I heard an interview recently with Emile Torres about this. And he didn’t make this any less stupid, but he did a great job helping to explain the deranged pathologies of the people behind these.

When you have the power to make decisions at a global scale, your goals and fears are radically different from those of people who only have the ability to make choices that impact their household or family or neighborhood.

These people have a fantasy of being not just A “great man of history” but THE greatest, most important, most monumental figure to have ever lived in the whole universe. And in their head, if this technology either allows humans to make a superior species that replaces us and goes on to conquer the whole galaxy or just eradicates all the life on the only habitable planet we know of… well what a legacy, you know? There’s no bigger tombstone that says ‘I MATTERED!’

And that’s what they crave. They’re basically sick, poisoned with toxic levels of power and ego.