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.