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.
