billionaires are only free so long as they do nothing that compromises greater returns year after year. Their money is tied up in financial institutions, beholden to the demands of their fellow investors, their overall class. What you call "freedom" is just ultimate privilege. And, like any privilege, it is conditional.
Musk is the perfect example that very concept, yet you choose to dismiss it as some bizarre outlier rather than a demonstration of the rule.