Doomsday predictions such as nuclear war, climate change or a zombie apocalypse have fueled the ultra-rich’s obsession with luxury bunkers.
However, one Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur joked that those bunkers might not be needed in the event of an AI apocalypse.
As part of a conversation about fears for the future, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that – unlike some tech tycoons – he doesn’t have a bunker.
On stage at the WSJ Tech Live event on Tuesday, Altman was asked if he was so worried about advances in artificial intelligence that he had prepared a bunker. “I would say no,” he told the magazine’s Joanne Stern. “I have structures, but I wouldn’t say a bunker,” Altman added, without specifying what those structures were.
In his insightful book about the ultra-rich’s obsession with doomsday scenarios, Douglas Rushkoff wrote that some tech tycoons use “The Event” as a euphemism for various doomsday scenarios that might require bunkers. These include “environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, rampant virus or malicious computer attack that destroys everything.”
Examples of these bunkers range from the Vivos Group’s underground vaults in South Dakota, a heavily fortified Safe House in Poland that can be turned into a windowless fortress, to Miami’s Indian Creek Village, an island with its own police force, golf campground and country club and is known as Miami’s “billionaire bunker.”