More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space, Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity / Adam Becker / 2025
As someone who is not in the sciences, I am grateful for Adam Becker’s at times painstaking breakdown of Silicon Valley's wildest claims about the future of Tech. Anyone who has spent time in this realm knows that there is a huge array of weirdos and weirder ideas, from the Zizians and their absurdly reductionist radical utilitarian ethics to Elon Musk and his foolish ambitions to go to space. Becker takes the time to point out the flawed science and contorted logic of tech elites, heralding the coming of the singularity, attempting to conquer mortality, as well as colonize Mars. Tech elites present these pitches to politicians, business elites, and the public as arms races necessary to solve the world’s greatest struggles, from climate change to pestilence. More Everything Forever sometimes suffers from taking the ideas too seriously and being so totalizing in its criticism of these tech elites. Many are simple charlatans, and there’s something particularly grating about dealing with an effective altruist’s particular brand of bizarre thought experiments. Becker focuses too much of his attention taking their arguments in good faith, in my opinion, and fails to account for their political craft, that is, how they are accumulating power and manufacturing consent for projects that will build the surveillance state, enrich their coffers, and impose their will on humanity. Instead, Becker ends with a very weak romantic nod to leverage our resources to implement progressive socialist policies. What an excellent desire and what a feeble follow-through in terms of a plan. In doing so, Becker falls into a classic liberal trap: assuming the worst of the capitalist class can be reasoned with and not making adequate plans to take power away from these men hellbent on destroying the planet in the name of their own egos. 3.5/5