Former Facebook Executive Antonio Garcia Martinez Predicts Collapse Of Civilization Within 30 Years

Antonio Garcia Martinez is a Silicon Valley insider who believes that civilization as we know it will probably collapse within the next 30 years and he is not alone in this belief. Martinez initially began his career as a quantitative strategist at Goldman Sachs, but eventually left New York for the allure of Silicon Valley. He then built a startup which was bought by Twitter and afterwards embarked on a career as a product manager executive at Facebook.

After growing disillusioned with his experiences in Silicon Valley, Antonio Garcia Martinez wrote the highly acclaimed book Chaos Monkeys: Obscure Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. Of his look into the tech industry, he admits that it isn’t all glowingly optimistic in tone, as Willamette Week report. In fact, Martinez even compared life in Silicon Valley with what it must have been like working in Communist Cuba in 1965.

“The book isn’t nice, because Silicon Valley isn’t a nice place.”

Discussing Secrets of Silicon Valley, a new BBC documentary that will premiere on Sunday, Antonio Garcia Martinez asserted that ordinary people, who he says those in Silicon Valley refer to as “Normies,” should be terrified of what is just around the corner, according to the Daily Mail.

“You may not believe it but it’s coming, and it’s coming in the form of a self-driving truck that’s going to run you over.”

Antonio Garcia Martinez is one of many ex-Silicon Valley insiders who is currently preparing for mass chaos and the inevitable collapse of civilization, and Martinez is now reportedly residing deep in the woods outside of Seattle. It is his belief that within the next 30 years many people will no longer have jobs, as robots will be routinely used to do the work that those people are currently doing now.

“Within 30 years, half of humanity won’t have a job. It could get ugly – there could be a revolution. You don’t realize it but we’re in a race between technology and politics, and technologists are winning. They’re way ahead. They will destroy jobs and disrupt economies before we even react to them and we really should be thinking about that.”

Even the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, Jeremy Howard, concurs with Antonio’s belief that society may be going in the wrong direction with “massive social unrest” looming on the horizon, and warns that people should be more frightened and aware of this than they are.

“People aren’t scared enough. They’re saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, there will always be more jobs.’ It’s founded on this purely historical thing of there has been a revolution before, it was called the Industrial Revolution, and after it there were still enough jobs, therefore this new, totally different, totally unrelated revolution will also have enough jobs. It’s a ludicrously short-sighted, meaningless argument which incredibly smart people are making.”

Five years ago today was the FB IPO, and this was the scene the night before. Oddly, we’re not all still on speaking terms. pic.twitter.com/cEJpumgEqF

— Antonio García Mtez. (@antoniogm) May 18, 2017

Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, has gone on record saying that he, like Antonio Garcia Martinez, is also very concerned about the future of Artificial Intelligence. While Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg holds a decidedly optimistic view of AI, Musk notes that this may be because he feels Zuckerberg doesn’t fully understand it and called the Facebook founder’s knowledge of AI “limited.”

Lord Rees and Stephen Hawking are also of the belief that while Artificial Intelligence could prove valuable in some respects, they also feel that it could create a dystopian future if people aren’t careful. Or, as Elon Musk calls it, the “Robocalypse.”

Similar to Antonio Garcia Martinez’s move to the woods, The New Yorker revealed earlier this year that there are large numbers of wealthy Silicon Valley employees and others in the tech industry who have turned into survivalists and are also preparing themselves and their families for the end of civilization.

Whether Antonio Garcia Martinez is right in his prediction that chaos could erupt in the next 30 years which could ultimately trigger the end of civilization is up for debate, but he and other Silicon Valley insiders are just hoping that humans get it right in the end so that their fears of a dystopian future don’t actually come to fruition.

[Featured Image by Ming Yeung/Getty Images]