The scenario You describe is very credible, up to a critical point. WHEN CERTAIN LIMITS HAVE BEEN REACHED, if the above would be factual, this indeed would present a sinister and tragic set of events? However, what is a stretch of unimaginable conditions, the manipulators not realizing the power of super intelligent machines, as being a formula which can apply and turn against them. I suppose they could buy the best minds, and wouldn’t they forewarn them, of that possibility? After all, if we can think of it, couldn’t they? Maybe they are just leaving in a hedonistic paradise of pleasure and wealth, their egos so much imbued with the denial in the potentials of technology, that THEY are missing the entire point? If that would be the case, then, these people, whomever they would be, MUST be by definitions sub standard examples of what it means to be a human being, as far as intelligence goes. This is the sticky point of the stretch to credulity, i know power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, therefore, if this is true, then it is easier to hold on to a notions such as people like this are not stupid, they are sinister and evil. They may be practicing Satanism and using the power of evil to be able to upstage the standard conventional world we most of us have been brought up in.
The problem here, is, that, and that is why i hold to the view thar Nietzsche was grossly misinterpreted, that Nietzsche was only interpreting history, not trying to change it. Marx saw this, and that is why he made that comment. The whole of the transvaluation being a change toward and consisting of questions of morality, is nonsense, N must have seen this, N was trying to diffuse the protestant work ethic, that some few may have glanced as really being anti christ-ian, i think his intelligence must have made tacit connections between categorical morality, and the subsequent abuses of absolute material power.
This was , perhaps the hidden agenda which the reformation did not fathom maybe Luther's points were not absolutely motivated by the dislike of his father, or some such thing, and neither by his distaste for the aristocracy , and maybe Nietzche's claim to have an aristocratic heritage, was nothing else, but a cynical and futile pathos into the political-moral irony which pre-empted those confusing ideals, which previously could only be held up by values of the conventional morality.
Nietzsche idealized Christ's character minus the organization which grew up around Him, and this re-inforces the above claim? I admit my reaction to Your comments, are not substantiated as well as i would like, however, if You were to do the same,(substantiate) the claims in a rebuttal, i would be very much more in privy with bringing the last part of my objection within an acceptable overlapping, or at least some kind of parallel position with them.
I must say, Your comments were, to say the least shocking and disturbing, and please do not get the idea, that it is fo disagreement's sake only, that i argue.
To pre empt a possible objection to, whether Marx read Nietzsche ,the best i have been able to come up with, is that, Nietzche was aware of Marx works, if such, he probably , tacitly agreed with the notion of a subliminal, rather than an overt ability in changing history. The expressed material change of Marx and the subtly poetic implied capacity of change for Nietzsche, at any rate in the world of Polanyi's tacit knowledge, make the point of delineating the exact relational flow of information quite unnecessary. Information can flow, irrespective of the usually understood, sequentially forward passage and marked time. I believe these people, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kant, proved their ability to transcend time, by the subtle, and often hidden sense in which their thoughts may be connected.
James, I side with Weber, as per the Weber-Spengler debates re: the above, it reinforces the view which i have not previously and consciously knew, but out of a sort of gut level feeling.