Naomi Klein: AGI ambitions as a salvation narrative

‘It's a quasi-religious story … Musk talks about summoning a digital god, a digital demon’

EXCERPT

KLEIN: "The tech end timers, um, have another vision, but it bears some resemblance to this story, right? I mean, the, the, you know, and you've been covering the wild things that they say about what they're building with, with, with AGI, right? With, with super intelligence as, as Trump now call- Yes ... has renamed it We've renamed it officially. But it's, it's a quasi-religious story. I mean, uh, Musk talks about summoning a digital god, a digital demon. They burn effigies at OpenAI to try not to bring a bad digital god. Um, so they ... And the dream is a dream of total dematerialization, right? Like, you, you want to ascend into the digital sphere. So the, so it merges- Uploading our consciousness to the cloud. Yeah. Yeah. Once again, I would love for this not to matter- ... for it just to be like a quirky little cult- Yeah ... and not, like, the richest people dominating the, um, top stocks, uh, that are, like, holding up the entire global economy, right?"

Source: Offline with Jon Favreau · Sep 26, 2026 · 57s clip