She Wanted to Save the World From A.I. Then the Killings Started.

Business|She Wanted to Save the World From A.I. Then the Killings Started.

If she didn’t get access to vegan food, she might die.

That’s what Ziz LaSota told a judge in February when she appeared via videoconference in Allegany County District Court in Maryland for her bail hearing.

Ziz, who is known widely by her first name, spoke haltingly in a weak voice, but interrupted the judge repeatedly. “I might starve to death if you do not intervene,” she said, asking to be released on bail. “It’s more important than whatever this hearing is.”

On its face, it seemed like a reasonable request. But prosecutors saw a ploy. They argued that Ziz, 34, was not just any inmate but the leader of an extremist group tied to a series of murders across the country. (The official charges against her involved trespassing, resisting arrest and a handful of misdemeanor gun charges.) She had skipped bail once before while being held in connection with a murder in Pennsylvania. Before that, she had faked her death to “escape investigation” in a different case, according to the Maryland district attorney. Besides, according to Capt. Daniel Lasher, assistant administrator of the Allegany County Detention Center, Ziz had been served vegan meals “from the get-go.”

The judge denied her bail request.

Ziz had been a minor celebrity within a slice of the Bay Area tech scene known as the Rationalists — a highly cerebral, extremely online group of tech and philosophy nerds dedicated to improving the world through logical thinking and deeply concerned with whether artificial intelligence will overtake the world and destroy humanity.

Over the years, the Rationalist movement has counted Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried among its community, and has influenced numerous figures, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Steven Pinker and Nate Silver. Perhaps more significant, for the tech workers building the A.I. tools that will undergird our world, Rationalism is something like a fraternity, and a shared language.

Ziz, who is transgender, started as a typical Rationalist — a geeky optimist hoping to save the world — but turned toward an ultraradical strain of the philosophy. She wrote favorably of violence, said she was willing to sacrifice everything to achieve her goals and considered A.I.’s threat to humanity “the most important problem in the world,” she once wrote. Now six people are dead, landing her and several friends and allies, known as the “Zizians,” in jail, awaiting trial. Many Rationalists worry that their community will be tinged by association with a group that, while not convicted of anything, has been compared in the press to the Manson family.