The Poppies of Terra #55 - Refuse/Resist

“Technological salvation,” writes Adam Becker in the first chapter of his new book, “is being used as an excuse to steer society in a dangerous direction, in the service of an impossible future. Breaking free of these visions means understanding them.” Indeed, Becker’s More Everything Forever makes his case in compelling fashion, providing a welcome, bracing antidote to the techno-utopian spiel increasingly spouted by Silicon Valley brollionaires and their cultish adepts. This is an important, necessary book, and it couldn’t arrive at a more critical time. Will Becker persuade you on every point? Perhaps not. But he’ll get you to at least reconsider things, and that’s even more valuable.

In his well-researched, carefully considered volume, Becker enumerates the common grandiose visions pitched by folks like Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, examines their flimsy philosophical foundations, points out their fundamental lack of scientific plausibility, and generally calls out the narrow-mindedness of the attitudes from which they stem, despite vociferous claims, on all counts, to the contrary. Generally underlying these fantasies, espoused in increasingly dogmatic and strident tones by their uber-wealthy traffickers, lies a pernicious ideology of total technological salvation, closely allied with movements like effective altruism, longtermism, false dichotomy-ism, and purported rationalism. Humanity’s problems, these folks declare, can and should and will be solved by the Singularity, or by Artificial General Intelligence, or by nanotechnology, or by unmitigated space colonization and resource consumption, or a combination of these, and so on. We must aspire, they say, to boundless growth, or risk stagnation and death. What kind of growth, you–thoughtful reader–might ask? Spiritual? An understanding of consciousness? A refinement of our values? Our cultural patrimony? Our collective wisdom? Nah. Growth here boils down to more people using more energy, making select industry captains exponentially more wealthy along the way. “This vision of perpetual job creation past the heat death of the universe,” observes Becker, in reference to a quote by Andreessen, “looks like the effective altruists’ intergalactic empire as seen through the fun-house mirror of start-up culture.” I’m reminded of this Goldfrapp song: “We’re on fire / We’ll eat stars / Everything / Is never enough.”

Becker systematically runs down the list of sales pitches and questions the feasibility and ethics of their assertions, poking at notions like the “orthogonality thesis” to see what, if anything, lies beneath. In most cases, he shows that the ideas glorified by tech elites distract from, and often exacerbate, poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. Simply training Large Language Models, for example, “can be very computationally intensive, leading to a huge carbon footprint.” But in the pursuit of reductive, monotonously blissful futures, the construction of AGI entities that solve everything, including death, and the creation of space empires that casually harvest billions of planets for raw fuel, all is justified. “Earning to give” excuses toxic behavior, cloaking it as moral virtue. Knee-jerk contrarianism becomes its own self-victimizing alternative reality. Longtermism, showcasing how quickly pretensions of moral math can go awry, presents preposterous calculations to justify ignoring pressing real-world troubles. Complex human issues–including subtle social, ethical, political, and philosophical quandaries–are bluntly flattened into technical riddles: “a philosophy made by carpenters,” as Becker puts it, “insisting the entire world is a nail that will yield to their ministrations.” “Progress” and “prosperity” are equated with ergophilia, and suggestions of moderation are condemned as sentences of scarcity and extinction. Inevitability, Becker points out, is often invoked by tech oligarchs. “The way Kurzweil and his fellow singularitarians talk about the technology to come,” Becker notes, “makes it seem like they’re playing a video game like Civilization, where there is a technology tree laid out in front of them clearly, and humanity (or indeed any intelligent species) is just working its way through that preexisting tree. But technology isn’t on rails, barreling down a set course beyond anyone’s control. Moore’s law isn’t a law of nature; it was a decision.”

As a science fiction writer, I found the concluding chapter specially fascinating. Here Becker traces the historical and ideological connections of modern tech utopianism and transhumanism with earlier ideas like Russian Cosmism, eloquently showing how fetishizing futuristic technological fixes is rooted in often grotesque misreadings of science fiction. Becker certainly knows his genre stuff. In fact, he goes a step further, drawing clear parallels between inflamed wishcasting–digital immortality, uploading consciousness, and colonizing the stars–and traditional religious salvation myths. The new pipe dreams function as secularized versions of age-old promises of eternal life, transcendence, and deliverance from suffering, with godlike AIs or interstellar civilizations representing divine judgment, and technological progress becoming its own form of spiritual ascension. It’s eschatology (end-times, resurrection, and heaven) run through a spin-cycle of futurist aesthetics, making these fancies seem rational rather than faith-based. There’s something particularly disturbing about these allegedly comforting, messianic conjurings, which in practical terms entrench present privilege for a few in exchange for potential pleasures for the many. Particularly when, as Becker shows in the penultimate chapter, these proclamations link back to works by folks like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the Fascist Manifesto.

In some cases Becker does overreach, in others he impugns by association, and in a few instances he focuses on matters of presentation over questions of substance. It would be nice to get the perspectives of tech leaders in other parts of the world. Some readers and critics will try to weaponize his tone against him, characterizing his writing as pure polemic, but I appreciate his passion, and wouldn’t mind if he were even more scathing. Nine-tenths of More Everything Forever are spent challenging the pearls that roll down to us from on high, tracing their origins, and evaluating many fallacious or unprovable claims; only in the last section does Becker propose any specific reforms. While historically defensible, his taxation suggestion seems like a stop-gap measure to address a symptom rather than the underlying causes that have led to this mess. Becker’s role as cogent intellectual dissident in this context is a commendable public service, but I do wish he’d discussed other recommendations, though admittedly that would probably be a whole other book. There is intrinsic value in thinking aspirationally, even when particular technologies are immediately out of reach, and though a hyperbolic variant of this infects much of the thinking Becker calls out, that doesn’t invalidate the fundamental truth. He doesn't mention genuinely useful AI advances, like AlphaFold. Becker does, to his credit, highlight that we need not lose our optimism, but can more beneficially nourish it by being grounded, and versed in the humanities. He also confesses to his own vacillation during a specific gathering of big-shots, humanizing himself by revealing relatable doubts when put under social pressure.

Carl Sagan, referenced several times in the book, said: “If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.” Make no mistake about it: we’ve been grabbed, and more nabbing is currently underway. The charlatans are numerous. They’re very, very rich, and they can sound very, very convincing. Don’t let them do your thinking for you. Don’t be seduced by shimmering toys and bombastic rhetoric, by the mirage of equating convenience with experience, or by unfounded, facile promises of a nirvanic future that can only be achieved if X (insert your proposition of choice). Refuse. Resist.