More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity | Adam Becker (interview)

Silicon Valley billionaires, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, promise salvation through space colonization, immortality, superintelligent AI, and endless growth. Adam Becker, astrophysicist and author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, debunks these profoundly immoral and biophysically impossible delusions, and explains why resisting them through collective action is essential. Highlights include:

• How tech billionaires confuse science fiction for reality and why their fantasies of space colonization are biophysically impossible;
• Why Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) remains an ill-defined concept that is based in the false assumption that humans’ evolved brains work like computing machines;
• Why large language models (LLMs), the dominant form of AI, are neither creative nor accurate enough to achieve the dreamed-for leap in machine intelligence;
• What the end of Moore’s Law tells us about diminishing returns to technological complexity and the expectation of endless technological growth;
• Why longtermism is a dangerous ideology of technological salvation and endless growth, prioritizing hypothetical future populations while excusing present-day social injustice and ecological destruction;
• How the fear of death underlies techno-utopian off-planet and transhumanist fantasies;
• Why resisting their oligarchic visions requires calling out the ridiculousness of their ideas and organizing collectively to push back both politically and economically.

0:00 Introduction

4:44 Motivations to write the book

9:23 Confusing science fiction for reality

12:37 Musk and Bezos reasons for off-planet plans

15:55 Musk Mars plans are delusional

20:33 Bezos space station plans are delusional

23:34 Kurzweil’s AGI dream

29:27 End of Moore’s Law

34:38 Limits of large language models

36:37 Longtermism perversion of ethics

44:58 Effective accelerationists

48:42 Malcolm and Simone Collins

50:32 Fear of death and technological salvation

53:57 Meaningful democratic resistance

If you want to read a thought-provoking essay/small-“r” rant, @Rushkoff has a good one for you covering collectivism, libertarianism, post-modernism, a newly redefined meta-modernism, and, of course, techno-utopianism https://rushkoff.medium.com/whats-a-meta-for-part-two-e3bed1cf7ec4

#TeamHuman #postmodernism #singularity #Neom #metamodernism #technoutopian

"Against the backdrop of the ever-present #weird, the #technoutopian visions of early #InternetPioneers were taking shape, and being primed for corporate intervention. And this is why #McLuhan’s prescient sound bites pop up throughout #HighWeirdness. The weird and the drugs had been there all along, but now the #mediaecology was connecting people with any and all ideas faster than ever, to the extent that #consciousness became “a tweakable or #hackable #interface.”

https://lithub.com/plunging-into-the-1970s-altered-states-of-awareness/