Review: “More Everything Forever”
A new book is required ready if you're worried about AI, tech overlords, and BS
Adam Becker’s new book — More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity — is excellent and important.
Let’s just get that out of the way first, no dilly-dallying.
If you listen to our podcast, you may have heard us discussing this book last week.
Kara Swisher interviewed Becker on her “On” pod, and boy was it a relief to hear someone knowledgeable explore some of the same weird terrain we found ourselves in toward the end of our book. We felt what we’d come across was accurate and true, but we also hadn’t heard many people talking about it, so Becker has validated that part of our book, much to our relief.
To boil it down, Becker tells the story of a Silicon Valley cult built around a science fiction story filled with sophistry, superficial pseudo-science, entitlement, big egos, greed, eugenics, bigotry, a lust for power, and a fear of death. It adopts various names — the Singularity, effective altruism, long-termism, AGI, and more — but everything revolves around a quasi-religious belief that computer science can create an all-encompassing entity capable of saving mostly white, mostly male humanity from itself.
- Maybe this is why OA has always had religious overtones — because it is an offshoot of a larger techno-religious movement.
Becker revels in setting them up and knocking them down, describing in engaging but non-critical prose various characters, pseudo-scientific beliefs, and philosophical meanderings before turning on a dime to gently explain why these people who believe they are so smart are actually terribly misinformed, ill-educated, unscientific, and muddled in their reasoning.