In the wildest dreams of tech billionaires, humans colonize the solar system on giant space stations, dodge mortality by uploading their brains into computers, and solve climate change in a single swoop of god-like AI-generated genius.
It’s a hubris that has led Big Tech companies, which until recently were seen as corporate climate leaders with ambitious clean energy goals, to run full-tilt towards oil and gas — powering the rapid expansion of their monstrously energy-hungry AI data centers with natural gas, and holding court with Trump energy officials who deny climate science while championing American fossil fuel “energy dominance.”
To all of this, Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, basically says – Um. No.
Becker’s book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, exposes how tech billionaires’ sci-fi inspired fantasies about ever-more technology making everything, endlessly, better are basically, well — terrible. These billionaires’ promises, in Becker’s careful accounting, veer from what he says is “wildly implausible” to “profoundly immoral” – and ultimately paves the way for a descent into oligarchy.
