More Everything Forever
AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
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発行者による作品情報
This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future
Names a Best Book of the Year by Science News • Conversation • Scientific American
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, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas 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.
