The futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it’s possible?
On this Angry Planet, astrophysicist and author Adam Becker joins us to explain all the problems with Silicon Valley’s dreams of the future. It’s not a short list. Much of the tech, and even the physics, don’t work the way techno-utopians say it does. Some of the people hawking robot slaves and immortality are chasing the impossible for tragic personal reasons. Others are just trying to sell you something. It’s all the subject of Becker’s new book: More Everything Forever.
Franics Fukuyama and the end of everything
“Death is the ultimate limit, the ultimate loss of control.”
Moore’s law, the singularity, and Ray Kurzweil’s father
The Face on Mars and large language models
Elizas all the way down
The false binaries of the tech bro future
Silicon Valley’s lost boys
“Death is avoidable and taxation is theft.”
Stasis for me but not for thee
“Mars sucks”
Against Life Extension by Francis Fukuyama
More Everything Forever on Bookshop
More Everything Forever on Amazon
Welcome to the Nerd Reich
We’re living in a bizarre age of technofascism. The richest man who has ever lived, a man who dreams of colonizing Mars with his children, is America’s CEO. Donald Trump, the man people voted for, is just the chairman of the board.
