More Everything Forever
AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
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Beschreibung des Verlags
'Book of the Year' as chosen by The Conversation
'Disconcerting . . . a disturbing and important book' NEW SCIENTIST
'Smart and wonderfully readable' NEW YORK TIMES
The bad science and sinister ideas behind Silicon Valley's foolish obsession with immortality, AI paradise and limitless growth.
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.
In More Everything Forever, scientist and writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow to reveal why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the truth is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience. And behind these fanciful visions of space colonies and digital immortality is a cynical power grab, at the expense of essential work spent on solving real problems like the climate crisis.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful myths that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this biting study, science journalist Becker (What Is Real?) surveys the dubious ethics and questionable science underlying tech entrepreneurs' visions for the future. Pushing back against Elon Musk's aspiration to "save humanity" by colonizing Mars, Becker argues that the many technological challenges involved (overcoming the extreme cold, long-term effects of low gravity, and lack of oxygen and water) mean that fixing Earth is always going to be the better option. Talk of colonization, he suggests, primarily serves to obscure the need to lower carbon emissions. Becker posits that "longtermism"—an outlook espoused by crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, among others—lends an unearned moral veneer to lucrative tech ventures by suggesting that funding, say, a space propulsion think tank is a better use of money than donating to philanthropic ventures because that technology will allegedly improve more lives among future populations than there exist people today. Other technological moonshots are downright fanciful, Becker contends, discussing how computer scientist Ray Kurzweil's prediction that human consciousness will be recreated digitally by 2045 relies on a specious understanding of exponential progress and his own boundless faith in scientific progress. The penetrating critiques expose the self-serving narratives that prop up tech billionaires' quest for ever more wealth. It's a searing takedown of the Silicon Valley set. Photos.
