More Everything Forever
AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
Pre-release: Expected April 22, 2025
0 of 2 copies available
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.
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- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from March 1, 2025
A skeptical view of grand predictions. Artificial general intelligence, colonizing Mars, living in a simulation, and immortality are rigorously investigated in this timely and thoughtful book. Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, takes a wild ride through speculative technologies and assesses their merit, using real science--testing claims mathematically, scientifically, and through interviews with experts. He concludes that many are neither feasible nor desirable, and some are downright bizarre. For example, he writes, "It's effectively impossible to put a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars....The radiation levels are too high, the gravity is too low, there's no air, and the dirt is made of poison. There are many other problems with this idea, and it's one of the simpler ones involved in these visions of the future." What's striking when reading Becker's work is why there isn't more skepticism. According to Becker, it's because the tech industry is operating under a wave of groupthink, promoting ideas associated with transhumanism, effective altruism, long-termism, extropianism, rationalism, and the singularity. Together, they make up what Becker calls "the ideology of technological salvation," a worldview "held by many venture capitalists, executives, and other 'thought leaders' within the tech industry" that emphasizes technological progress above all else. Becker traces the origins of this ideology to science fiction, including its early racist and authoritarian undertones, and exposes a lack of empathy and ability to deal with reality. He writes: "For a strong longtermist, investing in a Silicon Valley AI company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics." The book looks at many of the think tanks, nonprofits, and other institutions promoting these ideas as inevitable. Yet, Becker writes, "this future (or set of futures) doesn't work." An important and sober investigation of Silicon Valley's boldest claims about the future.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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