A letter to students

Dear friend,

I want to talk to you the way nobody in your guidance office will.

You have been told, since before you could object, that the purpose of your education is a return on investment. Test scores to get the school, the school to get the internship, the internship to get the offer, the offer to get the equity. You have been trained to think of your own mind as a startup and your soul as overhead.

And now, at the end of that conveyor belt, stands the biggest offer of all: come help us build the machine that replaces human beings. The compensation will be extraordinary. The mission statements will be inspiring. The word “humanity” will appear in every press release of the corporations quietly planning the largest dispossession of human livelihood ever attempted.

I am asking you to stop on the conveyor belt. Just stop, for one moment, and ask the question you were never given time to ask: What is my life for?

Not your career. Your life.

Here is what I know after decades in and around Silicon Valley: I have never once met a person at the end of their life who wished they had increased shareholder value more. I have met many who wept over the harm they helped build and rationalized — the surveillance, the manipulation, the weapons work, the “it’s just my job” that echoed through every dark chapter of history. Sit with the parents who have lost children to war and greed, and then tell me the stakes of your career choices are abstract.

You are not powerless. You are the opposite of powerless. You are the one thing the AGI plan cannot function without. Every empire in history has depended on the talented young believing they had no choice but to serve it. Every moral advance in history began when some of them realized they did.

Nobody is asking you to be poor. Honest work, honestly paid, is holy in every tradition. We are asking you to draw one line — the same line your faith, your philosophy, and your gut have already drawn:

I will not spend my one life making my fellow human beings disposable so that billionaires can be richer.

Choose medicine that heals the poor, not just the insured. Choose engineering that brings clean water, not cleaner ad targeting. Choose law that defends the surveilled, journalism that afflicts the comfortable, teaching that lights other minds, agriculture that feeds, art that tells the truth, and yes — choose technology, if you love it, aimed at humanity’s needs instead of its replacement.

The world has enough for your need. It will never have enough for their greed. Bring your gift to the side of humanity. We are waiting for you with open arms, and honestly — we cannot do this without you.

With revolutionary love,
The GreedLearning.com community
A ForeverPeaceNow.com initiative