My latest newsletter is about the excesses of big tech, why Europe should declare war on Silicon Valley, and how it can win. whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-europe...
Author, journalist, astrophysicist. He/him. @FreelanceAstro on the bird site. New book out now: MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER, about horrifying & implausible futures pushed by tech billionaires. Words in the Guardian, NPR, NYT, BBC, SciAm, Fortune, Quanta, etc.
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My latest newsletter is about the excesses of big tech, why Europe should declare war on Silicon Valley, and how it can win. whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-europe...
Happy to help. 😆 I wish I could say I was done reading their stuff too, but unfortunately I just took on a bit more. Someone's gotta do it, though.
"...BUT LET'S BUILD THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY ON IT!"
Great thread. Even the ludicrous Dyson swarm at Mercury's orbit that others have proposed (and that I critique in my book) is far more reasonable than this. That would "only" require disassembling Mercury. There is a whole other level of blatant ignorance at work with Altman.
The people dominating our political landscape, culture, and economy are just so stupid and full of shit it's almost impossible to describe
Also note money from the Arnold Foundation and from both of the "progress studies" guys, Collison and Cowen. The latter pair shows up in my book as well. The gang's all here.
Thanks for the endorsement, Timnit! 😊
Yep. "What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet & the planet, reorient our economy & leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics & culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?"
Yeah, I'd never heard of it. Filming there was surreal.
(also, damn, you're fast!)
💯
Having an interesting day. 😁🖖🏻
A reminder for everyone to read @adambecker.bsky.social ‘s book on why this absolutely will not be happening.
An excellent thread. These machines have no concept of a world beyond words.
Fireball of an interview w/ @adambecker.bsky.social about his book "More Everything Forever" on Techtonic. (Musk is totally, hilariously wrong about Mars. We're never going.) Click "Pop-up player" to listen: www.wfmu.org/playlists/sh... Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
You’re not seeing a bot “develop a personality” or “learning boundaries”, you’re seeing the faint echo of actual people talking about their actual lives, filtered through a gigantic averaging and prediction machine. It’s an insult to our humanity and frankly obscene.
Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of what my new book is about. But it's really quite something to watch people fall into this nonsense in real time. 😬
But it will be confidently wrong, because it doesn't actually know anything aside from statistical weights on character strings, not even about the internal structure of those very same character strings!
The internal contradiction here is really a perfect illustration of what's going on. It's just producing text strings without regard for its meaning. And it won't produce the string "bluebberies" because that appears nowhere (or almost nowhere) in its training data.
These machines are not thinking. They're just extruding homogenized thought-like product. And it's not a very good substitute.
See also: bsky.app/profile/kjhe... Nobody is home. It's not thinking, it's extruding homogenized thought-like product.
I for one welcome our new bluebberry overlords 😂
We are accustomed to thinking that anything generating language must have a mind behind it. But that's not true, not anymore. Not saying true AI is impossible, just saying the standard for making that call has to be much much higher than you're making it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_e...
The response you (and many others!) have to these machines says much more about us than it does about the machines. There is an innate human tendency to anthropomorphize, and that's a lot of what's at work here. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareido...
"GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert."
Yes. Bezos has been bleating on about this for years now and it's never made any sense. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
“Imagine a billionaire’s digital boot stamping on a human face — forever.” That’s the future Silicon Valley is building, writes astrophysicist Adam Becker in his blistering takedown of tech’s most delusional prophets. www.truthdig.com/articles/the...
NEW POD EPISODE: Special guest Adam Becker, an astrophysicist, author, tech journalist, and scientific philosopher, joins Rick Wilson to dissect Silicon Valley's beating heart: techno-futurism and the Silicon Valley bros. Listen here ➡️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdzM...
(that being said, even in a perfect world my second book would have been fairly different from my first — I don't much like doing the same job twice.)
Ah, yes. I agree with you there. I definitely had days writing this book where I said, out loud, "I can't believe I have to write about these people instead of physics, what's wrong with the world"
(And thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed What is Real? so much! I knew this new book wouldn't necessarily appeal to everyone who liked my first one, but I had to follow my heart. And I do think that the style and tone is similarly friendly & fun, even though the subject matter is pretty different.)
That work needed to be done, and it needed to be done in a way that was both comprehensive and compelling. I took that on because I didn't see anyone else doing it that way, and I thought I might be able to do a good job of it.
It would be nice if we could just dismiss those ideas as risible (and you're right, they are risible). But powerful people are taking them seriously, and therefore someone needed to explain *why* these ideas don't work, rather than simply saying "lol, lmao."
That's exactly what I was trying to do, and I'm glad it's helpful. Thanks for a fun thread - I always enjoy reading my work over other people's shoulders (as long as they like the work!)
A thoughtful thread from @cgsunit.bsky.social about my new book More Everything Forever. #booksky 📚
why are so many people willing to outsource thinking, learning, understanding & to just settle for believing the things that the llms / algorithms / screens output & flash their way?
a big reason I am trying to post less on social media and also consume it less is the growing understanding it's not healthy to intake so many people's inner thoughts and anguish
This is an especially good one — I'm looking forward to seeing it myself. I was surprised amd delighted to find that Rick is a huge fan of my book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER, and he asked me some great questions about it. #booksky 📚
No, a LOT of them think that. Science may be one of the most social forms of knowledge production we have. Arguably it’s at least as social as creative writing. Actual scientists will tell you this. Yet, millions of people think they can do science alone with an LLM.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Big Tech are worse than you can imagine. Adam Michael Becker has done the research and reveals their master plan, ideologies, and super villain designs. He joins me now on The Left Hook to break it down. Join us live@ thelefthook.substack.com
If I were in charge of PBS or NPR I would be doing 24-7 programming right now about the end of PBS and NPR
Media outlets can't pivot to AI to save themselves. It's not a business strategy and it's not going to work. The only path forward is for journalists to lean into their humanity, to do things AI can't, and to make clear they are writing for people, not algorithms: www.404media.co/the-medias-p...
In his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Adam Becker probes the technocrat worldview. Interview ⤵️
Who should we be more afraid of — Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos? Adam Becker, author of the new book, "More Everything Forever," tells @karaswisher.bsky.social dumping Trump and his cronies will be easier than getting rid of tech billionaires.* *As long as we still have a democracy
Please please please everyone read Adam's book to understand more about why the things that are happening are happening.
Thanks! And yeah, they're pretty good at doing my work for me. During edits, I frequently went through the following chain of thought: "oh, damn, I'm being pretty harsh, is that unfair?" ➡️ "Let me go back & check the primary source..." ➡️ "...oh shit, what they said is actually worse than I thought."
Thanks!
No no no 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 the best (thank you 😊)
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😁
Feels like something created to anger me specifically. This is not real. This is not how physics works, this is not how LLMs work, this is not how anything works. This is just tech billionaires deluding themselves.
I do love that my @rollingstone.com interview and my interview with @karaswisher.bsky.social both dropped on Bastille Day. A coincidence, surely. There's no historical resonance or lessons to be learned by inept plutocrats, or Nazis, on today of all days.
"These technocrats are constantly high on a drug called billions of dollars, and the human brain was not built to deal with that." I had a lovely time talking with @rollingstone.com about Musk, Bezos, the rest of the tech billionaire clowns, & the *true* name of my new book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER:
Had a great time blasting tech billionaire pseudoscience in this conversation with @karaswisher.bsky.social, who called us "soulmates." I don't know that I'd go that far, but have a listen and judge for yourself: www.iheart.com/podcast/269-...
I talked with @mollyjongfast.bsky.social about tech oligarchs and whether science fiction is really to blame for their delusions of grandeur: www.iheart.com/podcast/1119...
(And yes, I am seriously considering starting a newsletter or podcast or the like. More about that soon, I hope.)
I know that some people are able to use this site in a healthy way. While the evidence is pretty clear that social media is bad for individuals and society, I'm not trying to judge anyone else's social media usage. For me, though, the safest thing is to interact with social media as little as I can.
The fact is that this place is better for getting thoughtful people to pay attention to a particular piece of writing (or audio or video) than anything else. So until I start a newsletter or podcast with my own audience, I'll have to keep using this site, even though it's not good for me.
Back after a long weekend in the mountains with friends, and really wondering why I use social media at all. Even this site, one of the best, stresses me out more than I should let it. Some of that is just a reflection of how deeply awful the news has been lately, but some of it isn't.
Not enough people know or acknowledge that the AI industry is led by people who are so stupid and afraid of their own mortality so much that they actually believe they will be able to beat death and live forever through AI
Say it plain: race scientists believe that Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people. It’s not that this view has “faced intense criticism” as that the view is racist, false, and promoted only by a handful of frauds who have repeatedly lied and manipulated data
@adambecker.bsky.social AI overlords. Space empires. Immortality. Adam Becker tears down Silicon Valley’s techno-fantasies and the billionaires selling them. 🎧 snglrty.co/45PYAkg Because the future is not destiny, it’s a story. And it’s time we stop outsourcing the plot to Silicon Valley.
Byline's @mattmgallagher.bsky.social speaks to astrophysicist @adambecker.bsky.social about AI cults, space fantasies, and the politics Silicon Valley wants to escape. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mCL...
Thank you!
Tech gurus talk about colonizing Mars, building space stations, eradicating aging and death, and uploading minds. Not so fast, says @adambecker.bsky.social. In Ep 39 of BookLab, @amandagefter.bsky.social and I dive into Adam's new book, "More Everything Forever": booklabpodcast.com/booklab-039-...
You two are doing wonders for my impostor syndrome 😊
On days like this I find it so hard to reconcile our human actions with the almost impossible odds that we exist at all. I wish we treasured and valued each other. I wish we realized there’s more than enough for everyone. That we belong to each other, we need each other. That we are all we have.
Big Milestone for the Nerd Reich podcast: This episode with @adambecker.bsky.social has 100k views! In one hour, you'll learn why space colonization, eternal life and "godlike" AI are 100% BS. Why Mars Will Kill You (And Why Tech Billionaires are Lying About It) www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NrD...
Mostly did it by smiling and nodding while quietly freaking out, and then calling friends afterwards to tell them GUESS WHAT THIS PERSON SAID TO ME TODAY
Wow, thank you! Let me know if you'd like me to do a call with your class, I'd be happy to talk with them
Seriously, thank you. That's exactly what I was trying to do.
I think it's pretty good, but I'm probably biased. 😉
Thanks! 😁
I haven't listened to this conversation, but I'm half way through the book and it's excellent.
Thanks, glad you like it so far!
Of course, glad to hear you liked it so much!
Thank you! And yes, I've been appearing on a lot of podcasts lately and there are more to come. I'll post about them here when they happen.
Thanks, that was a great question! Looking forward to hearing what you think of the book.
Thank you!
I feel similarly, which is why I wrote it. I suspect that if you give it a chance you'll find it to be a lot more fun to read than you might expect. (But of course, I'm biased.)
The singularity is awesome
I want to reiterate that countless conservative judges issued universal injunctions against the Biden administration, and the Supreme Court never halted the practice. Now, barely five months into Trump's second term, the court puts an end to these injunctions. A brazen double standard.
Thanks!
Thanks!
Thank you! And yes, the surveillance is terrifying...
Thank you. I'm so glad you got so much out of the book. That's exactly what I was hoping to do with it.
there's a whole cottage industry of fear cultivation around AI risk - but more of it centered around "what AI could do if it becomes advanced enough" rather than "what specific oligarchs could do if their AI is even marginally cheaper than their current imperialist tactics"
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Thanks!
Thanks!
Looks like you're in Berkeley? Just come get a copy at Mrs. Dalloway's tonight and I'll sign it for you. www.eventbrite.com/e/adam-becke...
Thank you!
Thanks! I still need to read yours...
I'm so glad to hear that! I hope you like the rest of it too.
Thanks!
Thank you!
Hey, thanks!
"We started talking about death and it went downhill from there" really captures the spirit of Angry Planet in general
Thank you!! Also energy transition people are my heroes, thank you for your work!