# Cardinal Conversations: Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, "Technology and Politics" (the "crypto is libertarian, AI is communist" remark)

- Speaker: Peter Thiel
- Venue: Hoover Institution, Stanford. Cardinal Conversations series, moderated by Niall Ferguson.
- Date: 31 January 2018
- URL: https://www.hoover.org/events/cardinal-conversations-reid-hoffman-and-peter-thiel
- Source method: Reported quotes from Stanford Report, Axios, MIT Technology Review and Inc. No full transcript obtained.

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## Verified lines

- Stanford Report (1 Feb 2018), https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2018/02/cardinal-conversation-reid-hoffman-peter-thiel-technology-politics : Thiel said the forces of "centralization" and "decentralization" are evident in technology and politics. "Crypto is libertarian and AI is communist," he said.
- Axios (Dan Primack, 13 Feb 2018), https://www.axios.com/2018/02/13/peter-thiel-ai-is-communist-1518541570 , and MIT Technology Review (14 Feb 2018): "Crypto is decentralizing, AI is centralizing. Or, if you want to frame it more ideologically, crypto is libertarian and AI is communist." Axios adds that Thiel said only the first half of that equation is regularly discussed in Silicon Valley, owing to left-wing bias.
- Inc. (Sonya Mann, 1 Feb 2018), https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/thiel-ai-cryptocurrency.html : "the Chinese Communist Party hates crypto and loves AI." Mann's gloss: a sufficiently powerful AI could realise the central planner's dream of predicting potato yields months ahead from thousands of miles away.
- Reid Hoffman's counter-metaphor at the same event (crypto.news write-up): crypto is "anarchy" and AI is "the rule of law".

## Later echoes by Thiel himself

- Conversations with Tyler, recorded 21 Feb 2024: "I had this riff five, six years ago, where if crypto is libertarian, why can't we say that AI is communist?" and "returns to scale on AI are so big that maybe even San Francisco will survive with the AI revolution. There are benefits to this, but it also leads to this set of centralization questions." (See cowen-political-theology-2024.md.)
- Preface to The Sovereign Individual (2020): "If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian." (See sovereign-individual-preface-2020-excerpt.md.)

## Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9Ts4_65hKk (Hoover Institution). YouTube blocked from this VM; not transcribed.