The Emperors’ New Clothes

A review of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, by Adam Becker

For several decades, amorphous groups of self-appointed visionaries have been trying not just to imagine the future, but to create it. Many of them work (or invest) in high tech – digital innovations, AI, space-faring, biotech. Silicon Valley is now more of a state of mind than a geographic location or a particular industry. Some of these techno-futurists end up as convicted criminals, some are credentialed intellectuals, and some of them may even look on Elon Musk as a role model. 

More Everything Forever is much more than a survey of the current state of play in this future game. Author Adam Becker has a PhD in astrophysics as well as being a credentialed science journalist. He writes clear explanatory prose. Half-way through the book he takes Musk’s scientifically ridiculous claims about colonizing Mars to pieces, over some 20 pages. Then he disposes of the similar fantasies espoused by Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen, whose writings lean heavily on the early-20th-century Italian fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

As I read the book, I was a little baffled by its structure. It jumps back and forth in time and in technological development. The Introduction focuses on AI and Sam Altman’s unlikely dreams of total control. Chapter One demolishes the “effective altruism” (EA) and “longtermism” of Will MacAskill and other self-designated philosophers. EA did in fact lead directly to the scam that put Sam Bankman-Fried in jail for over 20 years. From EA, Becker leads us to Ray Kurzweil and his concept of the Singularity, while also discussing Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and eventually listing the reasons Google fired Timnit Gebru. And much more. There is a good index and this will be a useful reference work for quite some time.

Techno-eugenics – the term coined by founding CGS executive director Richard Hayes to describe the advocacy of reproductive and genetic technologies to enhance human characteristics and capacities – is unfortunately not adequately covered. Becker does include specific criticisms of eugenic attitudes and of what one researcher called “the normalization of sexual abuse toward women” (p. 141) in EA circles. And he appropriately focuses on Andreessen, whom More Everything Forever mentions at least 15 times, for his belief in “ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness—strength” and goal of becoming “masters of technology” and thus “supermen.” (It’s worth noting that Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” contains no mention of women at all.) Becker also points out Musk’s claims that space colonization (sic!) offers “hope for so many people,” so his crews must include women, if only as breeders. Musk is notoriously having many children, saying “civilization is at risk if we don’t start making more babies, and fast!”

But Becker doesn’t demonstrate how the logic of these men and others like them leads pretty directly to their investment in and promotion of transhumanist reproductive technologies. There is already a very clear eugenic approach to the modern fertility industry’s sales pitch. Pick the best baby from your embryos! Soon, perhaps, edit the chosen embryo(s) to match your personal goals. And if only wealthy people could use these procedures, well … aren’t they the ones we need to breed?

By the end of the book, Becker explicitly calls for curtailing the power of the rich:

[C]oncentrated wealth has eroded democracy in the United States and around the world. Peter Thiel has aided that erosion with his support of Trump and other far-right politicians. The antidemocratic ambitions of tech billionaires extend through Sam Altman’s power fantasy of his own ascension to king of the world straight to the permanent galactic fascism of Marc Andreessen. …

We must remember that, in truth, their visions aren’t inevitable – they’re all but impossible. There are other tomorrows, lush and desolate, gorgeous and harrowing, all at hand if we wish. The future is open.

More Everything Forever deserves a wide audience. It may be incomplete, even at almost 400 pages, but it is well written, well produced, and important. As the title of this review suggests, Adam Becker is like a well-educated, grown-up version of the truth-telling boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale. The self-appointed guardians of the species wrap themselves in what they think is a cloak of power but it’s not that hard to see right through it.