Review by Jacob Pleasants

How do Tech Elites Think About the Future, and Why Does it Matter?

When you contemplate the future, what sorts of things do you think about? Perhaps you consider the probability that a “misaligned” general artificial intelligence will cause the extinction of humanity. Or maybe you wonder how we can best go about spreading humanity out into space. If those things seem pretty far off into the future, well, it’s worth thinking about how we are very likely to be able to figure out how to extend our life spans quite dramatically. There’s cryonics, too, and in the future we’ll definitely have nanobots that can totally undo the horrible damage that freezing ourselves would cause. 

This might all sound like tired plots from science fiction. But the Big Tech leaders of Silicon Valley take all of this very seriously. Ridicule their beliefs if you want, but given the power that these people wield, we need to take them seriously. We need to understand what these people believe so that we can avoid becoming trapped in their fantasies about the future. Because those futures, to be clear, are by and large bleak for the vast majority of us regular people.

In More Everything Forever, Adam Becker takes a close look at how those in the Big Tech bubble think about the future. Transhumanism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism, Rationalism. Becker essentially takes us through the whole “TESCREAL Bundle,” although he doesn’t use that particular acronym. Near the end of the book, he actually mentions how he encountered the “TESCREAL” paper by Gebru and Torres somewhat late in the research for the book - and it of course matches up quite well with his research and analysis. Indeed, he probably could have organized the book around the idea - and in some ways it almost already is. Each chapter of the book is essentially a deep look at one of those “isms” that seem to dominate the thinking of Silicon Valley. Becker examines their intellectual roots, their core principles, how they have been adopted and adapted over time. And he reveals their many deep flaws.

Simply put, this book is fascinating. Having read about the TESCREAL Bundle some time ago, the basic outlines of this book were familiar enough. But Becker goes deep into the origins of these ideas and gains important insights into how and why they have taken hold in the minds of the tech elite. Two of my greatest takeaways: these ideas are extraordinarily insular and extraordinarily self serving. They are insular in the sense that for all the variety that can seem to exist among the many “isms,” the same people just keep coming up again and again (Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Eric Drexler). And the same basic ideas keep getting resurrected and repackaged. The fundamental fantasies haven’t really changed much over the past half century or more. 

And these ideas, to be clear, are overwhelmingly self-serving because they place technology at the absolute center of everything that matters in the world (universe). To work on tech, then, is to do the only thing that matters. Why bother worrying about the inequities that exist in our world right now when the existence of humanity itself is on the line? Why bother spending time fretting about climate change in the face of the impending singularity? It’s always pretty comforting to imagine that the thing you happen to be doing is literally the most important thing in the world.

The ideas that Becker dissects are absurd, as he shows in careful detail. He probably spends more time refuting the ideas than is really warranted. We, the readers, don’t really need to be convinced that fantasies about becoming spacefaring colonizers are blinkered or that nanobots are implausible. At the same time, tearing down these beliefs on their merit does serve an important purpose in that it reveals how these ideas essentially serve as a modern form of religious belief. For all the “rationality” that ostensibly motivates these ways of thinking, there is very little logic to be found.  

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Why is any of this important for us to know? Why should we care about the nonsense that the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Ray Kurzweil, and others happen to believe? The short answer is that these people command sufficient resources that they can actually try to bring about their visions for the future. In some cases, this will result in wasted resources as the ultra wealthy try desperately to cheat death (e.g., cryonics), just as the ultra wealthy always have. But then there are things like AI — technological systems that these people have decided must be built in a particular way and that will affect us all. Heck, as far-fetched as the spacefaring dreams of Bezos and Musk might seem, they can actually move resources in those directions, and not just their own fortunes.

So, we need to take notice. We need to learn more about the beliefs that are driving much of the thinking and decisions of the tech elites. But while I do think this book is important to read, I will offer another reason why I think you should read this book: it is just a lot of fun to read. You’ll have a hard time putting it down. Becker’s storytelling, analysis, and ruthless critique come together into what really is a great read.