Silicon Valley's Misguided Utopian Visions

The Atlantic

2 days ago

Technologists currently wield a level of political influence that was recently considered unthinkable. While Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashes public services, Jeff Bezos takes celebrities to space on Blue Origin and the CEOs of AI companies speak openly of radically transforming society. As a result, there has never been a better moment to understand the ideas that animate these leaders' particular vision of the future.
In his new book, More Everything Forever, the science journalist Adam Becker offers a deep dive into the worldview of techno-utopians such as Musk—one that's underpinned by promises of AI dominance, space colonization, boundless economic growth, and eventually, immortality. Becker's premise is bracing: Tech oligarchs' wildest visions of tomorrow amount to a modern secular theology that is both mesmerizing and, in his view, deeply misguided. The author's central concern is that these grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities, but ideologies with real-world consequences​.
What do these people envision? In their vibrant utopia, humanity has harnessed technology to transcend all of its limits—old age and the finite bounds of knowledge most of all. Artificial intelligence oversees an era of abundance, automating labor and generating wealth so effectively that every person's needs are instantly met. Society is powered entirely by clean energy, while heavy industry has been relocated to space, turning Earth into a pristine sanctuary. People live and work throughout the solar system. Advances in biotechnology have all but conquered disease and aging. At the center of this future, a friendly AI—aligned with human values—guides civilization wisely, ensuring that progress remains tightly coupled with the flourishing of humanity and the environment.
Musk, along with the likes of Bezos and OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, aren't merely imagining sci-fi futures as a luxury hobby—they are funding them, proselytizing for them, and, in a growing number of cases, trying to reorganize society around them. In Becker's view, the rich are not merely chasing utopia, but prioritizing their vision of the future over the very real concerns of people in the present. Impeding environmental research, for instance, makes sense if you believe that human life will continue to exist in an extraterrestrial elsewhere. More Everything Forever asks us to take these ideas seriously, not necessarily because they are credible predictions, but because some people in power believe they are.
Becker, in prose that is snappy if at times predictable, highlights the quasi-spiritual nature of Silicon Valley's utopianism, which is based on two very basic beliefs. First, that death is scary and unpleasant. And second, that thanks to science and technology, the humans of the future will never have to be scared or do anything unpleasant. 'The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever,' Becker writes. (One reason for the interest in space is that longevity drugs, according to the tech researcher Benjamin Reinhardt, can be synthesized only 'in a pristine zero-g environment.') This future will overcome not just human biology but a fundamental rift between science and faith. Becker quotes the writer Meghan O'Gieblyn, who observes in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine that 'what makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.'​
Becker demonstrates how certain contemporary technologists flirt with explicitly religious trappings. Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Google's self-driving-car division, for instance, founded an organization to worship artificial intelligence as a godhead ​. But Becker also reveals the largely forgotten precedents for this worldview, sketching a lineage of thought that connects today's Silicon Valley seers to earlier futurist prophets. In the late 19th century, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov preached that humanity's divine mission was to physically resurrect every person who had ever lived and settle them throughout the cosmos, achieving eternal life via what Fedorov called 'the regulation of nature by human reason and will.'
The rapture once preached and beckoned in churches has been repackaged for secular times: In place of souls ascending to heaven, there are minds preserved digitally—or even bodies kept alive—for eternity. Silicon Valley's visionaries are, in this view, not all cold rationalists; many of them are dreamers and believers whose fixations constitute, in Becker's view, a spiritual narrative as much as a scientific one—a new theology of technology.
Let's slow down: Why exactly is this a bad idea? Who wouldn't want 'perfect health, immortality, yada yada yada,' as the AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky breezily summarizes the goal to Becker? The trouble, Becker shows, is that many of these dreams of personal transcendence disregard the potential human cost of working toward them. For the tech elite, these are visions of escape. But, Becker pointedly writes, 'they hold no promise of escape for the rest of us, only nightmares closing in.'​
Perhaps the most extreme version of this nightmare is the specter of an artificial superintelligence, or AGI (artificial general intelligence). Yudkowsky predicts to Becker that a sufficiently advanced AI, if misaligned with human values, would 'kill us all.'​ Forecasts for this type of technology, once fringe, have gained remarkable traction among tech leaders, and almost always trend to the stunningly optimistic. Sam Altman is admittedly concerned about the prospects of rogue AI —he famously admitted to having stockpiled 'guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to'—but these worries don't stop him from actively planning for a world reshaped by AI's exponential growth. In Altman's words, we live on the brink of a moment in which machines will do 'almost everything' and trigger societal changes so rapid that 'the future can be almost unimaginably great.' Becker is less sanguine, writing that 'we just don't know what it will take to build a machine to do all the things a human can do.' And from his point of view, it's best that things remain that way.
Becker is at his rhetorically sharpest when he examines the philosophy of 'longtermism' that underlies much of this AI-centric and space-traveling fervor. Longtermism, championed by some Silicon Valley–adjacent philosophers and the effective-altruism movement, argues that the weight of the future—the potentially enormous number of human (or post-human) lives to come—overshadows the concerns of the present. If preventing human extinction is the ultimate good, virtually any present sacrifice can and should be rationalized. Becker shows how today's tech elites use such reasoning to support their own dominance in the short term, and how rhetoric about future generations tends to mask injustices and inequalities in the present​. When billionaires claim that their space colonies or AI schemes might save humanity, they are also asserting that only they should shape humanity's course. Becker observes that this philosophy is 'made by carpenters, insisting the entire world is a nail that will yield to their ministrations.'​
Becker's perspective is largely that of a sober realist doing his darnedest to cut through delusion, yet one might ask whether his argument occasionally goes too far. Silicon Valley's techno-utopian culture may be misguided in its optimism, but is it only that? A gentle counterpoint: The human yearning for transcendence stems from a dissatisfaction with the present and a creative impulse, both of which have driven genuine progress. Ambitious dreams—even seemingly outlandish ones—have historically spurred political and cultural transformation. Faith, too, has helped people face the future with optimism. It should also be acknowledged that many of the tech elite Becker critiques do show some awareness of ethical pitfalls. Not all (or even most) technologists are as blithe or blinkered as Becker sometimes seems to suggest.
In the end, this is not a book that revels in pessimism or cynicism; rather, it serves as a call to clear-eyed humanism. In Becker's telling, tech leaders err not in dreaming big, but in refusing to reckon with the costs and responsibilities that come with their dreams. They preach a future in which suffering, scarcity, and even death can be engineered away, yet they discount the very real suffering here and now that demands our immediate attention and compassion. In an era when billionaire space races and AI hype dominate headlines, More Everything Forever arrives as a much-needed reality check. At times, the book is something more than that: a valuable meditation on the questionable stories we tell about progress, salvation, and ourselves.