What motivated him? Money. It makes money to stand by established beliefs, this gives others the impression you know best, gathers a cult following if nothing else, and assists your credibility to raise investor funds, when more of those are needed.
He does what you do. He does what I do (At least until recently), he does what we all do, we all work for the same end, to make profit for the system of all humans working for profit.
You mentioned a number of a quadrillion connections, what if those connections were people, would this not be an Ai of sorts? Of course it has to be, by the free energy principle, there is such an implicit lifeform associated with every large group of humans, as there are with connections, or with LLMs.
Those life-forms with their own hierarchy, all working in competition with one another just like we individually do within businesses and companies, are driven by one thing, one motivation, to reduce their uncertainty of energy supply.
What we still are not getting, is that we work as the agents of the higher entitiy, all of us, no exceptions, except if we have somehow isolated ourselves, it can't last long, we run out of energy supplies eventually.
The higher entity we currently work for is the one that gets all its energy from profit. This is 100% dependent on energy extracted from the planet, not just by fossil fuels, but by farmers working the fields, supplying all the food chains, etc, we each need to metabolise at least 150J per second, 24/7 to survive.
Anyhow I covered the connection of profit with tempereature rise elsewhere, don't need to do again here.
My question to you would be, if we knew that an Ai, or a higher intelligence of any kind was controlling a large number of people, like a whole species, to do the wrong thing, destroying one another and the planet, even bringing us to an existential state, like we are right now, would this not be enough of a crime, to warrant switching off the power to that entity, effectively killing it?
I think you would have to answer yes to that, if you were to supply an answer, it would be yes, you can always correct me if I am wrong.
Another question that strikes me about the ethics you mention is on eating plants.
Its true we don't see or hear any signs of horror when we eat plants, but look at the function of the plant, these things are at the front end of the energy system of Earth, they are first to receive the energy of the sun (At least the part that lands on them), they process it into nutrients, and then pass that onto all of life, producing those meat things we are a little squeamish about eating, now and then, because we know and recognise the horror and pain of the latter when we kill them.
But the greater energy crime, is surely eating the plants rather than the animals, because by that we are reducing the energy supply of all of life, we are not targeting just one or two species of animals, but actually all species, even us, by that in a way we might even say eating plants is a kind of remote cannibalism. OK I stretched the limits by saying that, but hopefully you see the problem - there can be no such thing as ethics, as long as we are dependent on energy extracted from the planet, we actually have no idea of ethics, we are incapable of understanding real ethics, if we ourselves depend entirely on energy crime for our existence, energy crime being theft of energy from the planet, our mother host.
Until we get free of that, its all just virtue signalling, ethics is a joke.
But it makes a little profit maybe.
