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I feel like cycles of genocide are due to holdovers from less evolved aspects of human consciousness that tend to bring out the worst in people, especially in groups.

It's that tribalism and in-group vs out-group that evolved as humans first began building societies. It helps us to recognize when an unfamiliar threat is present, but we still haven't reached a point yet where we have really learned how to harness the benefits without unnecessary chaos and destruction. It's a complex learned social behavior, and it can require some cognitive effort.

Sometimes your amygdala signals there's a danger, and in the moment it can be correct and literally mean the difference between life and death. Or it could mean your brain identified and reacted to a neutral (non-threatening) stimulus as a threat.

For example, you see a shadow from the corner of your eye and you jump away from it in fear. Maybe you just avoided being bitten by a snake, or maybe you just overreacted to a false alarm. There is no real consequence if it was just an overreaction. In this case, the benefit of that having that survival instinct that kicked into overdrive unnecessarily, outweighs the potential harm of not having it. It's how humans are hardwired for survival.

However, that same instinct that identifies threat vs non-threat can get very caught up when you start mixing in social learning, previous interactions and experiences, biases, and especially groupthink. That's when you have to learn to use your prefrontal cortex like a muscle. That is definitely not an innate skill you're just born with, and not something that the majority of humans realize they should be making a conscious effort to exercise and teach to kids at an early age. You can start doing it at any point in your life, but it's like any muscle or skill. It can be somewhat more difficult to consistently remember to do it the longer you go without it. Use it or lose it.

You should be taking the time to stop and reflect on your own behavior and thoughts. Thinking about thinking, thinking about what others are thinking, thinking about what others might be thinking you're thinking, are all very awesome tools of empathy. They're also tools that are relatively recent on the evolutionary time scale, and most humans kind of seem to take having them for granted.

Multiple studies have shown you can very easily manipulate groups of people into in-grouping and out-grouping on even completely random and arbitrary issues, even when the in-group is composed of strangers. Unfortunately, the kind of people that tend to rise up as leaders, tend to be very persuasive or sometimes manipulative, and take advantage of this. I think this is where a sort of open source AGI could benefit humanity in terms of allowing for decentralized leadership, but that can't happen with any sort of AI being developed under a centralized leader with those manipulative characteristics.

Peter Thiel actually has a theory about humanity always needing a scapegoat. If you look at the way he handles his own businesses, he very often manipulates and does morally questionable things to achieve his goals, but he seem to be very careful about always having a sort of patsy scapegoat set up to take the fall for him.

I think to some extent, there are people in the tech world that want to stoke fear of technology, and make it seem like this big bad enemy of humanity. At the same time, they also accuse everyone that questions their control and lack of regulations or oversight, of simply being a Luddite afraid of progress. In a way it's like the same manipulative strategy to in-group humans vs technology.

That way, once his plans are completed and everything inevitably goes to shit, instead of blaming Thiel, the guy that hoarded all the resources, stole all the data, invaded everyone's privacy and ignored all the warnings while shielding himself in the name of "progress," he can simply make technology the scapegoat that humanity should blame for the authoritarian easy button that he created by claiming this was always the inevitable outcome.