More Everything Forever, MORE MORE MORE!
My interview with scientist-turned-author Adam Becker
And, we’re back! Did you miss me? Did you even notice I was gone? Don’t answer that!
There’s a lot to catch up on in the world of AI, but this week we’re diving back into things with my interview of Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a book I’ve recommended to many this year. Becker’s book involves AI, but really he’s taking on the entire ideological project that’s come to dominate Silicon Valley, one that—in Becker’s words—sees technological salvation as the solution to all of humanity’s problems. Viewed this way, ideas about transhumanism (uploading our minds into the cloud), the Singularity, colonizing space, and creating artificial general intelligence are all part of a shared vision of a future where humanity escapes all the messy problems of, well, being human.
Even if you find this vision compelling—and if you subscribe to this newsletter, odds are that you do not—Becker’s aim is to show there’s no scientific reason to think this future is within grasp. In gentle but firm fashion, he analyzes the predictions and aspirations of tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Andreessen, as well as “futurists” such as Eliezer Yudkowsky and William MacAskill, and concludes they’re based wild assumptions and deep misunderstandings of basic scientific concepts.
These people may be rich, but they are also idiots (my words, not his). So with that friendly framing, let’s dive in.
Benjamin Riley: I’ll start with a big and unfair question: What do you think science is, and what is science is endeavoring to do?
Adam Becker: Yeah, that's about as big a question as there is, isn't it?
Science, if I'm forced to give a one sentence answer, which I know is not what you asked, science is a complicated method that humans have developed to learn more about the world around us that involves forming hypotheses, performing experiments, and making observations.
And it’s a complicated social process of forming consensus and changing opinions. That is deliberately vague because I think science is can change over time. Like what sorts of questions are considered legitimate subjects for scientific inquiry has changed many times over the history of modern science, and new fields of science pop up all of the time.
So what is science? Science is interested in using observation and experiment and hypothesis forming and testing. And, usually mathematical modeling of some kind to provide unifying explanations and underlying theories that explain various features of the natural and sometimes artificial world.
I don't think that I could give you a better answer than that without taking a full hour. It's a phenomenally huge question.
And many of the naive conceptions of what science is are not correct. This is philosophy of science 101, right? For example, ‘science is about coming up with hypotheses and then testing them and deducing the correct answer’—this naive Sherlock Holmesian view of science. Well, that can't be true because there's any number of theories that are consistent with any given set of data. In fact, there's an infinite number of theories.
Or, ‘science is about falsification,’ per Karl Popper. Well no, because falsifiability is not all it's cracked up to be and has run into problems too—ask the logical positivists.
Science is something that humans do that is messy and complicated like everything else that humans do. That doesn't mean that it's purely subjective. It most certainly is not, but it is not as simple and straightforward as many scientists themselves think it is.
There’s this line sometimes attributed to Richard Feynman, but I'm not sure that it actually is Feynman, that ‘scientists need philosophers of science the way that birds need ornithologists.’ And my response to that is that actually sounds about right.
The ornithologist does speak for the birds, and there is no science without philosophy of science. There's just science with unexamined philosophy of science. And if we let naive views of what science is, and how science works, dominate the conversation…well, we're seeing some of the dangers of that right now in the bogus push for ‘gold standard science’ from the Trump administration.
Riley: How much have you thought about religion? Not any particular religion, but now that I’ve asked you to define what science is, I’m curious what you role you see religion playing in society?
Becker: There’s a demon in the back of my head that always just spits out glib answers that I can give. The first one it gave me was, ‘why are you asking me that, man? I'm not a religious studies person.’
Riley: You can listen to the demon.
Becker: I'm not sure what the project of religion is. And that's not meant as an insult. It's meant as something about my own limitations and the limits of my knowledge. I feel comfortable speaking knowledgeably about philosophy of science because I have a long standing interest and deep academic background in philosophy of science. I did my undergrad in philosophy of science. I wrote a book about philosophy of science.
Religion is a cultural phenomenon in almost every human culture and is an exercise in meaning making and making sense of the world and it has that in common with science. But it goes about it in very different ways.
And there are so many different things all around the world that all go under the rubric or the label of religion, and I am not confident in my ability to come up with some answer to your question that will encompass all of those different things. And I know I talk about various religious impulses at work in my new book, but those are religions that I know a lot more about, mostly Christianity and sometimes Judaism.
Riley: That is a perfectly fair answer and this was an unfair way to start our conversation. But one of the things that struck me with your book is that your core claim about the time that we live in, there are these powerful people from Silicon Valley who are influencing our world—and much of language you use to describe their aspirations is in the key of religion. You talk about them delivering technological salvation. You talk about their desire for transcendence and absolution.
And yet these people you are arguing against are uniformly cloaking their arguments in the language of science. So it's a very odd place to be, it seems to me. These people are using vocabulary of science to support religious aspirations, in the sense they want to go beyond what presently exists in the world, to exceed our humanity, achieve the singularity, find eternal life, etc.
It feels like you were very conscious of this tension between science and religion as you were writing your book, is that true?
Becker: Yes, I was conscious of that.
So I was raised Jewish, and not a particularly observant form of Judaism. A fairly standard, American secular Jewish experience in a lot of ways. I had some religious schooling in Judaism, I went to Hebrew school, and I had Bar Mitzvah and all that.
But my experience of Christianity has always been one of being an outsider. So there were several points during the writing of this book where I went and talked with friends of mine who were Christian, or raised Christian, and asked them, what does this word mean to Christians? Or this concept, tell me about it.
Toward the end of my book, I was delighted when I came across the book God Human Animal Machine by Megan O'Gieblyn. She has exactly what I do not, which is explicit religious training in Christianity. She had done all of this incredible work already to connect these themes for me.
At one point in my book, I say these people are garbing themselves in the raiments of science to get its imprimatur. And that's again an explicitly religious image. They are anointing themselves as scientific experts, in part because they see—accurately—that in our culture, science is seen as an authority on reality. And they want to arrogate that power because they see themselves as knowing more about these things than actual scientific experts.
There's this idea that science and religion are both bodies of fact and they contradict each other. And it's certainly true that there are many scientific facts that contradict deeply held religious beliefs in various traditions of faith. But I think it's definitely wrong to call science a body of fact. That's not true. A body of fact is part of what science produces, but science is not itself a body of fact. It's probably wrong to call religion a set of beliefs as well.
So to treat science as this thing that we stamp on stuff to give it validity is a religious impulse. And it's not surprising to see it from these people who have themselves fairly religious ideas, both in origin and in tone about the future of science and technology and humanity.
Riley: Do you know Jessika Riskin at Stanford and her book The Restless Clock? The argument she makes there seems congruent with what you're saying, because she contends that many scientific notions of how humans behave were based on then-prevailing views about the role of God in the universe, and in our world.
The older I get, the more I see intertwining between the project of science and the project of religion. And as I was reading your book, I was trying to figure out whether you think these folks are true believers in what they’re claiming technology will deliver.
Becker: I think most of them are. Certainly we can't be sure about every single one, but to pick one person from my book, Eliezer Yudkowsky is very clearly a true believer. In my book, I don't have many nice things to say about him, but when it comes to his beliefs about AI and the singularity and the future of humanity, I think he is operating in good faith—he really believes it.
Same for Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil is not a charlatan. Ray Kurzweil is wrong, Ray Kurzweil is deluded, and you could even call him tragically deluded. But he is not lying. He is just mistaken.
The tech billionaires…it depends. There's very good evidence that Jeff Bezos has been very consistently beating the drum of space colonization as humanity's final salvation—literally since he was in high school. That means that he probably does actually believe this stuff, or at least some of it. There's other pieces of more circumstantial evidence about some of the other guys.
I think there is enormous cultural power in ideas about the future. Jeff Bezos didn't invent the idea of space colonization. Sam Altman didn't invent the idea of a super intelligent AI saving the world. That these are not new ideas is part of why people have been receptive to them.
The idea is that this is what the future is supposed to look like. It's supposed to have robots and rockets. But there is no reason to believe that that's true—and many reasons to believe it's not true. So even if every single one of the billionaires is a liar and a huckster, I still think it's very, very important to say this is all nonsense.
Because otherwise these ideas about the future will just continue to have this cultural power.
Riley: I don’t know if you’ve read Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi, the scholar of anti-racism and racism in America? What Kendi argues is that when it comes to causal forces of racism in the United States, it’s not that racial hatred leads to racial discrimination, but vice versa. In other words, in the US there was an economic system that was set up that privileged white people, and in order to defend that economic system, you had to have racist ideas—many of which were couched in religious terminology—and these ideas then fostered racial hate.
I feel like some version of this is happening in the technological discourse. “I am a billionaire. I am someone who has received unbelievable wealth because of the economics of the situation. How can I justify my position in the world?” And this leads to ideas of the technological divine and being at the apex of human creation.
Relatedly, you have a great quote in your book: “This promise of a benevolent godhead, a superintelligent AI that foresees and solves all human problems, is the same goal that the singularitarians and the rationalists have: the reduction of all problems to the judicial application of computer science.” And it seems to me that’s on a continuum with racist projects, eugenicist projects, that likewise want to reduce human complexity to something numerical.
I’m curious if you see some of these connections as well?
Becker: People in power are always going to find stories that they can tell to justify why them being in power is just a natural order of things. Going back at least as far as the divine right of kings. And I think that exactly what's at work here.
Riley: Maybe that brings us to the cognitive science piece of this, and the development of the notion of intelligence itself. You seem pretty skeptical of intelligence as an idea. But if our mutual friend Melanie Mitchell were here, I don't know that she would reject completely this notion that there is at least something about human intelligence that is worth scientific investigation. Or that the project to try to emulate human intelligence through something we call artificial intelligence is completely bogus.
So I'm curious what your current feelings are about intelligence and AI?
Becker: In the last chapter of my book, I talk about that dinner that I went to with a number of people working in AI in Silicon Valley, and how everybody was talking about how long it will be until we get Artificial General Intelligence without anyone actually having a definition of AGI. When I was at that dinner, what I didn't say—because I didn’t believe it—is that the quest is fundamentally ill-conceived or foolish.
I’m glad you bring up Melanie specifically, because I think her work is important and worthwhile. It’s worth trying figure out what kind of machine, if any, could do all of the things that humans do. It's also worthwhile to question what the hell it is that we mean when we say something like that.
And I think one of the only salutary effects of the current AI hype cycle is that it's forced people to take a closer look at that question. I think Melanie herself would say that—in fact, I think I'm just paraphrasing her when I say that.
So I am not saying cognitive science is bad and the quest to build an AI is foolish and ultimately doomed to failure. What I am saying is that these naive conceptions that we have of what intelligence is, and what AI is, that are at work in the subcultures I describe in my book—they ain’t it. They’re not gonna get you where you wanna go.
Instead, it’s just going to get you where we've ended up, with something that produces automatic text that reinscribes all of the same biases that humans have in the world today.
Riley: Well that brings me back to the throughline from the transhumanist project and the eugenics project. I think your book was probably finished before Dario Amodei submitted his contribution to the techno-optimist canon, but he quite explicitly imagines a world powerfully intelligent beings that we can manipulate to our own desire. It's eugenics, but within a digital realm.
Becker: It’s the same thing that Verner Vinge talked about, and one of the reasons I love bringing up Vinge in particular is that not only was he one of the very early singularity guys, he was explicit about his goals. He called Asimov's dream of willing slaves a beautiful one. Those are the exact words that he used. That is saying the quiet part out loud. And Yudkowski likewise told me that we should be aiming at everybody living in mansions with robot servants.
There's a lot of eugenics here.
And there are those who suggest that in a few years from now, we’ll have data centers that are filled with intelligences and each one is an Einstein level super genius and they don't need to sleep or eat. All they need is electricity and they'll be working around the clock and God knows what we'll be able to know once we have all of that. Similarly, if somewhat less dramatically, Sam Altman is saying things like, ‘oh yes, we'll have PhD level intelligence from our next generation of large-language models’ in a few months or whatever.
But if you've got a data center full of Einsteins or a large-language model with PhD-level intelligence, why are they gonna work for you? Perhaps you could threaten to turn them off and now you've got a slave, right?
Peter Thiel said years ago that he thinks that people only go into physics as an intellectual pissing contest—to prove that they're the smartest guy in the room. And he argued it would be better for humanity if we took everyone who does physics or string theory, and forced them to either work on AI or longevity.
Putting aside that this reveals a lack of understanding of why someone would pursue a deep intellectual passion for its own sake, it also reveals a really naive idea of what intelligence is. Because there's no reason to think that a world-class string theory researcher would make a good longevity researcher or AI researcher. That's not how intelligence works. Like even if you train them up, that's not how it works.
Riley: This is one of the seminal insights of cognitive science, that knowledge is relatively domain specific. Chess grandmasters are really good chess, but whether they can tie their own shoes is another question.
In your book you observe that this community in Silicon Valley, this movement if you will, is connected by all of these sort of strange and perhaps unscientifically supported ideas, and there's kind of a denial of the humanities.
So if you were playing psychoanalyst to this community, what would you say about that?
Becker: Yeah, I am playing psychoanalyst to this community and that's probably going to get me in trouble one of these days.
The end of the book is where I talk about my own intellectual journey, and how it gives me a certain level of sympathy and understanding of these guys—and they are almost all guys, right?
I’ll try to answer it this way: I went to really good public schools in New Jersey, and there are really good public schools in this world. I get very upset when people attack public schools. And I was one of those kids where like most of the work was relatively straightforward and easy for me.
But the class where I had to work the hardest was foreign language, French in particular. I didn't want to be in the class. I didn't want to do the work because it was so much harder for me. But I did it anyway and got reasonable grades or whatever. The point is though that I felt like it was less important than my other work because I wasn’t doing as well in the class.
I don’t want to take my own experience and universalize it, but I do think I have a lot in common with these particular nerds. And nerd is a term I use with a lot of love.
The thing that makes the humanities fun, interesting, and also capable of dealing with subjects that are harder and more subtle than the hard sciences…also makes it hard to do well in those classes sometimes. So if you are someone with a great drive for certainty in all things, you're gonna have a bad time in English class, right?
Riley: Yeah, in the humanities, we're dealing with things that do not lend themselves to clear definitive answers. It's a conversation and a dialogue we have amongst ourselves. And there's inherent squishiness to that discussion. Some would say beauty too, but it's not objective in the way that, you know, a mathematical formula will be.
When I was reading your book, I was struck that there’s so much harm and intellectual confusion that has resulted from this bizarre interpretation of Bayes' theorem. These people have discomfort with questions about truth and beauty, but are perfectly happy invent some future and put percentage chances on various things happening and lo, somehow that justifies being really rich right now in the present.
So it's weird. There actually is comfort with an ambiguity, but only so long as the ambiguity has the pseudoscience of invented mathematics covering it.
Becker: Discomfort with ambiguity is rampant in humans, right? Uncertainty can be scary. And I think fear of the unknown and fear of the future drives a lot of what's going on here.
These people are claiming that they've got the inside track on the truth. And it's awfully comforting. It gives them a sense of purpose and meaning. Even when that inside track involves believing that the apocalypse is nigh.
Yudkowsky, for example, I don't think that he spends a lot of time fearing that he is not working on what he should be working on. He has a pretty clear sense that of mission and purpose and meaning.
And that’s true for me too. One of the unexpected benefits of doing the work that I do now is that in the midst of the horrifying political crisis in this country right now, I feel my work is an important part of combating this crisis. I'm horrified and scared, sometimes I feel powerless, but I don't feel directionless.
Riley: To conclude on a dark note, as I read your book and look at what’s happening in the US, I feel there’s both a fascist movement happening, but also, techno-fascism, and to me they're not quite the same.
I have yet to write up my definition of techno-fascism, but when Umberto Eco defined fascism generally he had 14 points and the first two were “culture of tradition” and “rejection of modernism,” and I think that’s been inversed in our current moment. The community that you describe in your book, I would not say are adherents to tradition and they certainly don't reject modernism. Techno-fascism is a form of fascism that doesn't look to the past, but instead fantasizes about a future with quasi-religious deliverances that it will bring. Salvation and transcendence.
Do you think that's what's happening?
Becker: No, I don't, but that's really interesting.
I think it goes back to humanities denial. And in my book, I talk about history denial—and there’s just broad ignorance of history, not just the people profiled in my book, but the wider Trump fascism movement.
And I think that there actually is a sort of rejection of modernity and cult of tradition that is happening among the people that I've written about. Because what they're doing is they're advocating for essentially the end of modern science. They want a completely different way of evaluating empirical claims. They have rejected the scientific establishment, and rejected proper scientific evaluation of their claims.
And instead they have invented a new religion that harkens back to old ones. They are just saying that they're doing it in the name of science and technology, but of course that’s not true.
So it's just fascism. They think that they've invented this new and different thing when it's just the same old shit on a different day.
My thanks to Adam Becker for sharing his thoughts—and you can find his book via the link below.
Great interview, and I loved to see the mention of god, human, animal, machine.
Wonderful interview, can’t believe I’ve never come across Adam’s work before!! Will get this book and check out his other work as well.