More Everything Forever

08 Nov 2025 - 10 Nov 2025

book by Adam Becker (an astrophysicist as well as journalist Adam Becker) - Wikipedia) on SV culture, transhumanism, rationalism, and the like. Adam Becker | Author and Astrophysicist

His book on quantum stuff looks interesting, here it is jointly reviewed with Errol Morris' book on Thomas Kuhn The Defeat of Reason - Boston Review

Have to admit I skimmed this rather fast since I'm pretty familiar with this scene already. But it looks like a great introduction for normies.

My new book, More Everything Forever, is about the terrible plans that tech billionaires have for the future and why they don’t work. 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. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by fantastical technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs. These are wildly implausible and profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass.

Decent summary of stuff I mostly already know, so I didn't get a ton out of it. I'm mostly on the author's side in being skeptical of all this stuff, but he falls a little bit too much into the smug-critic role and I had a negative reaction to that.

It also overlaps with all the TESCREAL critics. There's a footnote where he acknowledges this. Again, not a criticism, but somewhat old news.

p26 The apocalyptic vision of AI Risk is the obverse of the AI utopian visions, and equally specious

p42 Reference to IJ Good's book The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked Ideas which looks fantastic.

p53 Charlie Stross: "The Singularity is the turd in the punchbowl of near-future SF."

p96 orthogonality thesis, he notices it is bogus. Melanie Mitchell as a critic, real intelligence doesn't work that way

Ceglowski, who was borin in Poland, says that the idea that a superintelligent being would inevitably want to improve itself is "unabashedly American" p111

Maciej Cegłowski - Wikipedia (seems like someone I should know better) Oh he's this guy Idle Words I've read his stuff

p197 "The whole project of utilitarianism smacks of a kind of ethical Taylorism: confusing metrics with the reality they imperfectly capture" Nice.

p249 "Those vibes—vibes of fascism, authoritarianism, and colonialism—are fundamentally about creating a fantasty of control, the ultimate drug offered by the ideology of technological salvation"

p267 Levandowski (Waymo founder) founded a religious organization dedicated to "the realization, accdeptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence"

p268 engineer's disease, yeah. "The belief that expertise in one field (usually in STEM) makes you an expert on everytghing else too."

p270 Some interesting notes on the simulation hypothesis, he is dubious, says it is denial of nature, attempt to reduce the mystery of reality to the known structure of a computation.

Author trashes Yudkowsky book What AI’s Doomers and Utopians Have in Common - The Atlantic Here Lies Humanity, Dead by Fancy Autocomplete

"rationalism is to Silicon Valley as Scientology is to Hollywood" says David Karp, which is undeniably true but a cliche at this point?

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