Silicon Valley leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, have often misunderstood classic science fiction books like Foundation and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a misreading evident in their technology, according to an article. Musk is promising to use AI to generate a “historically accurate” version of Homer’s Odyssey, even as AI companies are destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. The article describes an "Artificial State," a dream of severing humans from the natural world and each other, where a small number of powerful Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires plan to have their heads frozen and consciousnesses uploaded onto computers, an idea from a story published nearly a century ago. This dream includes life in outer space, immortal life, and colonizing other planets, with the thinking that democracy and the liberal nation-state must be abolished to free corporations from government restraint, allowing them to marshal resources toward developing advanced AI. While these leaders recently paid lip service to democratic input, no promised democratic or constitutional structures were built, no world-governance board was established, and no AI constitutional convention was held. Instead, they told stories about existential threats from AI that could only be avoided by accelerating its development, driving investment in their corporations. In 2025, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he guessed that p.