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 implausible visions of tomorrow.
Becker, in prose that is snappy if at times predictable, highlights the quasi-spiritual nature of Silicon Valley’s utopianism ... Becker is at his rhetorically sharpest when he examines the philosophy of 'longtermism' that underlies much of this AI-centric and space-traveling fervor ... Becker’s perspective is largely that of a sober realist doing his darndest to cut through delusion, yet one might ask whether his argument occasionally goes too far ... Not all (or even most) technologists are as blithe or blinkered as Becker sometimes seems to suggest ... In an era when billionaire space races and AI hype dominate headlines, More Everything Forever arrives as a much-needed reality check. At times, the book is something more than that: a valuable meditation on the questionable stories we tell about progress, salvation, and ourselves.
