More Everything Forever

AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

By: Adam Becker

Narrated by: Greg Tremblay

How Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems

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.

Critic reviews

"This is a really important contribution to our discussion of the future and what it might hold, and what we should be trying for now. Some of these current popular ideas about the future are foolish enough to distort our current reality, and they deserve to be revealed as such. Becker's book is very entertaining as it exposes how the emperor has no clothes."—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy

Insightful

Good information and insights, but he seemed to make the same points over and over.

Overall Great, but there is one core issue.

Adam Becker is largely on target, that billionaires are a core element to the "problem".

My core issue with the book is his attack on people migrating into space, he seems to have missed some key points as to why expanding our presence into space. He is correct that fixing problems here on earth is also an imperative, however no matter where one falls on the concept of nations, which nation you come from, etc, Space is the Ultimate High Ground, and the industrialization of space makes it nigh impossible, without radical changes in propulsion technology, such as FTL capable craft. If we want to put a hard stop on any idea that one nation would attempt Nuclear War, then that means having mobile space habitats, ore processing and mining operations in space.

It really would not matter who, or how many Nations are in space doing these things, any weapon launched at one of these space structures would be detected long before it ever neared it's target, and thus it could do any number of things to prevent itself from being hit due to the sheer volume of time it would take for such a weapon to get close. This could literally be just putting debris between the weapon, and the target, because at the speeds such a vehicle would be traveling, it could easily be destroyed by hitting a small piece of flack.

Why this matters, is because if you wanted to start a war with a fellow space power, and you intended to go Nuclear, you could never be sure that you could take out it's ability to respond in kind. So instead of a Nuclear Triad, you would have to add Quattuor or some other word resembling the number four to our vocabulary, and you could never stop them from lobbing rocks at you over, and over again from great distances. In space, anything mobile is indeed a weapons platform by it's very nature. I am not saying these things because I love the idea, only that it is a reality due to the speeds which you can get something moving in space.

This is something somewhat ironically that can really only ever be boot strapped by AI. Robotics+AI will give us the solar system. There is one thing that AI is really good at, and that is iterating on designs, using sparce data to guide a more resolved solution to problems, and rapidly iterate on that until it can do things that would take humans much much longer to do. So really, all one needs to start boot strapping the industrialization of space is an AI powered craft, a 3D printer that can use insitu resources to make anything from circuit boards in order to expand itself, and ultimately build the first basic refineries, lastly it needs to have a compact Nuclear Power source to keep itself running even far a way from the sun, or when it is in shadow.

This will not happen over night of course, it will likely take decades, even centuries, however eventually we will likely have the ability to leverage this to build O'Neil Cylinders and the like. Shielding people from the radiation of space would simply be a matter of storing the majority of the water supply that people would need to live and work in one between the ground that they walk on, and the outer shell. You could even use that water as a means of maintaining a perfect rotation should something occur to put an imbalance in the rotation of the structure by counterweighting should the center of gravity shift.

Utopia, while great if one ever develops, would never be the goal, nor would moving everyone off the Earth. However diversifying where we live should the worst ever happen, will always be a good idea. The sooner we start that process going, the better off we as a species will be.

Fantastic book

Killer research and take from an actual astrophysicist. Loved reading about the pseudoscience, ideologies and supervillain ambitions behind the tech bros.

Antidote to AI futurist dogma

A well organized scientific polemic against the belief that AI (with or without a singularity) and space colonization must dominate the future, and thereby the present.

JUST READ IT

This was a magnificent book that I think anyone with a remote interest in tech should read