by Adam Becker
Basic Books
4/22/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9781541619593
This "wild and utterly engaging narrative" (Melanie Mitchell) shows why Silicon Valley's heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions--with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth--are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.
In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow--and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason--for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity--at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What's more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
Reviews:
"Timely and thoughtful... Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, takes a wild ride through speculative technologies and assesses their merit, using real science... An important and sober investigation of Silicon Valley's boldest claims about the future." -- Kirkus, Starred Review
"This is an important book as well as a good one. More Everything Forever is a really significant contribution to our discussion of the future and what it might hold, and what we should be trying for now. Some of these popular ideas about the future are foolish enough to distort our current reality, and they deserve to be revealed as such. Becker's book is very entertaining as it exposes how the emperor has no clothes." -- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Lucky Strike
"Our world has fallen into the clutches of billionaires who mistake dystopian science fiction stories for suggestions, rather than warnings. Speaking in my capacity as a dystopian science fiction writer, I can confirm that this isn't merely very stupid, it's also very, very bad." -- Cory Doctorow, author of Red Team Blues and Little Brother
About the Author:
Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and other publications. His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was long-listed for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award. He has been a science journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and a science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He lives in California.