Introduction

I have just finished an audiobook of Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. In my view it’s a must read. There’s no point in rehashing the perfectly serviceable summary on Amazon, so I will copy and paste it below.

Disconcerting . . . a disturbing and important book’ NEW SCIENTIST

‘Smart and wonderfully readable’ NEW YORK TIMES

The bad science and sinister ideas behind Silicon Valley’s foolish obsession with immortality, AI paradise and limitless growth.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, scientist and writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow to reveal why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the truth is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience. And behind these fanciful visions of space colonies and digital immortality is a cynical power grab, at the expense of essential work spent on solving real problems like the climate crisis.

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful myths that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.

Becker is, like the people he comments on, a materialist. At least that’s how he comes across. This isn’t a criticism. It limits his critique of the people whose ideas he reacts to to being informed, rational and sane. He observes that many of the ideas about immortality and salvation in space echo religious dogma – which is nuts for materialists to be accused of that. The implication is that the present error compounds an earlier one. In terms of dogma this is fair enough, but there’s also the non-materialist foundation of the religious dogma to be considered. This is the great and ancient human legacy that materialists deny utterly. The book does not explore this dimension at all. That’s okay. Becker is devastating enough using reasoned argument grounded in materialism.

The quest for immortality

Becker tells us about Ray Kurzweil who has a passion to upload human intelligence into a technological medium so that it is possible to live forever. I came across Kurzweil ages ago and I have been perplexed ever since at why anyone gives him any credence. 

Becker offered a useful perspective which I will summarise as the delusion of transferred expertise. This is when people who are highly competent in a narrow field assume, and are assumed to have, corresponding competence in unrelated fields. I first came across in 1996 when I was reading UK’s The Guardian. There was an article against psi phenomena being real which quoted the opinion of a Professor of Surgery, with no indication why he might have an opinion on the subject worth listening to. It was obvious from the article that he knew less about psi phenomena than I knew about surgery.

Becker also observed that among the tech boosters there is a confidence that developing expertise in STEM fields confers the requisite capabilities to opine on specialist fields in the humanities. Hence the presumption of a materialist perspective isn’t accompanied by any sense of obligation to determine whether it is likely to be true. There is no intellectual modesty, little informed commentary and a lot of mistaking ideas from sci-fi as gospel.

Is immortality a sensible goal? Is uploading the contents of the human brain into a technological medium a sensible thing to aspire to? Kurzweil evidently would answer ‘Yes’ to both questions. But really?

There are multiple perspectives on the idea of immortality – some simple and others sophisticated. There are also multiple perspectives on what constitutes the human mind – and the nature of the brain. Nothing in what Kurzweil says suggests he has a clue beyond his self-defined challenge, and what he thinks might resonate with fellow materialists who share his biases. But what of those who do not?

This isn’t about a right to believe as you will. It’s about credibility. Adherents to dogmas that deny contrary evidence exists are sensibly not regarded as credible commentators who have something of shared value to communicate. At best they are representative of an interest group. At worst they are talking nonsense to their own in-group and to those who innocently presume they are listening to people who really do know stuff.

Saying they are wrong doesn’t mean we are right

From my animistic perspective the idea that human conscious should be uploaded to a technological medium to secure immortality is misguided on so many levels. This is quite apart from the slight problem of whether it is possible at all.

Materialism is a dogma that has been crafted either in spite of, or in ignorance of, an abundance of evidence that it isn’t true. This isn’t to say that I can come up with a counter dogma that is true. All I can say is that there is a vast abundance of evidence that materialism is an insufficient explanation for human experience. It assigns non-conforming data to a set of negative categories – misperception, misinterpretation, hallucination, error, stupidity, ignorance, carelessness or unsoundness of mind.

This isn’t at all remote from the Christian notion that all non-ordinary phenomena are God-approved or Satan-induced – and the faith has got the right to say which was which.

Any form of genuine inquiry will stimulate the evolution of ideas. Dogmas cannot survive doubt and curiosity. Dogmas survive only when they discourage or forbid curiosity. There is no Truth that must be protected by dogma. 

The fact that some materialists discourage inquiry into the humanities tells us that they believe that they have arrived at ‘The Truth’ and contrary perspectives are not conforming to reason as they see it. The tyranny of dogmatic certainty is well attested to in our history over the past 1,800 years.

As we evolve our understanding of who and what we are, we can only assert what is wrong, and hence to be discarded, on good evidence, and what can be dropped into a yet to be completed jig-saw image of a ‘truthful’ understanding.

I don’t think this jig-saw picture of truth will be completed any time in the foreseeable future. It will remain a work in progress. We can say what does not fit the gaps we have. And to me materialism fits no gaps in my picture. It isn’t a useful tool for truth-seeking about the human experience and about human nature.

Conclusion

Becker’s book peels away the illusory aura of intellectual and moral respectability that the tech salvation movement has disguised itself in. 

The dominance of tech in our lives leaves us vulnerable to its hypnotic gestures. The movement insists that tech is the saving grace of humanity, as if unaware that it is what has put us into every perilous position we must already confront. Of course, it hasn’t done this alone. Human nature has played its part as well. It’s like we are not inherently suited to a tech-heavy setting.

But when tech is the only ‘hammer’ you have or believe in, the whole world just looks like one big bag of nails. Suddenly the ‘purpose’ of human life becomes an adjunct to the tech, rather than it being an enabler of meeting human need. We end up serving it.

The relationship between humans and technology hasn’t been explored sufficiently. It’s a conversation we must have in sufficient depth to generate insights we don’t yet have. The advocates of techno salvation have a well-rehearsed sales pitch that seems persuasive because we haven’t crafted a rich enough protective counter response. We are on the cusp of being conned by people saying they are here to save us. The only thing they want to save is their version of what is good and real and true. Sound familiar? 

I am an audiobook devotee. I get through 4-6 non-fiction books a month. This book, among the many impressive ones I have encountered, is the most important in some years. 

It opens up the potential for conversations we urgently need to get into having about what technology means to us on a collective level. It is strangely about transcending gravity, time and space – moving beyond the confines of the concrete material reality. It is increasingly an analogue of the magical. The themes of our contemporary technology are more and more the themes of magical fantasy – and more and more about making our physical reality an analogue of the animistic.

In many respects the technology we are developing is animistic and magical. We are making our devices informed, communicative and responsive. We could take the ‘artificial’ out of AI and it would make sense to an animist – but not a materialist. There’s a lingering ‘god-like’ sense that materialists cling to – as if, in throwing away theism, they cannot surrender a lust for power and status. Does it really come down just to egos? 

I cannot assert that my sense of animism is the perfect counterpoint to materialistic techno salvation. But it is a legitimate jig-saw puzzle piece that has a place in the final picture. I am open to hearing compelling arguments that materialism can claim the same thing. I am listening.