Mission critical: Expert eye on frightening fallacies and fantasies behind tech titans' AI visions
Adam Becker's More Everything Forever is a must-read if you want to understand the dangerous new world we find ourselves in. Photo / Getty Images
Billionaire pseudo-libertarian tech-bros with their utopian fever dreams terrify me. They clearly read a lot of William Gibson and Nietzsche while getting the wrong end of the stick. The likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman labour under the delusion that some lucky investments in other people's ideas make them natural Übermenschen to 'benignly' micromanage the destiny of humanity.
American author, science philosopher and trained astrophysicist Adam Becker, in his compulsive, brilliantly written book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, comes at the subject with the exasperated contempt it deserves. Think of it as Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley. Becker digs into these fanboy fantasias of the future and squashes the plausibility of most of the 'science'.
It helps that Becker moves in the same elevated circle of intellectuals and consultants, and speaks with first-hand understanding. Rather than presenting real science, it's a toxic red-blooded protein shake of authoritarian ambition, Spenglerian pseudoscience, eugenics, back-of-the-envelope futurism and raging megalomaniacal narcissism. What's more, it's a cynical distraction from genuine issues like the climate crisis and social inequality.
Usefully, Becker breaks the bilge down into the key ideas and players into digestible slices before demolishing them. For example, a central concept to the mindset (or snow job) is a philosophical argument called 'effective altruism'. On one level it sounds thoroughly anodyne – the evidence-based maximising of limited resources for the greater good. That's all fine and dandy until it gets into its logical cups and heads into 'useless eaters' territory and obsessing about demographic IQ scores.
This dangerously unempathetic, utilitarian take on ethics underpins much of the tech-broligarchy's thinking, but paradoxically, it seems to co-exist with the notion that an infinitely expanding post-scarcity society is just around the corner. The tech-broligarchs, like Lewis Carroll's White Queen, believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Often what it renders down to is highly privileged, poorly socialised, rather immature individuals from engineering backgrounds blundering with a utilitarian hammer into other specialities from biology to the humanities, each with their own subtleties and nuances, and just seeing fields of nails.
However, a lot of what these would-be messiahs are pushing is just not scientifically feasible in the near future or even as a pipe dream. Becker is very good at pouring cold water on favourite hobby-horses such as AI singularity – the point where AI surpasses human intelligence and controls its own technological advance. Futurist Ray Kurzweil's mind-uploads-to-computers nonsense is similarly debunked (too fundamentally different and incompatible), along with spreading out into the universe to infinity and beyond (not enough energy and too far away). The numbers never add up.
Think about it. Musk wants to colonise Mars in a decade, but we still have no feasible way of shielding against the radiation, there's no industrial base there to keep the whole thing functioning, and we don't even know if human beings can survive long term at about a third of Earth's gravity.
Yet Musk, typical of the movement, gives the impression it's just a matter of Schopenhauerian willpower and throwing enough government subsidies at it.
It's never entirely clear how seriously the tech bros actually take these fancies, or whether it's just window dressing for something more concrete: political control. Becker is forensic in dissecting the putsch for power, all the more impressive given the bulk of the book must have been completed before it became crystal clear Trump was a sort of Trojan donkey for these people.
So no, we aren't all going to be golden immortal cyborg demigods colonising the stars with our perfect AI husbandos and waifus. It's not going to be Star Trek. It's not even going to be like Ben Elton's 1989 satire Stark, in which a bunch of billionaires decide to tank planet Earth and escape to the moon.
If you found Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires as morbidly fascinating as I did, More Everything Forever is a thoroughly worthy companion volume. It will leave you wishing they'd all get on Elon's rocket to Mars, while also wondering who will scrub the gold toilets for them when the robots rebel. It's a must-read if you want to understand the dangerous new world we find ourselves in.
'The futures of technological salvation,' says Becker, 'are sterile impossibilities, and they would be brutally destructive if they did come to pass. The cosmos is more than a giant well of resources, and humans are more than siphons sucking it dry. But I can't offer a specific future as an alternative. What I can tell you is that anyone who claims to know the one inevitable future, or the one good path for humanity, is someone who deserves your deepest scepticism.'
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, by Adam Becker (Hachette, $39.99), is out now.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Space discoveries to be shared
Stargazing dreams first kindled in childhood will soon be shared in Dunedin. American astrophysicist and former Nasa communicator Dr Michelle Thaller arrives this month as the special guest of the New Zealand International Science Festival, which opens on June 28. During a series of talks she will share nearly three decades of space discoveries, ranging from neutron stars to tantalising hints of possible life on other planets. Dr Thaller's career began with the pioneering infrared Spitzer Space Telescope at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We had never had a telescope that looked at the universe quite that way before," Dr Thaller said. "It was literally a new set of eyes, we were detecting light and creating images, we just never had seen anything like it." Stars form inside vast clouds of gas and dust that block light, so it was previously impossible to see within them. By tracing heat rather than visible light, the observatory peered inside and caught the moment new solar systems formed. "It is just incredible to see these discoveries coming in, your jaw drops every time." She later served as assistant director of science, for communication, at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, a role that involved translating findings such as neutron stars, the collapsed remnants of giant stars. "They are only about 30km across, they are tiny little things but they have about the mass of two times the sun." Despite scientists studying thousands of these "monsters", it is still not fully understood how they work because there is no physics to describe such mass packed into so small a volume; ordinary atoms could not withstand those conditions. "That is so much gravity in so small a place that it actually bends space and time and when you look at a neutron star, you can see the back of it as well as the front of it because light is actually bending around." "There is so much gravity and so much mass there it is actually warping space and time so that light travels from the back side towards you as well." The discovery that had eluded her during nearly 30 years at Nasa was solid scientific evidence of life beyond Earth. "With our Mars rovers we have seen some chemical signals that could be life, but we are not sure, there is no smoking gun." There have been close calls, such as a planet about 100 light-years away observed with the new James Webb Space Telescope. "There was this tiny little signal that actually got stronger over time that we thought could be what we would call a biosignature, something that is only produced by biology." However, recent analysis has suggested it may be something else. "It was definitely an organic molecule, definitely a carbon-based molecule, the kind that is our chemistry. "But we had to sort of slow our hopes down a little bit, it wasn't quite ready yet." Festival New Zealand International Science Festival June 28 — July 6 Visit for details
NZ Herald
15-06-2025
- NZ Herald
Opinion: NZ has a vast sea territory but lags behind other nations in protecting the ocean
Only 0.4% of New Zealand's marine territory is fully protected. Photo / Getty Images THE FACTS For the past fortnight, the city of Nice in France has been the global epicentre of ocean science and politics. Last week's One Ocean Science Congress ended with a unanimous call for action to turn around the degradation of the ocean. And this week, the United Nation's Ocean
Scoop
13-06-2025
- Scoop
How Current Affairs Podcasts Are Filling The Cracks In Mainstream News Reporting
According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans used social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X as news sources in 2024 despite the reported proliferation of misinformation and voter manipulation on these online sites. Meanwhile, another 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 63 percent of American teenagers got their news from TikTok. The study also stated that in four years, the percentage of adults who regularly turned to TikTok for news increased by five times. 'With its short-form video content, TikTok provides the ideal platform for both misinformation and disinformation to pass as credible, in part because content creators' popularity may be misinterpreted as expertise, even where it doesn't exist,' a 2023 blog from Capital Technology University's website stated. In a 2024 article that documented waning public interest in cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC, the libertarian magazine Reason noted that podcasts 'have gone the opposite direction' from short-form information blasts on platforms like TikTok and YouTube by offering 'lengthy, discursive interviews that let subjects speak uninterrupted for minutes at a time and conversations that flow more naturally—a near-impossibility in the tightly paced, commercial-bounded programming blocks of cable news programming.' Podcasts are increasingly becoming popular among Americans, with 'Comedy, entertainment, and politics… [being] at the top of the list of topics that podcast listeners say they regularly listen to,' according to a 2023 report by the Pew Research Center. The report further points out that those who turn to podcasts for news see them as more trusted sources than other platforms. 'You can't get into a topic and cover it in five minutes,' notes Deborah 'Arnie' Arnesen, the host of the public affairs podcast 'The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen.' She observes that podcasts allow deeper dives in a single episode and enable reporters to devote multiple episodes to one issue. 'Some things need to be repeated, looked at from different angles, and have different voices describing the same topic, because with each voice, you learn something more,' she says. 'It's that liberation, easy availability, and the license to drill down and realise that I can't just talk about this once and move on to a different topic, because this topic is like a hydra. It has so many heads. I think that is what is so exciting about [podcasts]: There are no parameters to what you do. The only parameters are whether people listen.' Public affairs podcasts like 'Worldly,' 'Intercepted,' and 'The Rest Is Politics' often explore single topics across numerous episodes, while 'The Daily,' 'Today in Focus,' and 'Today, Explained' do this more occasionally, concentrating mainly on the important news of the day. 'The Rest Is Politics' 'looks to debate in a civilised way, creating a bridge between the 'political divide' of [Britain's] Labour and Conservative [parties] so that meaningful conversations can be had about events of the week,' according to a 2022 article in the Oxford University newspaper, the Oxford Blue. Arnesen, whom New Hampshire Business Review in 2003 called 'a female liberal gadfly in a field dominated by such conservative male voices as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Michael Savage,' notes that current affairs podcasts can help listeners of differing political ideologies see eye to eye. For example, she says, 'No one is going to escape [Donald Trump's] chaos, his hurt, and the economic implosion [that his administration causes]. If someone isn't always politically aligned with you, but their hurt is the same, you can say, 'You should listen to this [podcast or radio show]. It might help you to understand why your family or community is suffering, why that job hasn't shown up, [or] why you can't access your social security.'' In contrast to left-leaning podcasts like 'Democracy Now!,' 'Pod Save America,' and 'The Ezra Klein Show,' programs like 'Left, Right & Center' and 'Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar' present both left- and right-wing perspectives on public affairs. Arnesen feels that being exposed to diverse perspectives can help make us less 'cemented into our silos. I replaced Rush Limbaugh on five radio stations many, many years ago. You know what I learned from Rush? He never lied. He just cherry-picked and left out critical facts. I would say to my audience, 'Understand that's another reason for you to listen to [divergent viewpoints]. We all put everything through our lens, and our lens will only look at certain things. That doesn't mean we're lying to you, but it means that we might be missing something because we didn't look to the left or the right.'' She adds that podcasts complement traditional news outlets rather than replace them. 'This is synergistic,' she says. 'I just want to make sure you hear different voices coming from a different range of perspectives, because you never know when it will hit.' Arnesen describes podcasts as 'the interstices between the cracks. I see the mainstream media as bricks in a wall, but bricks can't be held together without cement. In a lot of ways, podcasts are that cement. They are what ultimately will hold us together because they're more liberated, can take more time, and can invest in what we need to know. The bricks can't, but [podcasts] can.' Author Bio: Damon Orion is a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and teacher in Santa Cruz, California. His work has appeared in Revolver, Guitar World, Spirituality + Health, Classic Rock, and other publications. Read more of his work at
