More Everything Forever - by Adam Becker (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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 [this book], science writer Adam Becker investigates [what he sees as] 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 [Becker believes that] the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience"--

Book Synopsis

This "wild and utterly engaging narrative" (Melanie Mitchell) 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

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.

Review Quotes

"A clear-eyed assessment of today's prophets." --Boston Globe

"A compelling survey of the ideas espoused by a band of futurist thinkers who have championed -- and profited from -- a boundless faith in the power of artificial intelligence...Engaging with these tech-infused visions is necessary because they are starting to affect how society is governed." --Nature

"Smart and wonderfully readable... Amid [Becker's] sharp criticisms of the tech figures he writes about is a resolute call for compassion. He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us." --New York Times

"An urgent call to deflate the world-shaping power of tech billionaires....Becker articulates a timely and informed wake-up call....His vehement critique is fundamental to diminishing their power."--Science

"Disconcerting....More Everything Forever is a disturbing and important book."--New Scientist

"A deeply researched and engaging narrative" --Science News

"In More Everything Forever, Adam Becker surveys the grand ambitions of our technological elite--their messianic faith in AI, their imperialist yearnings for space, their moral gymnastics in the name of humanity's unborn trillions--with the sharp eye of someone watching a high-stakes magic trick where the rabbit never actually appears....This is the quiet devastation at the heart of More Everything Forever: the realization that these grand techno-utopian visions, rather than democratizing the future, consolidate control over it." --Worth Magazine

"[Becker's] 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." --Publishers Weekly

"More Everything Forever is a gripping book about the unlikely yet very real nexus of tech tycoons, eccentric philosophers, and grandiose futurists. Becker combines masterful storytelling and lucid exposition to lay out what's at stake for the future of technology and, more importantly, humanity."--Arvind Narayanan, computer scientist and co-author of AI Snake Oil

"I love this book. We are sitting astride an inflection point. The world as we know it or think we know it is rapidly vanishing, replaced by something... Well, we're really not sure what. It used to be that we could point to an Orwellian future where 2 + 2 = 5 and so on and so forth. Perhaps disturbing but still understandable. But nowhere in this can of worms is there a vision of the subjugation of everything to a dystopia of machines. As Adam Becker reports, we will all bow down before the specter of advanced technology, before the onrushing oligarchy. The only remaining question: will it be an oligarchy of advanced devices or just nasty, self-serving, delusional billionaires equipped with advanced iPhones? Becker has become our greatest prophet of doom."--Errol Morris, documentary filmmaker and author of The Ashtray

"Our world has fallen into the clutches of billionaires who mistake dystopian science fiction stories for suggestions, rather than warnings. Speaking in my capacity as a dystopian science fiction writer, I can confirm that this isn't merely very stupid, it's also very, very bad."--Cory Doctorow, author of Red Team Blues and Little Brother

"Adam Becker's More Everything Forever dismantles the toxic techno-optimism endemic in Silicon Valley and outlines why the most pressing problems society faces can't be solved with technology alone. The book is a must-read for understanding why the visions of the future promoted by today's techno oligarchs are built on pseudoscience and far-fetched fantasies mixed with racism, eugenics, and colonialism. Becker argues that focusing on invented future problems that may or may not ever come to pass gives techno-optimists license to neglect urgent and real problems like global warming and income inequality that are threatening humanity in the here and now. More Everything Forever feels particularly urgent and timely as billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos vie for political power."--Christie Aschwanden, author of Good to Go

"This is an important book as well as a good one. More Everything Forever is a really significant contribution to our discussion of the future and what it might hold, and what we should be trying for now. Some of these 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 Ministry for the Future

"With a wild and utterly engaging narrative, Adam Becker gives us a refreshing reality check on the fantasies of billionaires, futurists, and utilitarian philosophers who are plotting to 'optimize' the future of humanity. A fascinating exposé of the extreme techno-solutionism promoted by the most powerful and influential technocrats of our era."--Melanie Mitchell, computer scientist and author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

"Timely and thoughtful... Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, takes a wild ride through speculative technologies and assesses their merit, using real science... An important and sober investigation of Silicon Valley's boldest claims about the future."--Kirkus (**Starred Review**)

About the Author

Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and other publications. His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was long-listed for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award. He has been a science journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and a science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He lives in California.