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.