On “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity”, by Adam Becker.
“More Everything Forever” is well-written, scientifically authoritative, and quite fair to the protagonists, who get plenty of space to speak for themselves. But it’s decisive and convincing in its conclusions: some of the richest and most influential men in the world are motivated by a set of beliefs that are frankly unhinged – and it’s on the basis of these beliefs that resources on a huge scale are currently being allocated.
In 2005, I was invited to a “Foresight Vision Weekend” in San Francisco, to talk about my view that nanotechnology should be more like biology, rather than the mechanical engineering-inspired vision of Eric Drexler. There, I met some of the luminaries of transhumanism – Eric Drexler, Aubrey de Grey, Josh Hall, Ralph Merkle – but despite the general cordiality of my reception, it was uncomfortable to be amongst a large congregation whose belief system I didn’t share. The prevailing view was very much that a brisk engineering approach would soon lead, via Drexlerian nanotechnology, to a world of extraordinary material abundance, in which disease and old age would have been eliminated, and humanity would have merged with, or been surpassed by, intelligent machines. Accelerating technological change was about to change everything – “The Singularity was Near”, to quote the title of an influential and best-selling book by Ray Kurzweil. What struck me was the range of participants at the meeting – some were the kind of enthusiasts that some at the time dismissed as “bloggers in their mothers’ basements”, but amongst them were dot com millionaires, senior figures from the military-industrial complex, and the odd congressman.
It’s this world, 20 years on, that Becker describes. The world he describes is now more influential and politically dominant than I could ever have imagined. Where in 2005, there were dot com millionaires, now there are individuals commanding hundreds of billions of dollars, directly influencing the most powerful government in the world, and where in 2005 there were congressmen, now there is a Vice-President. The “Silicon Valley worldview” is approaching hegemonic status amongst the people who matter … or think they ought to be the only people who matter. And the Singularity remains at the centre of this world view – what Becker calls “the ideology of technological salvation”.
This ideology comes with variations, but all of them have in common three principles. They assume that all human problems can be reduced to problems of technology, and that solving those technological problems will be immensely profitable. But profit is not enough – an important feature of these worldviews is that they offer their adepts transcendence through technology, allowing them to break through human limitations like ageing and death [1].
The bloggers of the 2000’s built communities – around sites like Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, and Slate Star Codex – based on this nascent ideology of technological salvation. These created a movement of “Rationalists”, which began to explore some of the potential dark sides of the notion of a Singularity. But, in a pattern already identified by the philosopher Alfred Nordmann [2], scenarios of extreme and futuristic outcomes displace from current consideration real world problems that new technologies are starting to pose.
Associated with these communities emerged a fantasy utilitarianism, which contrives to argue that current issues – like climate change and the threat of nuclear war – are second order problems compared with the need to ensure the welfare of generations in centuries to come, through building the Singularity. Conveniently, this view also recommends that you, if you share this commitment to technological salvation, should do your best to become rich. Convicted billion-dollar fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was one of those who took this advice too seriously.
What does the transhumanist futurism of 2005 look like today? I think it’s fair to say that there has been close to zero progress towards the Drexlerian version of nanotechnology. The more biologically inspired version of nanotechnology that I was arguing for didn’t produce a Singularity, but it did deliver a covid vaccine [3]. Proponents of the Drexler vision, like Josh Hall, still maintain that no-one has proved the detailed conceptual blueprints provided by Drexler in his technical book “Nanosystems” to be impossible or unachievable, and that the lack of progress has been due to a conspiracy by the scientific establishment. I’ll return to the latter point later. On the achievability of the mechanical approach to nanotechnology, one should always be wary of saying anything is impossible if it’s not absolutely prohibited by scientific laws (e.g. the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which prohibits perpetual motion machines). But I outlined some of the formidable scientific and technical obstacles in my piece “Six Challenges for Molecular Nanotechnology”, and I don’t see a lot of progress in overcoming them since then.
Throughout all the rationality, Becker comes back to identify a very old fashioned motivation for the ideology of technological salvation – fear of death. Becker quotes the futurist Ray Kurzweil as saying that anyone living to 2029 will have the opportunity to live another 500 years – they’ll have reached “longevity escape velocity” – with every year one lives beyond that, nanomedicine will have extended life expectancy by more than one year. This is something Aubrey de Grey was talking about back in 2005, but I don’t think the record since then is encouraging.
According to the World Health Authority, US life expectancy at birth is actually worse now than it was in 2005; after a few decades of steady rises, it levelled off, reaching a maximum of 76.7 in 2014. The covid pandemic was clearly a huge perturbation, but perhaps a more worrying issue for the anxious ageing Silicon Valley oligarch is the continuing lack of progress in finding any kind of cure for the neurodegenerative diseases of old age. Continuing failure here should perhaps be a lesson that a brisk engineering approach isn’t enough – we actually need science, to understand the messy details of human biology.
An alternative way of achieving immortality is to use technology, not just to fix one’s ageing body, but to escape it entirely. The idea that one’s mind personality is entirely software, and it doesn’t matter what hardware it’s being run on, has long been an attractive one for singularitarians and transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil. Once again, the Deus ex Machina for achieving eternal life by uploading one’s mind into a powerful computer is Drexlerian nanotechnology, giving us nanobots able to read the state of one’s brain. To say this depends on unproven technology is a bit of an understatement, as I wrote at length a while ago in “Your Mind will not be Uploaded”.
But surely the one area where we do see rapid progress towards the singularitarian dream (or nightmare) is in the rapid progress of artificial intelligence? Becker is rather dismissive of large language models – perhaps more dismissive than I would be. But I think one thing he is absolutely right to highlight is the slipperiness around the definitions of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
I think a decade ago, anyone discussing AGI, whether an AI doomer or a technological salvationist, would have assumed that a genuine AGI would have, not just superintelligence, but agency and a consciousness of some kind, which would underpin a set of motivations which might or might not be aligned with our own human priorities. But Becker quotes as the sort of working definition now current in Silicon Valley “a machine that can reproduce any economically productive activity done by a human”, which seems both vague and much weaker.
Becker is emphatic that LLM’s, in his view, cannot develop into AGI in the first sense. The consciousness that LLMs like chatGPT can appear to have in their responses to human questioning is an illusion, the very human tendency to see meaning in random patterns and to impute agency to inanimate objects – no more real than seeing an image of Elvis Presley in a piece of burnt toast.
But for Sam Altman, the purpose of OpenAI was to develop true AGI – leading to “Moore’s Law for everything”, a “really powerful superintelligence” that one could ask to solve big problems like climate change. One can be more positive than Becker about AIs potential to have a big economic impact, for example by disrupting the domains of internet search and advertising, and speeding up the process of computer coding. Yet this still seems a long way from AGI as the kind of omnipotent universal oracle that Altman’s rhetoric implies.
The final frontier is, of course, space, so it’s unsurprising that there’s a deep association of singularitarian thought with space travel and space colonisation. Eric Drexler was, at the beginning of his career, associated with the space colonisation visions of the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, and one can trace the intellectual lineage back to the Russian cosmists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Nikolai Fyodorov. Becker’s scientific background as an astrophysicist makes him a great person to explain what perhaps should be obvious – the ideas of space travel and Mars colonies espoused by Elon Musk and his likes are ridiculous. Perhaps these visions are influenced more by the “golden age” of science fiction, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that they are tainted by the racism, sexism and crypto-fascism of that time, as exemplified by Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell Jr.
The ideas now becoming prevalent amongst “Silicon Valley Royalty” seem to be taking that metaphor too seriously, with opposition to democracy becoming more explicit, and a more open embrace of the virtues of oligarchy – rule by the people who think they’re the only people who ought to matter. Added to this is more than a tinge of pseudo-scientific racism. Plenty of hired intellectuals are available to support these views – the career option of telling rich people what they want to hear will always be attractive to some.
The danger of group-think is all too obvious, together with an elevation of the virtue of independent thought to the point where it becomes an unthinking rejection of anything perceived as conventional wisdom – what Becker describes as “reflexive contrarianism as a virtue”. This leads to the absurd situation in which people like Marc Andreessen, multibillionaire venture capitalist and proponent of technological progress at all costs, can paint themselves as mavericks, standing against “the establishment”. These people are amongst the richest and most powerful in history – they are the establishment! “The thing about Goliaths is that they always want to be David”.
This reflexive contrarianism extends to academia and consensus science; it’s easy to imagine how Becker’s devastating critique of the idea of Mars colonisation would be dismissed by the true believers. But, to be fair, there is perhaps one tiny grain of truth here when it comes to Drexler and his vision for nanotechnology. Drexler was marginalised, even derided, in the US scientific establishment as the large US government-supported nanotechnology programme got under way. I think this was unfair – I disagree with Drexler on many scientific points, but I would give him credit for raising consciousness for the potential of nanotechnology and for appreciating quite early that cell biology offers an existence proof for complex nanoscale machines and devices. If I believe Drexler was wrong on many points, I think he was interestingly wrong.
But even here, there’s a parochialism behind the complaint. The USA isn’t the whole world, and this bit of US academic politics just doesn’t matter in Europe, Korea, Japan – and especially China. If it really had been possible to make Drexlerian nanotechnology work by spending $1 billion a year for a decade, as Josh Hall is quoted as saying, I think it would have happened, if not in the USA, in Europe or the Far East.
Drawing attention to what was going on in the rest of the world should remind us of another type of nanotechnology – the relentless incremental improvement of semiconductor manufacturing technology that makes the chips that all the current excitement around AI depends on. These chips may be designed by Nvidia in the USA, but they are actually made in factories in Taiwan, relying on tools from the Netherlands, to create the components that are now at nanoscale sizes.
Here the USA is falling behind, with Intel unable to keep up with the technological progress of TSMC. Meanwhile a huge national effort is happening in China to achieve its own technological independence in making the chips to power AI. Silicon Valley isn’t the whole world, and the next decade will see a historical national struggle for national technological and economic supremacy, in which the victory of the USA is not pre-ordained.
“More Everything Forever” is one of the two best new books I read in 2025. My other favourite book for the year was Dan Wang’s “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”. I’ve already written about Wang’s book here – “What makes a manufacturing superpower?” – but it’s worth reflecting on the pair of books together.
Wang argues that the USA would be stronger if it rebuilds its manufacturing capacity, and builds more houses and infrastructure, leading to a sense of optimism about the future driven by physical dynamism rather than a retreat to a digital world. Wang [4] has contrasted Silicon Valley’s approach to AI – “building God in a Box” – with China’s approach: “interested less in treating AI as a supernatural goal, and more as a technology to be harnessed”. These two books are very much of the moment – but I can’t help wondering whether, in a few decades, people will look back on the pair as marking a moment when China’s new supremacy in technology, science and economic power became inevitable, while the US elite were gripped by an episode of mass delusion.
[1] I developed this theme in my 2016 e-book: Against Transhumanism: the delusion of technological transcendence
[2] Alfred Nordmann If and Then: A Critique of Speculative NanoEthics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11569-007-0007-6 (subscription required)
[3] See my 2020 blogpost “Nanomedicine comes of age with mRNA vaccines”
[4] Dan Wang in the FT (£) “How China could pull ahead in the AI race”
https://www.ft.com/content/9f6c2f35-933f-4e14-85f1-1192488dda4e