by David Kordahl
Adam Becker alleges that tech intellectuals overstate their cases while flirting with fascism, but offers no replacement for techno-utopianism.
People, as we all know firsthand, are not perfectly rational. Our beliefs are contradictory and uncertain. One might charitably conclude that we “contain multitudes”—or, less charitably, that we are often just confused.
That said, our contradictory beliefs sometimes follow their own obscure logic. In Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Michael Shermer discusses individuals who claim, in surveys, to believe both that Jeffery Epstein was murdered, and that Jeffery Epstein is still alive. Both claims cannot be true, but each may function, for the believer, less as independent assertions, and more as paired reflections of the broader conviction that Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself. Shermer has called this attitude “proxy conspiracism.” He writes, “Many specific conspiracy theories may be seen as standing in for what the believer imagines to be a deeper, mythic truth about the world that accords with his or her psychological state and personal experience.”
Adam Becker’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, criticizes strange beliefs that have been supported by powerful tech leaders. As a reader of 3 Quarks Daily, there’s a good chance that you have encountered many of these ideas, from effective altruism and longtermism to the “doomer” fears that artificial super-intelligences will wipe out humankind. Becker—a Ph.D. astrophysicist-turned-journalist, whose last book, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, mined the quantum revolution as a source of social comedy—spends some of his new book tracing the paths of influence in the Silicon Valley social scene, but much more of it is spent pummeling the confusions of the self-identified rationalists who advocate positions he finds at once appalling and silly.
This makes for a tonally lumpy book, though not a boring one. Yet the question I kept returning to as I read More Everything Forever was whether these confusions are the genuine beliefs of the tech evangelists, or something more like their proxy beliefs. Their proponents claim these ideas should be taken literally, but they often seem like stand-ins for a vaguer hope. As Becker memorably puts it, “The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever.”
As eventually becomes clear, Becker thinks this is a dangerous fantasy. But given that some people—including this reviewer—still vaguely hold onto this dream, we might ponder which parts of it are still useful. Read more »