They may not all align neatly along the left-right spectrum of our politics. That’s because their aspirations are orthogonal to the critical political debates of the day. How they choose to deploy their money, however, starting with nearly $200m directed so far to prevent states from imposing AI regulations, signals one of their key aspirations: allowing artificial intelligence to rip free and build the next phase of humanity’s cosmic evolution, one which may not include humans as we know them.

The tech oligarchs are not particularly shy about this ambition. Larry Page has argued that digital life is the “natural and desirable next step” in humanity’s cosmic evolution. “If we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good,” he said. Humanity “will be the first species ever to design our own descendants”, argued Altman. Humans “can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”

Musk, whose Neuralink is working to patch AI into human minds, is also invested in building what will succeed everyday humans. So is Zuckerberg, who recently directed his philanthropy to devote itself entirely to advancing ways to extend life. When Thiel dies, his body and brain will be frozen in liquid nitrogen, to be transferred “into an immortal body” in the future. As he wrote in the Education of a Libertarian, “I stand against (…) the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”

The tech oligarchs don’t all think alike. Some moguls insist that their consciousness should be part of the next step in humanity’s evolution, whether cryogenically preserved or uploaded into some electronic gadget. Others just want to help bring about the next AI phase of intelligent life, even if their ego is not around to experience it. Nonetheless, they all share a disinterest in concerns about housing and healthcare, or the price of food and gas.