A terrifying tour of Silicon Valley's deluded plans for a techno-utopia
TECHNOLOGY
More Everything Forever
Adam Becker
Basic Books, $34.99
In commercial space flight PR jargon, a catastrophic launch failure is routinely glossed over with seemingly innocuous explanations. The second stage booster did not 'explode, destroying millions of dollars' worth of engines and several satellites'. No, it 'underwent a rapid unplanned disassembly', the results of which were 'mission sub-optimal'.
Ask a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Gulf of Mexico what he saw, when yet another doomed Space X Starship detonated 10 kilometres above his head, and these are not words he would use.
But to hear Elon Musk tell it, his Starship and its successors will soon be the workhorses of an interplanetary fleet that will take humans to Mars. And not just a few intrepid Apollo-style explorers collecting rocks and taking pictures, mind you. Musk and his disciples want to colonise the red planet, and by that, he means setting up an entire, self-sufficient civilisation there.
Adam Becker's marvellous 'disassembly' of Musk's ludicrous fantasy is neither unplanned nor sub-optimal. Subtitled AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, More Everything Forever gives a trawler deckhand's eye view of what awaits us, should a deluded cabal of tech billionaires somehow make their dreams come true.
The paving stones of these roads to hell are, seductively as ever, presented by advocates as nothing more sinister than the greatest good for the greatest number, and history is littered with the wreckage of such beneficent intentions.
And so it is that Becker begins his descent into the AI underworld in the seemingly harmless realm of EA, or 'effective altruism'; the notion that it is incumbent on people with wealth to share it around, and so help those less fortunate. The catch here is the E before the A, and what began as a fairly harmless, if occasionally wacky, crusade in the minds of philosophers like Peter Singer can, and did, come utterly unhinged when the brutal logic of algorithms is used to maximise the 'effectiveness' of altruism. Particularly in the hands of the likes of cryptocurrency lunatics such as Sam Bankman-Fried, and the deluded Scottish philosopher William MacAskill.
Bankman-Fried was very keen on EA, and he did give away a lot of money, but as most of it belonged to other people, he was convicted of fraud on a titanic scale in 2023 and consigned to the hoosegow for 25 years. But 25 years is a millisecond to MacAskill, an advocate of 'longtermism', a clumsy word which means that in order to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number, it's clear (to longtermists, anyway) that we need a lot more people to make happy. More people, indeed, than Earth's ecology could ever support.
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