"Venture capitalists erected their industry on the altar of profits, with perhaps a dash of rationalism. There is an element of faith needed to power their belief that taking flyers on early-stage companies can lead to billions-the Silicon Valley version of prosperity gospel. Still, it would be hard to argue that venture capital is a religious practice. That seems to be changing."
"As he points out, the recent trend of technology has been the opposite. Rather than fostering connections between people, tech is increasingly focused on building machines that will interact with-and train-other machines. This seems to present a crossroads moment for humanity. It would be easy for us to retreat from each other, though Dash is optimistic that the rise of AI will showcase an important human strength that chatbots lack (or at least can only emulate): empathy."
Venture capital blends profit motives with a degree of faith in high-risk startups, and that faith is now intersecting with quasi-religious ambitions around AGI. Peter Thiel's lectures on the Antichrist signal cultural and ideological undercurrents within the tech world. Somesh Dash draws on a Hindu cultural background to emphasize community and service as corrective values. Technological trends increasingly prioritize machines interacting with machines rather than fostering human connections. That shift creates a crossroads in which empathy emerges as a uniquely human strength unlikely to be fully replicated by AI. Platform growth has also shown how benign communication can escalate into harmful real-world events.
Read at Fortune
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