Adam Becker (Basic Books On sale 22 April (US); 8 May (UK))
With Elon Musk and his minions stomping through Washington government offices like Godzilla in Tokyo, and other tech multi-billionaires having gained US President Donald Trump’s ear, the super-rich are getting super-scary.
Science writer Adam Becker shares his disconcerting analysis in More Everything Forever: AI overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley’s crusade to control the fate of humanity. He finds would-be rulers of the universe with egos the size of planets and impossible, science-fictional dreams of endless growth at infinite speed across the universe.
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Sometimes even scientifically trained fans of such dreams can take the science in sci-fi too seriously. Take physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. Soon after the Apollo moon landings, he detailed plans to expand into space by building giant cylindrical habitats to house a million people in stable Earth orbit near the moon. The book containing this vision, The High Frontier, inspired young space enthusiasts – including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
O’Neill’s plan had some big flaws. The technology was far beyond even today’s NASA, and long-term exposure to space radiation outside Earth’s protective magnetic field would have been lethal to humans and electronics.
Today, such space plans look less improbable. But other tech-fuelled dreams have developed alongside them. The technology advances of recent years have fed a stock market boom and given Silicon Valley huge political as well as economic clout.
Becker is rightly wary of vocal advocates of artificial intelligence, particularly Sam Altman. As CEO of OpenAI, he launched and leapt into the multi-billionaire club. Becker quotes him as saying “this technological revolution is unstoppable”, and that he sees AI as taking over all services and manufacturing.
Altman is all over the map. On one page, he sounds like a libertarian, welcoming an AI conquest of the economy as something that will make us all rich and happy. On another, he’s cautious, warning we will need a strong government to protect “the environment, human rights, etc”.
For the tech billionaires, Becker writes, “the future is straight out of science fiction: people’s minds uploaded into computers to live for eternity in a silicon paradise, watched over benevolently by godlike AI; a ceaselessly expanding empire spanning the stars, disassembling planets, and consuming galaxies”.
Tech advances have fed a stock market boom, and given Silicon Valley huge political as well as economic clout
Their dreams reflect all this, with Bezos wanting a trillion people living in space “to enable a future of perpetual growth, lest we ‘stagnate’ here on Earth”, and software engineer turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen keen to see an eternally triumphal “techno-capital machine” to conquer the cosmos with AI and the power of entrepreneurship.
It is almost enough to make Musk’s obsession with colonising Mars to save humanity from extinction seem like a cautious exercise, until you read Becker cite Musk on X arguing that the “true battle is: Extinctionists who want a holocaust for all of humanity versus Expansionists who want to reach the stars and Understand the Universe”.
The philosophers and ethicists who act as soothsayers for the tech bros can have even more bizarre ideas. Some advocate “effective altruism”, which involves making lots of money to donate to charity (the idea behind Bankman-Fried’s creation and looting of a cryptocurrency exchange that got him 25 years in prison).
In Becker’s estimation, William MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University and a co-founder of the effective altruism and “longtermism” philosophies, seems to believe that the best thing we can do for future humanity is to fill the universe with as many people as possible.
More Everything Forever is a disturbing and important book. Becker’s most chilling message for me is that the tech billionaires don’t understand one key fact: what’s inside the singularity they dream of is a black hole. To put it simply, the world is going to become unfathomable and incomprehensibly dangerous. And they just don’t get it.
Jeff Hecht is a writer based in Auburndale, Massachusetts
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