#adam-becker — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #adam-becker, aggregated by home.social.
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We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: / taylorlorenz The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. We cover:Why humans will literally NEVER live on MarsThe biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solveThe truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plansWhy Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as realityHow AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrativeWhy investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it
While I'd personally avoid words like 'impossible' or 'never' applied to humanity as a whole, I absolutely think these words can be applied to Musk and Bezos as is discussed here. And I think from the larger context of the discussion in this video, that even Taylor and Adam are more intending these words in this more limited context, given that they briefly discuss the possibility of some of these problems being solved with some far future technology.
I think some of the problems discussed here, especially the things involved in building a Mars colony, are not so much impossible in general but impossible specifically under capitalism. That is not discussed in this video, though they do briefly discuss colonialism. The focus of the video is on the scientific and technical problems of space travel. They bring up a lot of the problems I've discussed in some of my earlier posts. I haven't read it, but if you want to get more detail on these issues, More Everything Forever by Adam Becker might be worth a read. -
A Physicist Destroy's Elon Musk's Mars Fantasy
We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: / taylorlorenz The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. We cover:Why humans will literally NEVER live on MarsThe biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solveThe truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plansWhy Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as realityHow AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrativeWhy investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: / taylorlorenz
While I'd personally avoid words like 'impossible' or 'never' applied to humanity as a whole, I absolutely think these words can be applied to Musk and Bezos as is discussed here. And I think from the larger context of the discussion in this video, that even Taylor and Adam are more intending these words in this more limited context, given that they briefly discuss the possibility of some of these problems being solved with some far future technology.
I think some of the problems discussed here, especially the things involved in building a Mars colony, are not so much impossible in general but impossible specifically under capitalism. That is not discussed in this video, though they do briefly discuss colonialism. The focus of the video is on the scientific and technical problems of space travel. They bring up a lot of the problems I've discussed in some of my Pillowfort posts. I haven't read it, but if you want to get more detail on these issues, More Everything Forever by Adam Becker might be worth a read. -
We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: / taylorlorenz The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. We cover:Why humans will literally NEVER live on MarsThe biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solveThe truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plansWhy Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as realityHow AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrativeWhy investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it
While I'd personally avoid words like 'impossible' or 'never' applied to humanity as a whole, I absolutely think these words can be applied to Musk and Bezos as is discussed here. And I think from the larger context of the discussion in this video, that even Taylor and Adam are more intending these words in this more limited context, given that they briefly discuss the possibility of some of these problems being solved with some far future technology.
I think some of the problems discussed here, especially the things involved in building a Mars colony, are not so much impossible in general but impossible specifically under capitalism. That is not discussed in this video, though they do briefly discuss colonialism. The focus of the video is on the scientific and technical problems of space travel. They bring up a lot of the problems I've discussed in some of my earlier posts. I haven't read it, but if you want to get more detail on these issues, More Everything Forever by Adam Becker might be worth a read. -
A Physicist Destroy's Elon Musk's Mars Fantasy
We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: / taylorlorenz The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. We cover:Why humans will literally NEVER live on MarsThe biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solveThe truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plansWhy Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as realityHow AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrativeWhy investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: / taylorlorenz
While I'd personally avoid words like 'impossible' or 'never' applied to humanity as a whole, I absolutely think these words can be applied to Musk and Bezos as is discussed here. And I think from the larger context of the discussion in this video, that even Taylor and Adam are more intending these words in this more limited context, given that they briefly discuss the possibility of some of these problems being solved with some far future technology.
I think some of the problems discussed here, especially the things involved in building a Mars colony, are not so much impossible in general but impossible specifically under capitalism. That is not discussed in this video, though they do briefly discuss colonialism. The focus of the video is on the scientific and technical problems of space travel. They bring up a lot of the problems I've discussed in some of my Pillowfort posts. I haven't read it, but if you want to get more detail on these issues, More Everything Forever by Adam Becker might be worth a read. -
We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: / taylorlorenz The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. We cover:Why humans will literally NEVER live on MarsThe biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solveThe truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plansWhy Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as realityHow AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrativeWhy investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it
While I'd personally avoid words like 'impossible' or 'never' applied to humanity as a whole, I absolutely think these words can be applied to Musk and Bezos as is discussed here. And I think from the larger context of the discussion in this video, that even Taylor and Adam are more intending these words in this more limited context, given that they briefly discuss the possibility of some of these problems being solved with some far future technology.
I think some of the problems discussed here, especially the things involved in building a Mars colony, are not so much impossible in general but impossible specifically under capitalism. That is not discussed in this video, though they do briefly discuss colonialism. The focus of the video is on the scientific and technical problems of space travel. They bring up a lot of the problems I've discussed in some of my earlier posts. I haven't read it, but if you want to get more detail on these issues, More Everything Forever by Adam Becker might be worth a read. -
This is pretty good. Lots about longtermism, singularitarianism, and effective altruism (now *there's* a wild misnomer), if you've ever wondered what drives these big-tech weirdos with god complexes
#reading #books #BigTech #AdamBecker #SiliconValley #AI #ethics #tech
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This is pretty good. Lots about longtermism, singularitarianism, and effective altruism (now *there's* a wild misnomer), if you've ever wondered what drives these big-tech weirdos with god complexes
#reading #books #BigTech #AdamBecker #SiliconValley #AI #ethics #tech
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This is pretty good. Lots about longtermism, singularitarianism, and effective altruism (now *there's* a wild misnomer), if you've ever wondered what drives these big-tech weirdos with god complexes
#reading #books #BigTech #AdamBecker #SiliconValley #AI #ethics #tech
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This is pretty good. Lots about longtermism, singularitarianism, and effective altruism (now *there's* a wild misnomer), if you've ever wondered what drives these big-tech weirdos with god complexes
#reading #books #BigTech #AdamBecker #SiliconValley #AI #ethics #tech
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This is pretty good. Lots about longtermism, singularitarianism, and effective altruism (now *there's* a wild misnomer), if you've ever wondered what drives these big-tech weirdos with god complexes
#reading #books #BigTech #AdamBecker #SiliconValley #AI #ethics #tech
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Author of "Enshittification," #CoryDoctorow and #AdamBecker, author of "More Everything Forever," discussed big #tech, artificial intelligence, and their place in today's society.
#cspan #video #transcript #ai
https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/2025-brooklyn-book-festival-big-tech-in-todays-society/668446 -
Author of "Enshittification," #CoryDoctorow and #AdamBecker, author of "More Everything Forever," discussed big #tech, artificial intelligence, and their place in today's society.
#cspan #video #transcript #ai
https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/2025-brooklyn-book-festival-big-tech-in-todays-society/668446 -
Author of "Enshittification," #CoryDoctorow and #AdamBecker, author of "More Everything Forever," discussed big #tech, artificial intelligence, and their place in today's society.
#cspan #video #transcript #ai
https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/2025-brooklyn-book-festival-big-tech-in-todays-society/668446 -
Author of "Enshittification," #CoryDoctorow and #AdamBecker, author of "More Everything Forever," discussed big #tech, artificial intelligence, and their place in today's society.
#cspan #video #transcript #ai
https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/2025-brooklyn-book-festival-big-tech-in-todays-society/668446 -
Author of "Enshittification," #CoryDoctorow and #AdamBecker, author of "More Everything Forever," discussed big #tech, artificial intelligence, and their place in today's society.
#cspan #video #transcript #ai
https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/2025-brooklyn-book-festival-big-tech-in-todays-society/668446 -
I just finished reading "More Everything Forever" by Adam Becker.
It explores the delusions of tech CEOs, the philosophers they follow, and the sycophants and zealots who cling uncritically to their every whim.
TL; DR:
- AGI won't happen
- space colonisation won't happen
- billionaires must not existThanks to @briankrebs for the recommendation!
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I just finished reading "More Everything Forever" by Adam Becker.
It explores the delusions of tech CEOs, the philosophers they follow, and the sycophants and zealots who cling uncritically to their every whim.
TL; DR:
- AGI won't happen
- space colonisation won't happen
- billionaires must not existThanks to @briankrebs for the recommendation!
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I just finished reading "More Everything Forever" by Adam Becker.
It explores the delusions of tech CEOs, the philosophers they follow, and the sycophants and zealots who cling uncritically to their every whim.
TL; DR:
- AGI won't happen
- space colonisation won't happen
- billionaires must not existThanks to @briankrebs for the recommendation!
-
I just finished reading "More Everything Forever" by Adam Becker.
It explores the delusions of tech CEOs, the philosophers they follow, and the sycophants and zealots who cling uncritically to their every whim.
TL; DR:
- AGI won't happen
- space colonisation won't happen
- billionaires must not existThanks to @briankrebs for the recommendation!
-
I just finished reading "More Everything Forever" by Adam Becker.
It explores the delusions of tech CEOs, the philosophers they follow, and the sycophants and zealots who cling uncritically to their every whim.
TL; DR:
- AGI won't happen
- space colonisation won't happen
- billionaires must not existThanks to @briankrebs for the recommendation!
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AI doomsday and AI heaven: live forever in AI God
Full text: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-doomsday-and-ai-heaven-live-forever-in-ai-god/
I get a lot of requests for a piece on the AI 2027 paper. That’s the one that draws a lot of lines going up on a graph to show we’re getting a genuine artificial general intelligence by 2027! Then it kills us all.
But the important thing about AI 2027 is that it comes straight from the hardcore AI doomsday cult nutcases.#Singularity #AdamBecker #AI2027 #EffectiveAltruism #EliezerYudkowsky #LessWrong
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AI doomsday and AI heaven: live forever in AI God
I get a lot of requests for a piece on the AI 2027 paper. That’s the one that draws a lot of lines going up on a graph to show we’re getting a genuine artificial general intelligence by 2027! Then it kills us all. [AI 2027] But the important thing about AI 2027 is that […]
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-doomsday-and-ai-heaven-live-forever-in-ai-god/
#Singularity #AdamBecker #AI2027 #EffectiveAltruism #EliezerYudkowsky #LessWrong -
AI doomsday and AI heaven: live forever in AI God
I get a lot of requests for a piece on the AI 2027 paper. That’s the one that draws a lot of lines going up on a graph to show we’re getting a genuine artificial general intelligence by 2027! Then it kills us all. [AI 2027] But the important thing about AI 2027 is that […]
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-doomsday-and-ai-heaven-live-forever-in-ai-god/
#Singularity #AdamBecker #AI2027 #EffectiveAltruism #EliezerYudkowsky #LessWrong -
Harvard Gazette: Know how those tech moguls want us to go to Mars? Ignore them.. “Tech billionaires promoting space exploration and colonization as the solution to humanity’s problems should be ignored, says Adam Becker. These CEOs have little to no expertise in engineering or astrophysics and have little to support their arguments beyond money, according to Becker, an astrophysicist, […]
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Harvard Gazette: Know how those tech moguls want us to go to Mars? Ignore them.. “Tech billionaires promoting space exploration and colonization as the solution to humanity’s problems should be ignored, says Adam Becker. These CEOs have little to no expertise in engineering or astrophysics and have little to support their arguments beyond money, according to Becker, an astrophysicist, […]
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Harvard Gazette: Know how those tech moguls want us to go to Mars? Ignore them.. “Tech billionaires promoting space exploration and colonization as the solution to humanity’s problems should be ignored, says Adam Becker. These CEOs have little to no expertise in engineering or astrophysics and have little to support their arguments beyond money, according to Becker, an astrophysicist, […]
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Harvard Gazette: Know how those tech moguls want us to go to Mars? Ignore them.. “Tech billionaires promoting space exploration and colonization as the solution to humanity’s problems should be ignored, says Adam Becker. These CEOs have little to no expertise in engineering or astrophysics and have little to support their arguments beyond money, according to Becker, an astrophysicist, […]
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This is sobering and illuminating: astrophysicist and author Adam Becker exposes the #flaws and outright #lies in #SiliconValley ideology, including the tech bros' obsessions with #Mars, #AI, and #immortality. 👨🏽💻
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
#interviews #ArsTechnica #technology #capitalism #oligarchy #TechOligarchy #AdamBecker #ArsTechnica #singularity #books #RecommendedReading -
This is sobering and illuminating: astrophysicist and author Adam Becker exposes the #flaws and outright #lies in #SiliconValley ideology, including the tech bros' obsessions with #Mars, #AI, and #immortality. 👨🏽💻
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
#interviews #ArsTechnica #technology #capitalism #oligarchy #TechOligarchy #AdamBecker #ArsTechnica #singularity #books #RecommendedReading -
This is sobering and illuminating: astrophysicist and author Adam Becker exposes the #flaws and outright #lies in #SiliconValley ideology, including the tech bros' obsessions with #Mars, #AI, and #immortality. 👨🏽💻
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
#interviews #ArsTechnica #technology #capitalism #oligarchy #TechOligarchy #AdamBecker #ArsTechnica #singularity #books #RecommendedReading -
This is sobering and illuminating: astrophysicist and author Adam Becker exposes the #flaws and outright #lies in #SiliconValley ideology, including the tech bros' obsessions with #Mars, #AI, and #immortality. 👨🏽💻
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
#interviews #ArsTechnica #technology #capitalism #oligarchy #TechOligarchy #AdamBecker #ArsTechnica #singularity #books #RecommendedReading -
This is sobering and illuminating: astrophysicist and author Adam Becker exposes the #flaws and outright #lies in #SiliconValley ideology, including the tech bros' obsessions with #Mars, #AI, and #immortality. 👨🏽💻
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
#interviews #ArsTechnica #technology #capitalism #oligarchy #TechOligarchy #AdamBecker #ArsTechnica #singularity #books #RecommendedReading -
The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity
Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525:
trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation of a human brain in a computer. . . . If you have a small difference in the information your eye is giving your brain and your ear is giving your brain, that’s already an awful feeling. It’s like seasickness, and nausea, or different types of pain. So what we’re promising to do here is to create thousands or millions of instances of sentient beings in computers that are probably suffering horribly, and are just going to get turned off. I mean, you could see this really macabre process of creating—if you imagine you can—sentient things in computers. There’s a lot of things to get wrong. And those outcomes are terrible.
What’s striking is how these ‘terrible’ outcomes are presented as a detail about implementation. They are a stepping stone, part of the journey, rather than something which might lead us to pause. If uploading is happening at scale, might these not be billions of souls tortured before being put out of their misery, like the digital hells conceived of by Iain M Banks which still haunt me fifteen years after I read the book?
They are presumably licensed by the outcome of infinite life for an infinite humanity. But if millions of instances of torture are licensed by the goodness of the outcome then what wouldn’t be? What more mundane viciousness and injuries might be enacted in pursuit of digital transcendence? I always thought the TESCREAL stuff was slightly overstated, in the sense of taking the intellectual games of digital elites too seriously, but I’m starting to revise that opinion.
What if this did become the dominant ideology amongst the most powerful people in the world, as opposed to something they like discussing when they’re high at parties? How would the goal of transcendence they conceived play out against a backdrop of spiralling inequality, social unravelling and climate chaos? It makes me want to go back to Peter Frase’s Four Futures and suggest a Fifth future, not quite what he called eliminativism but something close to it.
As Becker goes on to observe, Kurzweil’s vision of a universe subordinated to computation is colonialism on a vast scale, which unlike the mass psychological torture which precedes our glorious digital futures (whoops!) the guru only implicitly recognises, even as he insists that restraint would be exercised to prevent the entirety of existence becoming grist to the computational mill. From loc 1534:
There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would be the end of nature, colonialism on a universal scale, with entire galaxies’ worth of planets and stars chewed up to provide more computing power for the digital remnants of humanity. Hence Kurzweil’s insistence that alien life is unlikely: it is an assurance that the universe is ours for the taking, with nobody else there to worry about.
And it’s also one in which coding would be the ultimate form of power, creating a universe where one imagines it would be quite a good life for a principle researcher at Google and his descendants. From loc 1652:
With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.
Fun fact: I just found out Kurzweil is married to a psychotherapist who he credits here for “her love, guidance and insight into the interpersonal world” (my emphasis). I would be genuinely curious as to whether/how she interprets Kurzweil’s attachment to the Singularity and whether they discuss these ideas in psychodynamic terms.
#AdamBecker #climateCrisis #digitalElites #IainMBanks #ideology #postNeoliberalCivics #postNeoliberalism #postpandemicCivics #RayKurzweil #singularity #TESCREAL #transcendence
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The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity
Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525:
trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation of a human brain in a computer. . . . If you have a small difference in the information your eye is giving your brain and your ear is giving your brain, that’s already an awful feeling. It’s like seasickness, and nausea, or different types of pain. So what we’re promising to do here is to create thousands or millions of instances of sentient beings in computers that are probably suffering horribly, and are just going to get turned off. I mean, you could see this really macabre process of creating—if you imagine you can—sentient things in computers. There’s a lot of things to get wrong. And those outcomes are terrible.
What’s striking is how these ‘terrible’ outcomes are presented as a detail about implementation. They are a stepping stone, part of the journey, rather than something which might lead us to pause. If uploading is happening at scale, might these not be billions of souls tortured before being put out of their misery, like the digital hells conceived of by Iain M Banks which still haunt me fifteen years after I read the book?
They are presumably licensed by the outcome of infinite life for an infinite humanity. But if millions of instances of torture are licensed by the goodness of the outcome then what wouldn’t be? What more mundane viciousness and injuries might be enacted in pursuit of digital transcendence? I always thought the TESCREAL stuff was slightly overstated, in the sense of taking the intellectual games of digital elites too seriously, but I’m starting to revise that opinion.
What if this did become the dominant ideology amongst the most powerful people in the world, as opposed to something they like discussing when they’re high at parties? How would the goal of transcendence they conceived play out against a backdrop of spiralling inequality, social unravelling and climate chaos? It makes me want to go back to Peter Frase’s Four Futures and suggest a Fifth future, not quite what he called eliminativism but something close to it.
As Becker goes on to observe, Kurzweil’s vision of a universe subordinated to computation is colonialism on a vast scale, which unlike the mass psychological torture which precedes our glorious digital futures (whoops!) the guru only implicitly recognises, even as he insists that restraint would be exercised to prevent the entirety of existence becoming grist to the computational mill. From loc 1534:
There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would be the end of nature, colonialism on a universal scale, with entire galaxies’ worth of planets and stars chewed up to provide more computing power for the digital remnants of humanity. Hence Kurzweil’s insistence that alien life is unlikely: it is an assurance that the universe is ours for the taking, with nobody else there to worry about.
And it’s also one in which coding would be the ultimate form of power, creating a universe where one imagines it would be quite a good life for a principle researcher at Google and his descendants. From loc 1652:
With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.
Fun fact: I just found out Kurzweil is married to a psychotherapist who he credits here for “her love, guidance and insight into the interpersonal world” (my emphasis). I would be genuinely curious as to whether/how she interprets Kurzweil’s attachment to the Singularity and whether they discuss these ideas in psychodynamic terms.
#AdamBecker #climateCrisis #digitalElites #IainMBanks #ideology #postNeoliberalCivics #postNeoliberalism #postpandemicCivics #RayKurzweil #singularity #TESCREAL #transcendence
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The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity
Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525:
trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation of a human brain in a computer. . . . If you have a small difference in the information your eye is giving your brain and your ear is giving your brain, that’s already an awful feeling. It’s like seasickness, and nausea, or different types of pain. So what we’re promising to do here is to create thousands or millions of instances of sentient beings in computers that are probably suffering horribly, and are just going to get turned off. I mean, you could see this really macabre process of creating—if you imagine you can—sentient things in computers. There’s a lot of things to get wrong. And those outcomes are terrible.
What’s striking is how these ‘terrible’ outcomes are presented as a detail about implementation. They are a stepping stone, part of the journey, rather than something which might lead us to pause. If uploading is happening at scale, might these not be billions of souls tortured before being put out of their misery, like the digital hells conceived of by Iain M Banks which still haunt me fifteen years after I read the book?
They are presumably licensed by the outcome of infinite life for an infinite humanity. But if millions of instances of torture are licensed by the goodness of the outcome then what wouldn’t be? What more mundane viciousness and injuries might be enacted in pursuit of digital transcendence? I always thought the TESCREAL stuff was slightly overstated, in the sense of taking the intellectual games of digital elites too seriously, but I’m starting to revise that opinion.
What if this did become the dominant ideology amongst the most powerful people in the world, as opposed to something they like discussing when they’re high at parties? How would the goal of transcendence they conceived play out against a backdrop of spiralling inequality, social unravelling and climate chaos? It makes me want to go back to Peter Frase’s Four Futures and suggest a Fifth future, not quite what he called eliminativism but something close to it.
As Becker goes on to observe, Kurzweil’s vision of a universe subordinated to computation is colonialism on a vast scale, which unlike the mass psychological torture which precedes our glorious digital futures (whoops!) the guru only implicitly recognises, even as he insists that restraint would be exercised to prevent the entirety of existence becoming grist to the computational mill. From loc 1534:
There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would be the end of nature, colonialism on a universal scale, with entire galaxies’ worth of planets and stars chewed up to provide more computing power for the digital remnants of humanity. Hence Kurzweil’s insistence that alien life is unlikely: it is an assurance that the universe is ours for the taking, with nobody else there to worry about.
And it’s also one in which coding would be the ultimate form of power, creating a universe where one imagines it would be quite a good life for a principle researcher at Google and his descendants. From loc 1652:
With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.
Fun fact: I just found out Kurzweil is married to a psychotherapist who he credits here for “her love, guidance and insight into the interpersonal world” (my emphasis). I would be genuinely curious as to whether/how she interprets Kurzweil’s attachment to the Singularity and whether they discuss these ideas in psychodynamic terms.
#AdamBecker #climateCrisis #digitalElites #IainMBanks #ideology #postNeoliberalCivics #postNeoliberalism #postpandemicCivics #RayKurzweil #singularity #TESCREAL #transcendence
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Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?
I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398:
And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We Owe the Future was published.
Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill has built a hugely influential philosophical movement on the moral application of our knowledge about the world. In its more recent Longtermist variant this rests on weighing knowledge, even if fuzzy, about the long term trajectory of human civilisation against present concerns.
Yet Will MacAskill was old friends with billionaire crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who he was repeatedly warned about and who supported his organisations with tens of billions of dollars. If he couldn’t act morally in relation to the substantial weight of evidence about SBF’s malfeasance then why should anyone have confidence in his capacity to act morally in relation to the deeply speculative knowledge of the future he assigns great importance to?
#AdamBecker #digitalElites #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #SamBankmanFried #WillMacAskill
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Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?
I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398:
And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We Owe the Future was published.
Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill has built a hugely influential philosophical movement on the moral application of our knowledge about the world. In its more recent Longtermist variant this rests on weighing knowledge, even if fuzzy, about the long term trajectory of human civilisation against present concerns.
Yet Will MacAskill was old friends with billionaire crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who he was repeatedly warned about and who supported his organisations with tens of billions of dollars. If he couldn’t act morally in relation to the substantial weight of evidence about SBF’s malfeasance then why should anyone have confidence in his capacity to act morally in relation to the deeply speculative knowledge of the future he assigns great importance to?
#AdamBecker #digitalElites #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #SamBankmanFried #WillMacAskill
-
Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?
I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398:
And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We Owe the Future was published.
Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill has built a hugely influential philosophical movement on the moral application of our knowledge about the world. In its more recent Longtermist variant this rests on weighing knowledge, even if fuzzy, about the long term trajectory of human civilisation against present concerns.
Yet Will MacAskill was old friends with billionaire crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who he was repeatedly warned about and who supported his organisations with tens of billions of dollars. If he couldn’t act morally in relation to the substantial weight of evidence about SBF’s malfeasance then why should anyone have confidence in his capacity to act morally in relation to the deeply speculative knowledge of the future he assigns great importance to?
#AdamBecker #digitalElites #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #SamBankmanFried #WillMacAskill
