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'Disconcerting . . . a disturbing and important book' NEW SCIENTIST
'Smart and wonderfully readable' NEW YORK TIMES
The bad science and sinister ideas behind Silicon Valley's foolish obsession with immortality, AI paradise and limitless growth.
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, scientist and writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow to reveal why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the truth is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience. And behind these fanciful visions of space colonies and digital immortality is a cynical power grab, at the expense of essential work spent on solving real problems like the climate crisis.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful myths that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
About the author
Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written for the New York Times, BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta and many other publications. His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was longlisted 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.
Report
An important book as well as a good one. A really significant contribution to our discussion of the future . . . 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
