Adam Becker is a science journalist and astrophysicist. He has written for the New York Times, BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, Undark, Aeon, and others. He also recorded a video series with the BBC, and has appeared on numerous radio shows and podcasts, including Ologies, The Story Collider, and KQED Forum.
What’s the big idea?
Tech billionaires like to hype up delusional doomsday fantasies in which they are the saviors and overlords of civilization. Many people may just laugh or disregard these outlandish claims, but a closer look reveals the scary truth of how seriously, specifically, and consequentially these thought leaders are committed to their ridiculous visions for the future. They abstain from making meaningful choices to improve the here and now because of their faith in unreasonable techno-solutions. It is important that society stays aware that their nightmares and promised utopias are founded in fiction.
Below, Adam shares five key insights from his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Listen to the audio version—read by Adam himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Tech billionaires have ludicrously implausible power fantasies about the future.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other tech billionaires have made surprisingly outlandish claims about what a good future for humanity should look like. Elon Musk has spoken repeatedly about the need to set up a colony on Mars. He has said that he’s going to put a million people on Mars by 2050 by sending one rocket launch a day for years, and that the colony needs to be self-sufficient, surviving even if the supply rockets from Earth stop coming. Musk contends that this is vital for the future of humanity, claiming that our species will go extinct if it doesn’t happen soon. He claims Mars is our lifeboat for civilization.
This is all pure fantasy: Mars is too inhospitable to allow a million people to live there anytime remotely soon, if ever. The gravity is too low, the radiation is too high, there’s no air, and the Martian dirt is filled with poison. There’s no plausible way around these problems, and that’s not even all of them. Nor does the idea of Mars as a lifeboat for humanity make sense: even after an extinction event like an asteroid strike, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars. Mammals survived the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs, but no mammals could survive unprotected on Mars today.
Putting all of that aside, if Musk somehow did put a colony on Mars, it would be wholly dependent on his company, SpaceX, for supplies. That’s one feature that tech oligarchs’ fantasies have in common: they all involve billionaires holding total control over the rest of us.
2. AI isn’t going to be as good (or bad!) as the tech industry claims.
Silicon Valley billionaires and thought leaders have been making wild promises about AI. They claim that AI will soon become superintelligent, far outstripping human intellect, and this will lead to a total revolution in human civilization—if these godlike AIs don’t destroy humanity first.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, says that superintelligent AI is coming within the next four years. He also claims that once we have it, every product and service will halve in price every two years as AI takes over the economy. Bill Gates has made similar claims, suggesting that AI will free us for a life of leisure as it caters to our every need. Other industry leaders claim AI will revolutionize science, ushering in an unprecedented era of discovery and near-magical technology.
“These are narratives based on science fiction.”
There’s virtually no evidence for any of this: it is specious reasoning amplified by tech industry money and hype. These are narratives based on science fiction. They fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of intelligence and how current AI systems operate. Even calling something like ChatGPT “AI” is misleading; it’s a marketing term that’s gotten way out of hand.
3. We’re not colonizing space.
Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have dreamed of colonizing space for decades. Despite their promises, it’s not happening. Musk’s dreams of Mars are modest compared to some of the other specious fantasies spun by tech billionaires and the think tanks they fund.
Jeff Bezos doesn’t want to put a million people in space—he wants a trillion people living in a fleet of giant cylindrical space stations with interior areas bigger than Manhattan. He claims this is the best way to ensure future generations thrive. Otherwise, he warns, our species will “stagnate” on Earth. Yet such space stations would be staggeringly difficult and phenomenally dangerous to build. And Bezos’s concerns about “stagnation” are based on a mix of faulty reasoning and an attachment to long-discredited ideas about sociology and history.
“The impossible promise of an interstellar empire is held out as a shiny fantasy to justify the actions of tech billionaires.”
Others in the tech industry (or funded by tech billionaires) have advocated for a future beyond our solar system, pushing humanity to take over the galaxy or the entire universe. This is even more unlikely to work: the distances between stars are too great, and there’s little reason to leave the solar system.
The impossible promise of an interstellar empire is held out as a shiny fantasy to justify the actions of tech billionaires. Musk has used the supposed need to colonize Mars as an excuse to ignore details like worker safety at SpaceX. Bezos has said that the pursuit of such a future is the most important thing he could be doing with his fortune, more important than addressing Earthbound problems here and now.
4. How Big Tech gets science wrong and distracts from present threats.
Tech industry leaders often present themselves as scientific experts on everything from human biology to astrophysics to nuclear fusion. The truth is that they are business leaders, not scientists, and frequently get in far over their heads when discussing scientific concepts. They believe that their wealth makes them general experts on everything.
Musk has repeatedly gotten facts about Mars wrong, even when he’s been publicly corrected. He has repeatedly claimed that Mars can be terraformed (made into a more Earth-like planet) by using nuclear weapons to melt the Martian ice caps. Musk contends this would beef up the Martian atmosphere enough to allow humans to live there, but this isn’t true: there’s not nearly enough frozen gases in those ice caps to get the job done. When scientists pointed this out to him, he doubled down.
“They believe that their wealth makes them general experts on everything.”
He’s not alone in this. Altman has never given good justification for his claims about AI. Bezos’s ideas about space come from old plans from the 1970s that were later shown to be unworkable. These aren’t just careless mistakes about unimportant details. Getting these scientific facts wrong allows these tech billionaires to maintain faith in their power fantasies and gives them an excuse to ignore today’s problems. Altman has said that the AI systems he believes are coming soon will be able to solve global warming quickly and easily, and therefore, he’s not concerned about new AI data centers requiring huge amounts of power. Pushing humanity toward the impossible goals of tech oligarchs will lead to destructive consequences for everyone.
5. The racist origins of the tech industry’s core ideology.
Underneath the bizarre proclamations of tech billionaires, there is an ideology that technology can solve every problem, even fundamentally social and political problems like strife in the Middle East or political polarization in the United States. This ideology of technological salvation stems from a toxic mix of misunderstood science fiction, fringe religious movements, and racist pseudoscience.
The same online subcultures that spawned the ideas about AI that Altman, Musk, and the rest have swallowed also have connections with the American far-right and a troubling history of promoting scientifically discredited claims about fundamental differences in innate intelligence between different races. This goes hand-in-hand with their obsession with AI: they believe that AI can become godlike because they believe that intelligence is a single measurable trait corresponding to IQ, and that a sufficiently powerful AI would be able to simply dial up its IQ to an arbitrarily high number. But IQ has always been used for eugenics and institutional racism, and there’s little evidence that it measures anything real about people. It’s mostly just been used to say that some groups of people are inherently better than others.
It’s no surprise that such stories are attractive to billionaires who want to justify their desire to remain in power over the rest of us forever. Recognizing the hollowness of these ideas is the first step to taking back our power. They want to set the terms on which we imagine the future, but the future isn’t theirs for the taking. The future is something we all build together. They want us to believe that their promised utopias and nightmares are our only option. But in reality, the future is open.
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