The Apocalyptic AI Ideology of Luigi Mangione

After Luigi Mangione was arrested for the alleged assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the world began searching for his social media profiles in an attempt to discover his motives. His Twitter account was unearthed fairly quickly and many people, myself included, began reading through his timeline. His account remains untouched to this day and reading through Mangione's posts, one topic stuck out to me: his preoccupation with futurism and AI.

In a thread pinned to Luigi's Twtitter profile, he discusses the state of technology and quotes a speech he gave in high school on the subject:

Today, I will be talking to you about the future, about topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality. Likely, you’ll dismiss all this pretty quickly as interesting, but just science fiction... or worse, you might simply think I’m crazy. But, if you just stay with me for these next eight minutes, I’m confident I can convince you not only of my sanity, but also that the next hundred years of our future are going to be unlike anything humanity has ever seen before.

Continuing, Mangione notes that we already "live in the future" in 2022. He goes on to quote his old speech again:

When we understand just how fast the rate of human progress is increasing, a revolutionary near future isn’t unbelievable, it’s actually the only logical conclusion...Finally, be excited for what the future holds for us. We may have been born into one of the most exciting times on earth, regardless of the singularity. We might not recognize it in our day to day lives, but the world is changing fast.

Tim Urban's tweet that Luigi reposted is part of a thread summarizing his 2015 essay titled The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence where he makes the case that "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) and "artificial superintelligence" (ASI) will inevitably be created.

Like many other believers in superintelligence, Tim Urban's language in these essays borders on the apocalyptic and religious; he argues that ASI is the reason why "the words 'immortality' and 'extinction' will both appear in these posts". He goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:

What we do know is that humans’ utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule: with intelligence comes power. Which means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim—and this might happen in the next few decades.

Outside of his pinned tweet, Luigi frequently retweeted Urban's other tweets and even went as far as to declare that Tim Urban's book What's Our Problem? will be "the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century". Mangione's own tweets sometimes demonstrated a socially reactionary tendency, such as arguing that Japan should ban Tenga sex toys in order to increase its birthrate.

An important piece of context to keep in mind when considering the rest of Luigi Mangione's story is he came to believe in humanity's imminent immortality in high school. But rather than witness this fantastic AI-assisted future, his 20's instead became defined by the extreme pain of his disability and navigating America's horrible health care system to treat it.

Rather than witnessing AGI evolve into superintelligence and accelerate human progress, Luigi Mangione saw it being used to do things like unethically deny health care claims, which United was being sued for at the time of Brian Thompson's assassination. In the lawsuit against them United Healthcare was accused in a lawsuit of using an AI model with an error rate of 90% to deny care to patients, claiming that the company "systematically deploy an AI algorithm to prematurely and in bad faith discontinue payment for healthcare services for elderly individuals with serious diseases and injuries".

This timeline means Mangione was thinking about AI apocalypses and AI immortality while his back went out, while his back surgery didn't work, while he was dealing with insurance companies, while he learned that UHC uses AI to deny care and effectively kill people, and while he was taking psychedelic mushrooms.

Luigi wasn't the only person influenced by Tim Urban's blog post. In the summer of 2024, and ex-OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner (who Luigi also follows on Twitter) wrote a speculative science fiction story disguised as an essay called Situational Awareness. In it, he boldly declares that a "superintelligent" AI smarter than any human will exist by the end of the decade and will subsequently accelerate all scientific progress. This is, in essence, the core concept of "The Singularity" thought experiment that has existed for decades: a hypothetical point in time where AI intelligence, and thus society as a whole, will increase exponentially.

When attempting to explain this post-Singularity future, Aschenbrenner uses exact same image showing the exponential growth of "human progress" from Tim Urban's post.

In Situational Awareness, Aschenbrenner argues that an army of billions of superintelligent AI scientists create a new civilization, solve robotics, invent an "invulnerable laser-based missile defense" system, and overthrow the US government. He later asserts that we need to "lock down the labs" to stop this from happening before fearmongering about the potential dangers of the Communist Party of China controlling AI. During an interview with Dwarkesh Patel about Situational Awareness, Aschenbrenner also jokes about his desire to purchase the property rights to entire galaxies.

Luigi Mangione's federal trial is now set to begin in January 2027, over three years after his arrest. In June, it came to light that Mangione is planning on pursuing a psychiatric defense, implicitly admitting that he did commit the murder of Thompson.

Mangione's legal team argues that he had an "extreme emotional disturbance at the time of the occurrence". Based on the number of other disturbing incidents that have occurred within the communities of AGI believers, it seems possible that Mangione's longstanding attitudes towards AI and tech contributed to his disturbance. These incidents include:

• The Zizians, a group that broke off from the "Rationality" and "effective altruist" communities of AGI believers in San Francisco and would go on to commit several murders, including that of a Border Patrol agent.
• Leverage, a Peter Thielf-funded non-profit founded within the Rationality community subjected its members intense "debugging sessions" to exorcise "demons", with one former member comparing her trauma to that suffered by cult victims. Another account of Leverage comes from Lydia Laurenson, who claims that members also practiced "Occlumency" a magical technique from Harry Potter and suffered from nightmares of being sexually assaulted by "beings" that resemble other Leverage members. Laurenson was briefly engaged to infamous neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin, demonstrating the overlap between the Rationality community and the far right.
• Eric Bruylant, another devoted member of both communities would be sentenced to 5 years in prison after attempting to murder a mental health care worker during a psychotic break.
• A Rationalist named Jessica Taylor suffered also suffered a psychotic break while working at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a popular think tank among the community. Her job involved "thinking about extreme AI torture scenarios".
• Daniel Moreno-Gama, a man who, fearing artificial superintelligence, recently threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home and declared his intent to kill any OpenAI employees he could find.

I've dealt with chronic back pain for most of my life. It first became noticeable when I was in high school and suddenly became much worse during my senior year of college. The pain spread to my leg in the form of sciatica and I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease. At the time, I was finishing up my computer science degree and applying for PhD programs with the goal of studying artificial intelligence applications in video games.

I was able to manage the pain for some years with a mixture of physical therapy and medication, but it was still a drag on my quality of life over the years. I never knew why it suddenly became so bad during my senior year, nor did i find out why my back suddenly became even worse at the beginning of 2020. This time, the pain was so bad that I was barely able to leave my bed due to the pain; I ended up requiring surgery, which subsequently got delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

During this time, I would also come to realize that I too had fallen victim to a cult. My school, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), recruited me into a selective scholarship aimed at getting more black men STEM PhDs called the Meyerhoff Scholars program.

Despite its prestige and friendly outward appearance, the Meyerhoff program's administrators were manipulative, using the threat of losing scholarship money to coerce students into compliance and forcing them to survive an abusive six-week hazing ritual before receiving any money. This all happened under the guise that my peers and superiors were my new "family" - a term used to describe the mandatory group gatherings we were forced to attend.

I successfully made it through this ordeal, but didn't finish my graduate studies in AI. Eventually, I realized the extent to which I was harmed and became disillusioned with academia in general for creating a culture in which my abuse could happen. This culminated in me contacting the media about UMBC and I was eventually interviewed alongside my mother for an investigation into the Meyerhoff program by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

After leaving graduate school. I still retained an interest in the academic side of AI and casually kept up with various developments in the field. In a surprising coincidence, I was also introduced to the writings of Rationality founder Eliezer Yudkowsky during this time by friend who had also been admitted into, and was harmed by, the Meyerhoff Scholars program.

Between my chronic back pain, my interest in AI, my alienation from academia via a cult, and my close brush with cult-like AI communities, I see many similarities between Luigi Mangione's life and my own. However, my race and progressive politics prevented me from getting sucked into AGI enthusiast social circles, which often lean towards libertarian and neoreactionary politics.

I also credit my age as an inoculating factor; when I learned about the Singularity at school in the early 2010's it was treated as an interesting thought experiment by my AI professor before we moved onto practical topics. This is very different from the environment Luigi Mangione grew up in as a member of Gen Z born in 1998.

Belief in AGI grew massively throughout his adolescence in the 2010's, with massive AI labs DeepMind and OpenAI being founded with creating AGI as their official missions. These labs, and their advancements in the early 2020's that culminated in the creation of ChatGPT received a lot of attention from the media. This was fueled in part by outlandish and alarmist statements often delivered by employees of these AI labs (such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman) which baselessly claim that AGI's creation is imminent.

Hearing these statements from people in power during formative years and lacking a formal computer science education puts many impressive young people with an interest in STEM at risk of believing these unrealistic, utopian claims about AGI and subsequently falling into the harmful communities centered around this belief.

Mirroring Mangione's history, a source I talked to during my investigation of the identity of Gen Z tech writer Jordan "Crémieux" Lasker's flagged popular tech magazines as a primary factor in the development of his interest in AI and intelligence around this time. Lasker would go on to gain infamy as an anonymous internet personality that writes about tech and promotes race science, gathering a large following amongst Silicon Valley AGI believers (including Elon Musk).

Luigi Mangione, Jordan Lasker, and 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama are but three people whose early religious-like belief in the power of technology and AI led them to dangerous thoughts and actions. Because the future of the entire human race is on the line, the idea of a near-omnipotent being that could bring either doom or utopia to humanity espoused by AGI believers is an inherently radicalizing belief system that leaves its younger adherents vulnerable to other radical ideology and at a higher risk of committing extremist acts. As such, people who subscribe to this philosophy should be treated like believers in any other apocalyptic or radical worldview.