Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control The Fate of Humanity (2025)

This is a good (not great) book. It opened my eyes to the truly vast ambitions of today's tech billionaires. Ambitions here does not refer to wealth or political influence or anything else merely of this world, but something incomparably greater. Key ideas are the Singularity (the imminent time when AI blows past human intelligence, creating a radically different situation); the importance and inevitability of human colonization of space, including eventually the entire universe, perhaps with swarms of nanobots carrying human consciousnesses in silicon form; long-termism (the valuing of all future lives as highly as those now alive), etc. While there is some disagreement among the carriers of these ideas, there's general consensus that the long term human (or human-AI) colonization of the universe is of such great importance that all other problems fall by the wayside. The Singularity will usher in utopia - or perhaps apocalypse. These highly dubious ideas would not matter much, of course, were it not for the fact that their advocates have so much wealth and power. Becker skillfully explains the main ideas and nearly as skillfully he debunks almost all of them. He points to the deep inconsistency between, on the one hand, the tech billionaires' championing of science and, on the other, their refusal to face basic facts. He also offers a plausible account of some of the origins of, and motivations behind, these ideas: ultimately, they are rooted in Christian hopes to escape death and reach some kind of heaven, now conjoined to technological salvationism. Disseminating and funding these beliefs, especially the philosophy of effective altruism, gives the tech billionaires a patina of intellectual and even moral respectability. Their insistence on the overriding importance of the Singularity and "aligning" AI's interests with humanity's allows them to sidestep all other contemporary problems as trivial. I sometimes wished Becker had dug more deeply into certain topics. He tends to rely on interviews for his evidence. When it comes to precursors to this generation of science-obsessed utopianists, Becker never considers Condorcet and mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor only once in passing. Sometimes Becker assigns guilt by association, however tenuous. For example, the fact that these people talk of "colonizing" the universe associates them with European colonists (the only kind, apparently) and hence with racism. Capitalism, racism, and white men are sometimes tossed in, casually, as stock villains. In the end, though, these minor gripes don't detract too seriously from Becker's timely, valuable work.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (2015)

This book is somewhat challenging to comment on. I found many parts quite interesting, but I don't think it ranks up there - for me, at least - as a great book. Hodgson knows a lot about many things - and he comments smartly on many debates - but at times I lost sight of what he cared most about. Or why those things mattered. For example, as his title suggests, Hodgson insists that getting the definition of capitalism right is of great importance. Conceptual precision, he says, is as important as mathematical precision. I was not completely persuaded. Midway through the book, around p. 200, he finally offered his most detailed argument why definitions mattered. Hodgson makes a case that capitalism is more than just private property and markets, which have existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Of crucial importance are the state and law, which make property "collateralizable" - i.e. property is the usual collateral for loans, which in Hodgson's eyes are the real motor of modern growth. So capitalism is not a timeless system, but a historical, conditional one (and it may not always be with us). Hodgson also spends considerable time making the case that too many economists have remained wedded to a "physicalist" notion of property, i.e. viewing roperty as stuff. Instead, drawing on the philosopher John Searle's ideas about collective intentionality and institutional facts, Hodgson wants us to reconceptualize property as an institutional or social fact - something we together believe in and, hence, make real. I think these are his main claims. To be honest, I stopped reading about halfway through. I found myself agreeing with his intellectual affiliations (institutional economics, evolutionary economics) and admiring his relentlessly independent judgment.

Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982)

I was already familiar with, and persuaded by, the general arguments in this book: orthodox economic theory makes many unrealistic assumptions, about maximizing behavior, perfect knowledge and rationality, highly competitive markets, static equilibria, competition occurring only over price, etc. Nonetheless, I still found this book extremely interesting and well-argued. The authors draw on work in many fields, including Michael Polanyi's ideas about "tacit knowledge" and organizational sociology and, of course, modern evolutionary thought, to offer a much more realistic picture of how individuals and firms behave than does orthodox economics. The book draws extensively on Joseph Schumpeter's ideas and tries to formalize them (I have to admit I couldn't follow the models and math and skipped these sections).The book has been enormously influential, having been cited more than 55,000 times. I wish I knew the lineaments of its influence - which arguments have been challenged, modified or further developed. Several years ago I read and greatly appreciated Robert Frank's more recent Darwin Economics, which made a generally similar argument (though I don't remember Frank's book in enough detail to say what the differences might be). Finally, as I read this book, I was struck by the parallels to Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985), which came out just three years later and also proposed, and made a persuasive case for, an evolutionary approach to significant aspects of human history.

Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (1997)

This is a technically informed, empirically minded, and engaging account of an epoch-making invention (arguably one of the two or three most important inventions of the 20th century, other candidates being nuclear technology and antibiotics). Riordan and Hoddeson spend the bulk of their book on the technical aspects of work on the transistor, and they do this well, though after a point I had trouble following (for example, the apparently important difference between point contact and junction transistors). Along the way, they also pen deft portraits of the key figures and key organizations, above all, the incomparable mid-century Bell Labs. In terms of the technical aspects, both theoretical work (much of it coming from Europe) in quantum mechanics, in particular the behavior of electrons, and practical work, in obtaining purified forms of germanium and silicon and manipulating the flow of electrons, were crucial. Serendipity played a more frequent role than I would have imagined. Some of my take-aways and reflections include the following: 1) until reading this book, I hadn't fully understood that the key function of vacuum tubes and of transistors was to boost signals (even after reading the book, I didn't quite grasp how either of them did this). 2) nor did I understand that both of these technologies were developed with the transmission of telephone calls in mind (the primary business of ATT, Bell Labs' sponsor, after all). Their use in computers was, initially, a byproduct. For this reason, the full magnitude of the transistor revolution only dawned on people, including its inventors, a couple of decades after its invention in 1947. 3) the book did an excellent job illustrating the role of both collaboration and competition in scientific progress. 4) I was reminded of Robert Gordon's important book The Rise and Decline of American Growth. Gordon emphasizes the years 1920 to 1950 as a period of unprecedented and since unmatched growth in productivity. I don't think he explains exactly why that was the case (though come to think of it, he may attribute the surge in productivity to a more fully worked out application of electric power). I'm pretty sure he doesn't discuss the development of the transistor. Of course, while the transistor was invented at the tail end of this period, it only came into widespread use in the 1950s and 1960s. Its proliferation has coincided not with the increase, or even just maintenance, of productivity growth, but with its slowing down. Of course, it has changed entertainment, culture, news, politics, and much more quite dramatically. So a bit of a conundrum there. 5) this is not an original point, but this book, in conjunction with Gordon's, has led me to think of the transistor as a third "general purpose technology" of the last 200 years, alongside the steam engine and electricity.

Anton Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023)

I began this book with great hope - after all, Nicholas Carr, whose books on the internet (The Shallows) and social media (Superbloom) I have found so perceptive, had endorsed it. Alas, the work disappointed. Perhaps I was at fault, but I was never able to tap into its argument. A Web reads like an extended piece in the Feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - allusive, polemical, serpentine. The book prioritizes phenomenological observations about the nature of the web, which it renders in often poetical-paradoxical phrases and pretentious words. Barba-Kay provides scant evidence for his claims. He tends toward hyperbole (only "the bomb" - i.e. the nuclear bomb - rivals and parallels the web in eschatological significance). Not only did I not find myself persuaded by most of these big claims; I didn't even find them particularly arresting. After scant 100 pages, I put the book aside - something I rarely do. Given Carr's high standing in my eyes, though, maybe I'll look up reviews of the book and see if any of them can show me what I missed.

Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1984)

This book was a huge - and very pleasant - surprise for me. I read it in connection with my course (and interest in) Media & Minds. I thought I had read or at least knew of the most important works in the field of media ecology - McLuhan, Ong, Goody, Postman, etc. No Sense of Place had only recently registered in my awareness. So my expectation was that it would, at most, fill in a few new details. Instead, what I found was a book that not only made a new, and very innovative, argument about the impact of television. Much more broadly, I think the book qualifies as a significant contribution to social theory (and it turns out it's been cited more than 8,000 times). Meyrowitz does this by combining Erving Goffman with Marshall McLuhan. Goffman, about whom only the title of his most famous book - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - had given me an inkling of his ideas, turns out to be more complex and interesting than I had realized. His theory is that we are performing on many stages (not just one, as I had thought), while also retreating to a "back stage" for rehearsal of our "front stage" roles and for rest. So it turns out that Goffman's theory is much more about roles than I had suspected, and hence is also relevant to explaining group formation. But Goffman's theory is static, and this is where McLuhan comes in. Meyrowitz argues that new media change informational flows, as with the introduction of TV, thereby changing "situations." These define roles, and so as situations change, so too do the borders between front stage and back stage. Meyrowitz applies this quite persuasively to explain many of the changes in American society since the 1960s, thus offering a worthy alternative to Ronald Inglehart's account, which revolves around the shift from material to post-material values. Just as Postman's Amusing Ourselves made arguments about TV that now also seem remarkably prescient about our digital age, so too do Meyrowitz's arguments regularly seem to anticipate changes we are now living through.

Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979)

For some time I'd been meaning to read two widely cited classics from the 1970s about American education: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America and Collins's book. I thought of the books as rivals, offering different accounts of education: Bowles and Gintis, who were Marxists at the time, argued that schooling primarily served the function of instilling discipline in workers for the rigors of capitalist work. I assumed that Collins, one of the leading advocates of a conflict theory in sociology, would offer a largely empirical account of how individual competition fueled the race for credentials. The race for credentials, I expected, would only modify, but not constitute, the educational system. To my great and pleasant surprise, Collins turned out to be much more theoretical, and theoretically bold, than I had expected. He argues that education does not provide productivity-enhancing skills. Rather, it's all about carving out "property in positions," i.e. sinecures. Collins supports his claims with evidence of various kinds. Whether he's right or not, I'm not sure; but I found his ideas highly thought-provoking, to say the least. Throughout Collins acknowledges his intellectual debts to Weber and, indeed, reminded me in many ways, both substantively and styllistically, of the master.