Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - We MUST Save Earth Because We Can’t Live on Mars (ft. Adam Becker)

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 What if the future tech billionaires keep promising us isn’t the answer, but part of the problem? In this episode of Into the Impossible, I talk with Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, about the big dreams coming out of Silicon Valley—especially when it comes to AI and the future of humanity. We take a hard look at the idea that AI is going to fix everything, launch us into space, and solve all our problems along the way. It’s a powerful story, and a lot of very smart, very rich people believe it. But what if they’re getting the science—and the big picture—wrong? Becker argues that people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen are chasing a future that ignores some pretty basic realities: limits on energy, physics, and even society itself. Instead of creating a better world, their vision might actually make things worse, deepening inequality, spreading bias, and putting even more power into the hands of a few. If you’re excited about AI, curious about space, or just wondering where all this is heading, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear. — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 00:44 AI boom or AI doom?  03:40 What are tech billionaires wrong about? 06:10 Influence of science fiction on tech billionaires  11:05 Religious parallels in AI and space exploration   15:37 The search for extraterrestrial intelligence  24:16 Effective altruism and long-termism  35:28 Optimism and skepticism about AI  44:46 Judging a book by its cover 47:53 Impact of AI on underrepresented communities  — Additional resources:  Learn more about Adam: 💻 Website: https://freelanceastrophysicist.com/  📚 More Everything Forever: https://a.co/d/ajlYHvZ  — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And so therefore, it's really, really important that we get off of this planet in order to secure a future out in space. They say it's more important than anything else. It's more important than preserving the environment here. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than civil rights. They also overlook that space is pretty bad for humans to live. is the best place we've got. We're going to talk a lot about what I call the eschatology, the end times fantasies of tech billionaires, some of whom have been on the show and I've talked to

in the past, including people like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreson. Let's open with something that's really been a hot topic lately, which is the potential for AI boom or AI doom. In this book, you come down relatively hard on the billionaires that are not only shaping our economy through their inventions or technology, but also on their desire for control, manipulation, power and perhaps even, as you call it, a threat to democracy. What is going on with AI? How do you see it now? And what do you really see is the number one danger?

The audience would be, you know, keen to pay attention to, if not panic. Let us know when we should start panic. Sure, yeah. So, you know, like you said, there's the AI boomers who think that, you know, like a lot of these billionaires who, like Andresen specifically, is a great example, who think that really we just need to make AI go as fast as possible, scale up as big as possible, as quickly as possible, and it will solve all of our problems for us. And then on the other side, you have these AI Dumeers.

People like this guy, Eliasor Yudkowski, who I think we're probably going to talk about a bit more as we go on, and also the effect of altruists, people from the same camp as like Sam Bankmanfried, or if we want to pick a currently active tech billionaire Dustin Moskowitz, who believe that AI in all likelihood is going to lead to, you know, total extinction of humanity in the end of the world. I think that the evidence for either of these claims is pretty bad because there, in a lot of ways, are two sides of the same coin. And the reason I say that, even though their claims sound as far apart as possible, is that they're both predicated on this idea that AI is going to inevitably, and in pretty short order, become

incredibly powerful and superhuman in not just its abilities, but in its intelligence and just be more powerful and more intelligent and more capable than all of the rest of humanity and human civilization combined. Super intelligence. Right. Exactly. And then that will lead to it being able to do whatever it wants with like godlike powers of creation and destruction.

I think the arguments in favor of that happening are pretty bad. and the arguments against it are pretty good. So I think both the boomers and the doomers are sort of living in the same fantasy land, and they're both wrong. And that the biggest dangers we have around AI are the sort of normal dangers that we have around technology, right? That it'll be used to further concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few without democratic accountability, that it will take existing problems in society and make them worse, existing biases and make them worse.

And we're already seeing all of that happen. So I think it's just going to be more of the same faster and faster. Yeah, but more of everything. Yeah. More of everything but faster and faster. Past guest, Nick Bostrom has this famous thought experiment called the paperclip problem. You talk about it. And I was very, very impressed by the way this is described in the book because as astrophysicist,

you are an astrophysicist. Your first book was not even about AI or astrophysics is about quantum mechanics. We'll get to that later. Stay tuned. Those are breadcrumbs for later. But tell us, what are the kind of delusional or perhaps physics uninformed, you're content hot takes of these billionaires, ranging from Elon Musk, who I spoke to very briefly on the podcast a year ago, and people like Dick Bostrom, who don't seem to factor in the

so-called limits to growth and things that have been around for a very long time. So what are they missing and that we should be getting or lead us to be either less concerned about doom or more optimistic about boom? The most obvious physics uninformed thing that Elon Musk in particular says is basically everything he ever says about Mars. He's just wrong about Mars. But when it comes to AI stuff, I mean, you've got people like boomers like Mark Andreessen in particular saying that AI is going to allow us to transcend all limits to growth and just have permanent growth of everything or, you know, more everything forever, hence the title of the book. And that's just not how physics works, right? We know that there are limits on on everything that are imposed, if not by anything else, then ultimately by physics, right? entropy and cosmology force there to be limits.

There's only so much stuff in the universe. There's only so much energy in the universe. There's only so much free energy in the universe, energy that can be, you know, energy in a useful form that can be used to do stuff before it, you know, reaches a state of maximal entropy. Now, some of these people do recognize that. Ballstrom understands that limit. He understands that there's a limit imposed.

by entropy and limits imposed by cosmology. His response to that is to say, oh, then we need to go out and collect all of that available free energy before we lose it beyond the cosmic horizon, because otherwise, you know, we'll have lost resources that we could have used to make life better. I think not only does that ignore other kinds of physical and biological and scientific limits, but it also is just a really bizarre and unhealthy response to the fact that we live in a limited universe. There are those, though, that say that, you know, you're not being optimistic enough. And I mean, you're saying things like the past people would speculate we're all going to

be eating, you know, soil and green. There's a population explosion. Actually, the problem we should be worried about is overpopulation. Now it seems like underpopulation, according to some people, I take it from the exasperated side that you don't believe in that. But I want to take us back to the influence of science fiction on all these billionaires, all these, and some are not billionaires, right? I don't think you cow, well, Yukowski, he might be a billionaire by now or he certainly may. Kowski's not a billionaire on the way possibly to being on. But there are many other people in the book that you mentioned

that aren't, you know, Vernar Vinge, who is a graduate, proud graduate of UC San Diego, Kim Stanley Robinson, these are not billionaires, they're comfortable. But their visions do inform, you know, a lot of the techno-optimistic future. And I am, you know, I wouldn't say friends with Peter Thiel, but we are, you know, we've been in touch in a couple of conferences that that he's graciously hosted a bunch of thinkers from different, you know, sides of the political aisles, so we say. Sure. But the question that I always have is, you know, where else do we get inspiration, if not

science fiction? I mean, think about the fact that we're in the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, or this is what it used to be we have monoliths on our desk. We have a picture on your Keating Medal for Nobel pursuits and literature that I give to all my wonderful guests who come here in person. That's a, that's a request for more in-person guests, because I love to be in person. But these are people that shape the future through imagination, and the future was actually outpaced by their imaginations because not one of them had the internet in 1962. And so if they really were soothsayers, they would have caught it. So where should

we get our inspiration? And what is wrong with kind of the Star Trek versus Star Wars, kind of ideological battle that you talk about Peter Thiel kind of suffering with or wrestling with in the book? I don't want to back. away at science fiction, right? I am a huge science fiction fan. I think I make that clear of the book. Yeah, I was raised on science fiction. I was raised reading Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlin, you know, Ray Bradbury, all of the greats, Alfred Bester, and then, you know, more recent stuff as well. Ursula McGuin. She was here for this. Yeah, we used to do the, a lot of things with the speculative futures in science fiction. She's spent a lot of time on this campus. She's one of my favorite writers in any genre. She's amazing. But, you know, she also said, you know, science. science fiction authors are not futurists, right? The job of science fiction is not to predict the future and that she is a science fiction author and, you know, she took on the brave task of trying to speak for all science fiction authors. It's not, you know, her job or the job of science fiction to predict

the future, right? And that doesn't mean that science fiction can't be a source of inspiration. It can be. It clearly is and sometimes that's a good thing. But it's a question of what we take as information from science fiction and how we see science fiction, right? Because science fiction is not a roadmap for the future, even if it can serve as a source of inspiration, right? Because sure, you can look at Star Trek and say, oh, you know, I want those communicators. And now we have stuff that's essentially like the communicators, at least from, you know, the original series. But you can also look at Star Trek and say, oh, I want to live in a world where, you know, people work together to solve problems in that way. I want to live in a world where,

racial inequality is not an issue. I want to live in a world where, you know, gender discrimination doesn't exist. You know, especially for the original series of Star Trek and the next generation. Star Trek is sort of very, very clearly a kind of morality play, right? It's, and as I talk about in the book, it's not particularly subtle. And that can be a good thing. But, you know, like, there are people who watch Star Trek and think, oh, Star Trek's about Warp Drive. I'm like, buddy, go back look at, just to both pick an episode at random and show like the deep level of nerdy that I have and love for Star Trek. There's an episode from the original series. I'm pretty sure it's called Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. And it famously has, I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who

played, I think, the Ridler on the original Batman TV series as one of the guest stars. He's got these two guest stars. I'm one of them, half his face is white and half his face is black. And the other one, this half of his face is black and this half is whites. It's the same but swapped. And one of them claims that the other one is like racially inferior and is chasing him around the galaxy until their planet burns. And this episode aired in 1968 in this country. You know, a year of great, you know, civil strife.

Yeah. And racial unrest in this country. That episode was not about warp drive. That episode was about the dangers of racism and division. And so, you know, Star Trek and science fiction, absolutely a source of inspiration. But it's a question of, you know, okay, but what is this actually saying? Yeah. Right.

I see now a lot of parallels, ironically, between a lot of these techno-futurists, techno-optimists, who are, as I say, ironically, very secular in most of their practices or lack thereof, very much either self-professed atheist or agnostics at best, so to speak. And then this almost messianic, as I call it, you know, scatological. notion of AI as sort of the godhead figure and this this notion that it's almost the Messiah that's going to lead us into the promised land. And where is the promised land? It's the Great Beyond. It's the final frontier. It's space. Talk about these weird parallels that are almost religious in nature, both from the characters. You mentioned that Lian, you know, these founding,

you know, kind of figures, the prophets and also the apostates, the people that are kind of pushing back on them may have a lot of less financial firepower to go along with it. But talk about the battle between the religious fervor and the cult, almost cult-like notions that some of these communities are taking on. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is definitely a parallel here, right? The idea that the job of AI companies like Open AI or Anthropic is to essentially build a god, right? Some of them actually talk about it as such in those words. The idea that, you know, the goal is to have that God take us all the space so we can live forever. You know, this is, this, this just looks, uh, inextricably like going to heaven to live

forever with God, right? And, and that parallel, I think, is, is not at all a coincidence, right? If you, if you dive into the historical origins of these ideas, of things like transhumanism, things like this, you know, drive to take humanity to space as the next step. A lot of these ideas originally started out as religiously informed ideas, often from Christian movements. You get someone like Nikolai Fedorov saying that it's the common task of humanity to bring about a paradise in space through technology back in the late 1800s. You get someone like Teilhard de Chardin saying that you're going to have a self-reinforcing cycle of technology leading to humanity, having God-like powers, and eventually, you know, bringing about

a kind of paradise on Earth and a joining with God. These notions ended up becoming very influential. You know, Fedorov influenced Silkovsky, one of the pioneers of rocketry, and his ideas, his cosmist inflected ideas that came from, among other people, Fedorov ended up influencing Arthur C. Clark was Tzikovsky who said that, you know, Earth is the cradle, but you can't stay in the cradle forever. And then it was Clark who wrote Childhood's End, right? Book that... Infancy's End. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The title is a direct reference to that. And he even talks about Silcovsky explicitly in a different book, Rendezvous with Rama. It was Ther de Chardin, who, you know, first took the word transhumanist and sort of brought it into this context.

of technological apotheosis, you know, an eschatology of technology. And it was his friend Julian Huxley who grabbed that idea and brought it into a more secular context. But this idea is at its heart, I think, inextricably religious. And I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of these people come from, like a lot of the leaders in these communities come from a deeply religious background and then, you know, found atheism. But now I'm going to get real pretentious and also engage in some really irresponsible, you know, guessing about what's going on in other people's brains.

It's fine. It's your speculative future. Yeah, exactly. There was a Nietzsche quote that I didn't use in my book that I thought about using, but ultimately couldn't find a way to do it. And it's something like, you know, yeah, God's dead, but we're going to try to find some way of of putting something into that God-shaped whole in our society, finding something else to call God. And I think this is a lot of that. You know, this is, this is, oh, wouldn't it be nice if there were some omnipotent, omniscient being that could take care of us? And that's not going to happen. I want to parlay this eventually into a connection between a topic that I, you know, think dovetails nicely, although you don't mention in the book, but it's impossible for me to imagine you don't

have an opinion about alien life and UAPs in the universe. It's not in this book, but the kind of, again, eschatological and messianic and cult-like behavior and religious fervor and supplement surrogate, replacement of God of religion with advanced civilizations that exist that are visiting us to do what, who knows what. But do you see parallels there? Is there, you know, between these different communities, these different kind of cult-like structures as I see them. So it's interesting because aliens do show up in the book a little bit, right? Mostly in that a lot of these people don't believe in them. Right.

Right. And I don't mean they don't believe aliens have come here and visited us and given us advanced technology. I don't believe that either. These guys don't believe that aliens exist anywhere. Right. We're in. Yeah, exactly. Like maybe there are bacteria somewhere, but they don't believe that there's anything like, you know, an advanced.

SETI. Yeah, exactly. an alien civilization. And it's very interesting that they sort of go out and take that very strong position, which I think is, I don't think that that's true. The argument that they give for it, I think is ludicrous. The argument they give is, well, inevitably, a technological civilization is going to undergo something like a singularity

and is going to go out and try to colonize the universe. And so the fact that we haven't seen any evidence, of that, that we haven't seen evidence of Dyson spheres up in the sky, that we haven't seen, you know, alien autonomous probes showing up here in our solar system. Time travel. Right. Yeah, exactly. That means that we're alone.

And therefore, the universe is here for the taken. And so I do think that there is something sort of religious about that in the idea that, oh, that means it's our universe. It's here for us. God so loved us. He gave us his only son, but we're his only son. there's nothing else in the universe right exactly yeah and the reason i brought that up is i share a very similar viewpoint i'm open to it i don't like to use the word believe as you did but but i say i think

there's no evidence and i think that's basically what you meant i want to take that in a parallel track right now and talk about um kind of the day after aliens so if you remember the the great book and movie contact by carl sagan and his wife who was past guest on the show and druyan very proud of that um had her on way back when i first started and freeman dyson he was my first guest by the way Amazing. He was a lovely man. I met him when I was in college. Oh, you did?

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's too bad you didn't get to spend more time with him when you were here last. He's no longer with us, as I said. I had a conversation with Lex Friedman about that very scene in contact where Bill Clinton is a little, it's a realistic scene. It's not CGI like most of the movie. Bill Clinton's on the White House lawn saying, if there's discovery of this meteorite, he doesn't say the meteorite, but he says if there's discovery of alien microbes or whatever, if that is proven and verified to be true, that will mark a mark.

Mark a new dawn for humanity, basically. And so that was actually true. As far as people knew, that was a meteorite discovered in an article that had come from the planet Mars. This is your meteorite for being a guest. This comes from Argentina. Amazing. Thank you.

That meteorite was thought for many years, more than two decades, to be actually harboring signs of extraterrestrial life that originated on Mars, microbial, respiratory, biproducts, perhaps or microbes themselves. And I submit that 99% of the people that did know about that saw the press conference or whatnot. They don't know that that was never verified. In fact, it was refuted in some cases. Right. And second of all, they haven't changed their opinion on the existence of aliens one bit. In other words, it wasn't a big deal. And if you really care about, you know, life in the universe, there's only one example. We can go down to the Pacific Ocean here, scoop up some water and you get 10 to the,

you know, 25th examples of life. And yet we don't seem to be putting as much effort into, you know, the search for protecting life on Earth as we do for searching in life in the universe. Now, people like Jill Tarter will say that's idiotic statement. But let's turn our astrophysical eyes to that. The parallels between the search out there because we may be it. That's the part I think it's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless.

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How do those two things get reconciled? I mean, the notion that life, you know, could be, should be so abundant. Yet these accelerationists aren't taking as much care of the Earth, at least from the perspective I glean from you in the book as they could or humanity or democracy. So talk about that. How do they overlook that if this is the only example of life in a universe of 10 to the 23rd possible planets? It's a good question. They don't see that as the problem, right? They think, oh, this is the only example of life or at least, you know, advanced life in the entire universe.

And so therefore it's really, really important. It's more important than anything else that we get off of this planet in order to secure a future out in space. And there's a lot of problems with that, right? You know, they say it's more important than anything else. It's more important than preserving the environment here. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than civil rights. They also overlook that space is pretty bad, right?

that for for humans to live, this is the best place we've got. And there really isn't anywhere else. There is no planet B as the saying goes, right? Proxima Centauri B. Right, there's Proxima Centauri B. Yeah. But yeah, you know, like Musk wants to go to Mars. Mars is terrible, right?

There's no... And Jack Wiener spent those on last year. City on Mars basically says it's impossible. And even if it were possible, you point this on the book, too. I just want to parenthetically, we're not going to spend much time in it. But he talks about the fact that, yeah, you might want to go to Mars. Mars, but does your great-grandson want to be born on Mars? And did you psychologically vet them? No, you didn't because they weren't born when you took off with their future in mind. Anyway, go on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And Zach and Kelly's book is amazing. And I cite it in mine. It's a very good book. And yeah, Mars is terrible. There's nowhere in the solar system that we could go to, except right here, to like really live and work and build communities. Why do you think they don't focus on, sorry to interrupt, but why do you think they don't focus on the habitable, known to be habitable, known to be supporting life, life-sustaining places. I've been to, you know,

at least one of them in the South Pole, you know, which is not too dissimilar from where you spent your PhD year, or Michigan. I was in Wisconsin for part of my time,

so I can make fun of that. But the South Pole, you know, there are 45 people there right now in the middle of winter, coming up in the middle of winter for them. And, and,

or the oceans. I mean, we have 70% of the planet, right? And there's obviously abundant life there even. And there's an almost infinite parameter space of life.

Why is there zero? I mean, No Schmidt, Eric Schmidt has spent some effort on this, but I think it's to get his mega yacht out there and get some tax deductions. Eric, if you're out there, I'd love to talk to you. But Adam wouldn't because he doesn't think billionaire should exist. But anyway, let's talk about under the ocean and on the polar ice caps while they last, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, when you do see other things like, you know, the sea steading Institute people who want to go out there.

But like, yeah, by and large, there's not nearly as much interest. And I think part of it is just like it doesn't sound as sexy. Yeah, right? Like there's something cool about space that is less cool about like C Lab. And do you think it's partially, partially militaristic? I mean, what would be a better sci-op or better, you know, covert opt than to say, oh, we're going to get, you know, Starlink satellites and Blue Origin Kipers out there? But really, it's a cover for, you know, weaponizing space.

I mean, I don't think that it's a deliberate sci-op. There are certainly people who are interested in weaponizing space. and I'm sure they're very comfortable with this way of talking about space as a cover for that. But I don't think that that's what, say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, like, I don't think that that's what their ultimate goals are, right? They've been very, very clear that they want to go out into space to, you know, save and secure the future of humanity. You know, this is weird because space is awful. But yeah, I mean, they, it's very, very difficult to understand why anyone would. think that space is the inevitable future of humanity when you actually look at how awful it is

and how difficult it would be to leave the solar system and go somewhere else where there might be a better, more habitable planet than the ones that aren't Earth here. But even those planets probably already have their own biospheres. And if they don't, they're still going to be very difficult to live on. I guess that pushback might be, you know, from an Elon, you know, again, I've talked to him very briefly. His mom kind of bailed him out at the end when I said, well, which one of your kids, of your 14 kids that we know about are you going to say? goodbye to you, you know, which ones are you going to take with you? Which ones are you going to say goodbye? Because they're not all going to come. And would you want to bring a three-year-old

to Mars? I don't think that's a very good plan. And his mother just, you know, kind of interrupted the conversation. Let's not talk about unpleasant things. You know, so Mama May, she she bailed them out. But when, you know, when we think about, you know, kind of the ultimate goal in going into the space, again, it's this theme that runs throughout the book that's so rich is long-termism. Yeah. And that if you don't think that way, you are an obstructionist, you're a desal honorationist. You're a pessimist or what have you. And you trace it in the very beginning of the book to this notion of what, you know, what is called. I think it's very hubristic, if that's a word, to say that they're effective altruists. This notion is like the French Enlightenment.

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listening to them because you're not doing effective altruism when you give, you know, charity, Sadaka, you know, tithing or whatever. We're going to tell you how to do it. And it's really just a cover word for code word for we know what's best because we're, we are these superhuman brainiac. So talk about effective altruism and the repugnant conclusions I claim it has for this movement that that may come to dominate technology and democracy. There are a lot of weird names in this space, right, that sort of have that same flavor. Right. There's the effective altruists. My favorite is the rationalist. It's like, oh, yeah, we're going to call it. ourselves like the correctists. That's right. You know, there's, one of my favorite TV shows is

Parks and Rec. Yeah, yeah. And there's this group, this cult on Parks and Rec called the reasonableness. And I just always think of them when I think of the rationalists. But yeah, the effective altruists, you know, it is one of these things that sounds unobjectionable on the face of it, right? Like, oh, we're going to find the most effective ways to do the most good. But the devil, as always is in the details, right? What do you mean by effective? What do you by good? What do you mean by the most good? And this leads you sort of inexorably to this idea long-termism that, well, if you want to do the most good, you need to help the most people, where are the most people? Well, they're in the future, right? They're the future generations that

will come after us. Not only separated in space, but separate in time. Exactly. A lot more separate in time than in space. Right. Or there could be at least. Yeah. 10 to the 23rd or something. Right. Exactly. They have these absurd calculations. And that gets to the heart of it, right? Because we don't know what the future holds and we don't know what future people will need. It's very, very hard to make accurate estimations about like what generations, even 10 generations down the line, much less, you know, a thousand generations down the line will need, you know, if and when they're scattered across space. And to the effect of altruists, you know, this repugnant conclusion that they come to is this idea that, you know, more people, as long as their lives are at least barely worth living, is always better, makes the world and the universe a better place. And so this creates what one very prominent effective altruist, Will McCaskill calls a moral case for space settlement. But again, space is terrible. There is no moral case for space settlement. And you can't do that to your

descendants, right? But there's also the bigger problem of like, why, why is that what they want? why do they think that a better world is just one that has more people, you know, almost no matter what? I think a smaller population living happier lives is better. And this is like a well-known paradox in philosophy that, you know, people have sort of bashed their heads against for years. And there's a reason that it's, you know, a paradox. It's very difficult to sort of. It's on utility functions. Yeah, exactly.

Right. Right. They attempt to bring their, you know, engineering kind of credentials. do it. Right. Yeah. It's this idea that you can quantify absolutely everything. And I just don't believe that that's true. Right? Like, if you want to defend this, then you've got to have this way of determining like, okay, what is good and what is good across an entire population? How do you evaluate different kinds of happiness within one person and then across different people, across all populations, across all generations, literally until the heat death of the universe? If you have a way that you think of, do that that you think works, even in principle, I'm just not going to believe you. I see it as kind of an analog of the Drake equation, you know, which is, which is highly speculative and filled with, you know, errors and the biggest errors that there's no errors assigned to any of the terms in the equation. And so it becomes just a framework, but so forth. And then people use it and they

make these calculations of similar types of figures as, as Adam Frank, another past Adam astrophysicist has said in the show, you know, there could be 20, you know, 10 of the 24th, Avagadro's number of planets, right? Sure. Okay. In the history of the observable universe. Okay, I care about those within a hundred light years of me, right? So we can at least plausibly have communicated once at least in one direction. But there are these parallels. And I think that, again, there is a, there's this, this cord of escape. I can't help thinking, you know, I'm a, you know, I call myself a devout practicing agnostic, you know, where I think a scientist could be open to, you know, being swayed, but never should say that they believe in something without evidence.

I think that's problematic for a scientist to say. And nevertheless, you know, to be open, to be completely closed off to it. I find in my personal life, my children, my family to be more infused with meaning, so to speak. So I practice, but, you know, the level of which belief comes in is another matter. But these people, I think they are trying to replace this, you know, either God-sized hole or something that's missing in their life. And now we could psychoanalyze. I don't think that's important. But I do think it's interesting to consider, you know, so Mark Andreessen, follows me on X, Twitter, where you are rarely seen nowadays. I'm proud to post to you, but you're protected and blocked.

Oh, sorry. Everything else. But that's all good. We can find you on Blue Sky. Yes. Or Mastad... Have you been to Mastodon?

I have, although it's a little quieter. I'm mostly using blue sky these days. You know, Mark and Driesen, if I had to channel him, I might think that he would say something like, look, you know, Becker, you're one of the most, you're in the elite. You're in the elite. 0.001% of population educated Western institutions, conversant with technology, the

finest education, background, pedigree, you're living this comfortable life. And so you're criticizing the very people that, you know, in his case, developing, you know, Netscape, Mozilla, leading to the, at least the commercialization, popularization, which led to his great wealth, by the way, of the internet, you know, through the worldwide web browser, which was, you know, we can talk about its origins.

But, but what would you say to him? He might criticize this. I mean, he comes off as, if there is a villain, there's not really a villain, but he comes off kind of the most deserving of the most of the most opprobrium, at least as you, as you dish it out in the book. And Teal's kind of, Musk is a, is a, very, very close second. Maybe, maybe tops. Who knows? You'll have to say. But what would he say about

this, this, you know, critique? I mean, if we could channel him, steel man, his argument, look how much it's given you. I mean, you personally, I mean, you flew down here on an airline, you know, you'll stay in a chain hotel, you'll eat the finest food that the campus can deliver. Yeah. Technology. We communicated via email over the web. You publish in a major publishing, you know, House book. I listened to it in audio, read it, and print. These are all things done Bezos. And we can talk about Google and the, and the, and the, and the, the brins and the pages, et cetera. But talk about what they'll say. Like, you're, you're now, you know, kind of coming down with this harsh critique of the very abundant future, which you were

given. You say in the book, they didn't earn it, you know, completely. They might say the same to you. How would you react to that? You know, I think like any good millennial, uh, there are some internet memes that just live in my head rent free and probably just will forever, right? And the one that's coming to mind right now is this sort of one panel cartoon of, uh, like a medieval looking peasant doing back-breaking labor and, you know, like literally hunched over with like a big pile of wood on their back in a cap covered in mud saying, we should improve society somewhat. And then over on the side of the panel, someone dressed in like modern clothing is sort of sticking their head up out of a well saying, ah, but you participate in society.

Curious, I am very smart. It's kind of the human version of the meme where the wolves come upon a campfire. and they say, oh, we should really investigate that campfire to themselves. And then fast forward 10,000 years. And there's a teacup poodle inside of Paris Hilton. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's the human version of that. Kind of, yeah.

It is absolutely true that I participate in society, right? And that this is a society shaped in large part by the decisions made by the tech billionaires that I criticize in the book. The fact that I participate in that society and have benefited from various things in that society does not mean that I don't get to criticize it, right? It means that I should be aware of the ways in which I have benefited from living in this society. And I am, you know, I know that I have been very lucky. I was lucky to be born to the parents that I was born to.

I was lucky to be able to go to the schools that I went to. I was lucky to get my first book deal and my second book deal. That doesn't mean that everything is great, right? Just because I have been able to benefit from certain things in society doesn't mean that, you know, therefore I cannot possibly criticize society. It just means like there are, you know, there are problems. And I think it would be better if we address those problems. And would addressing some of those problems possibly make my life a little bit worse than it

is right now? Maybe. That's possible. I'm okay with that because I think that it would be better if we lived in a more just world where more people had the chance to, you know, not even live the kind of life that the billionaires live, but just the kind of life that I live. Because, you know, one of the things I thought about doing before the book came out was I thought about making a bingo card of different reactions. I figured I would get to the book. And one of the reactions I knew would show up in an internet

forum somewhere, and I want to be really clear, this is not what you're saying. It's not even what you're saying Mark Andreessen would say, right? But one of the criticisms I knew would show up somewhere was, oh, you know, Becker's just trying to profit off of, you know, these crazy things that these people say he's just a grifter. And like, buddy, if you say that, you have no idea how book publishing works. Like, this is not a money-making endeavor for me. Broke slowly. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I was just talking with someone last night and said, oh, yeah, after I did my PhD, I went into science journalism because I thought, you know, what, academics make too much money. That's right. to do something that makes less money than that. Too spoiled by riches. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I am fully open to and have accepted that, yeah, absolutely, I have benefited from living in the society that we live in. That doesn't mean that I don't get to say, hey, I think we should change this. I think it would be better if this were different. Yeah, and it's a very different book than the other

books that I've read or, you know, participated in Max Tagmark, obviously, is a, is sort of a doomer, as people call him and gets criticized for that. And they, and Jan Lecun and I had them battling each other. It's pretty funny to watch them, you know, at least by remotely, by text message. But at the end of the day, you know, what really feeds this I see is sort of a cycle, you know, where you've got these, you know, tech unicorns that fuel, you know, kind of this epistemic, you know, kind of conceit that they have solved something and are worth a billion dollars. So they're really smart, right?

So we should listen to whatever they say. And then that includes extracting, you know, both resources, monetary resources. Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, big board buck slot machine by aristocrat gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history.

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you know, could be a doom loop. But I want to ask you kind of a flip side of that. What do you optimistic about in this future? I mean, AI is transformed the way I do research, the way I teach. Has it done as much as the internet, you know, as I think Chowin Lai said about the French Revolution 1972, it's too soon to tell, you know, like will it, you know, really supersede? But, you know, we're just at the very nascent beginning of it. We're, you know, I haven't even brought in my autonomous robot, you know, to replace my job as a professor. But what do you optimistic about it? It could be an education. I mean, you're very familiar conversion with the educational system. And what are you optimistic about the AI that's not doom related that you're, that you actually

think is going to be a net benefit, both not necessarily of the people in the book? Sure. You can compliment them all you like. But what do you optimistic about in terms of, you know, both education, economics and and perhaps, you know, more broadly, you know, kind of technology in the future. I'm going to go for the last part of that first, right? Like, I think that there's all sorts of wonderful things to be optimistic about regarding technology in general, right? I have a cousin who's a cancer researcher, and there have been amazing leaps and bounds in cancer research in the last, like, decade due to this sort of new direction of cancer research having to do with, like, getting cancer patients own immune systems to learn how to fight the cancers that they have.

I'm very optimistic about that because I've, you know, talked with my cousin and other experts on this and came to the conclusion like, yeah, this sounds really great. Or rather, they came to that conclusion and convince me, you know, because they know what they're talking about. That sounds amazing. You know, I think I don't want to say it looks like the cure to cancers within reach because I don't know about that. But like, but we're definitely going to be able to treat cancers that were previously untreatable and are already able to do that. That's amazing, right? That's really great. I think that there's amazing applications for MRNA vaccines, right?

They're not just for COVID. I think that, you know, it's in a way too soon to tell what's going to happen with that, but it's looking pretty good. So, yeah, all sorts of amazing biomedical advances. I am optimistic about green technology. You know, it's just been getting cheaper and cheaper. That's amazing. I think that if we decide as a civilization,

that we are finally ready to make that transition to renewable energy as a primary energy source, that's just way more possible than it was even 10 years ago. Right? That's incredible. You know, I am still really, really worried about global warming, but it makes me less concerned about us having the tools, the technological tools, that we need to address it. Now that we have most of them, it's primarily a political and social problem rather than a technological one. And that's great. There's any number of other things that I'm optimistic about

regarding technology and the way that it can be applied. AI, these machine learning tools that we have now, there are all sorts of wonderful applications. This isn't generative AI, which I'll get to in a second, but I didn't use any generative AI in the writing of either of my books, except for one paragraph in the new book where I say, here's a thing that I got chat GPT to say, right? Where very clearly, that's generative AI. The rest of it is not. Right. Right. So unless I'm quoting chat GPT, it's all me. Right. But non-generative AI, right?

Like audio transcription, it's incredible. You know, as a journalist, I use that quite a bit because it's really, really helpful to have a first pass at a transcript of what somebody said to me. And is the transcript perfect? No. Is it ever going to be perfect? I don't know. Maybe there's a lot of different ways that people speak. But it doesn't need to be.

I just need to be able to get a few keywords so I can find the spot in the hour-long transcript where they say the one thing that I, that summarizes the thing they spent the last 20 minutes saying. And so I can use that in the article or the book or whatever it is that I'm writing. It's incredibly useful for that and has made it much easier for me to do my job. Although that is also an example of somebody losing a job because of AI, right? I, I previously hired someone from my first book. I hired a dear friend of mine who was looking for work. I said, well, look, you know, I have this grant to work on this book. I can give you some of that money if you transcribe these interviews. And so she did that. For the new book, I didn't have to do that. I just had to sign up for

this subscription, which was even cheaper. But nonetheless, you know, like as with most other technologies, yeah, okay, some jobs go away, but then new jobs are created, right? And I think a lot of, we're going to see a lot of that with AI. Generative AI is a trickier case, right? Because there are costs there that don't exist in the same way, or at least at the same scale, as there are and other AI systems, right? There's environmental costs, right? The carbon cost, the cost of the water that's being used to cool the systems, the resources that are extracted in order to build the systems in the first place. There's the intellectual property that was used in ways that are allegedly theft to train these systems, right? And I find it quite rich that you get people like

Sam Altman or Nick Clegg saying, oh, but you know, but if we had to be. to pay for the intellectual property rights, then these AI systems wouldn't be profitable. I'm like, okay, two things. First of all, they're still not profitable. Like, open AI's never turned a profit. And second, yeah, that's a problem. Like that's, but not the way that you think it is. It means that these systems, you should have maybe talked to somebody before building

these things. And then there's also the human cost, the labor that's being exploited to train these systems out of producing dangerous content, which first of all, it's not, you know, even completely successful, right? You can still get these systems to produce dangerous content or content that looks dangerous and by virtue of looking dangerous becomes dangerous. Like, you know, giving you instructions for what it claims is like a medicine, but instead if you take it, you know, it'll poison you or something like that. But or, you know, fake bomb making instructions that will blow up in your face if you try to build them or something like that. But, you know, they trained it out of or tried to train it out of producing like child sexual. material, which is very important for them to train it out of doing because they can't have it put it out on the internet. But in order to do that, they had to hire people at very, very low wages, usually in the developing world, to be exposed to some of the very, very worst of the worst of what the internet can produce. Because these things speak with kind of the smeared out

averaged voice of the internet. And so if you ask them to do horrible things, they will produce things a lot like the worst things that anyone's ever put on the internet. And it's caused real psychological trauma for the people who've done this. Karen Howe, who has a great new book out called Empire of AI, she documented this really, really well. I believe in her new book, which I haven't read, but also definitely in her reporting for the Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review and whatnot. These are real human causes. And, you know, ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. If you want to have these systems out on the

internet without having them produce easily such content, either you need to not have them on the internet or you need to harm these workers and the choice that these companies have made is to harm these workers. And so with all of those harms, and this is also putting aside the harms that that are coming from the people using these systems, right? The AI-induced psychosis cases that are being seen and the... Yeah, exactly. And the deskilling that people are like undergoing as they rely on it more and more to do things that they themselves used to do.

Even putting those things aside, it makes it very hard for me to say that it's okay to use these generative AI systems, or at least to use them widely. Because it's really, it's really like very hard to defend ethically what these companies like Open AI and Anthropic have had to do along the way to producing. You left out in Lama and, you know, meta's products, which are open source. Oh, sure. Yeah. Are they less probable?

I'm not sure that they are. I know less about them. And that's why I left them out. I know that at the very least they probably had to train on, you know, similar corpus. of intellectual property and probably using similar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I am skeptical that they're okay.

I don't know as much about them. Well, one of our favorite traditions on this podcast is to do what you're not supposed to do, which is to pass judgment on a book by solely looking at its cover. So we call this judging books by its cover. We even have a little jingle, which we'll start now. Hey, book lovers. We're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it.

Better into the impossible. There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books. So, Adam, what we like to do is have an author take us through the title, the subtitle. Yep. And the beautiful, you're not known for it. That's the only shortcoming I'll save of the book. So walk us through.

The title subtitle and the, at least the stellar background on this book. And then the next episode, we'll talk about this one. The title of the book, More Everything Forever is sort of what came first out of all the things on the cover aside from my own name. which I was not responsible in the choosing of my name. But so about halfway through the time that I spent working on the book, it sort of pivoted to being about something a little different than it had been about when I initially, you know, suggested it to my publisher. And they, you know, took the proposal and gave me a book deal.

And when I made that change, a lot of things that had been floating around in my head that I knew had to go into the book, but I wasn't sure how to make them go in the book. Just kind of clicked and fell into place. And I found myself finally writing a draft that I liked of a chapter that ultimately ended up becoming chapter one of the book. And not very far into that chapter, I realized, oh, you know, what would make a good title for this book is more comma forever. And so originally that was the title. And then I finished writing a very early, very rough draft of chapter one. and then sent it to a dear friend of mine who's also a writer and said, hey, what do you think of this?

I think this is where I'm taking the book. And I'd already sent that to my editor. My editor liked it, but this friend of mine is one of the very few people I was also showing drafts of the work to at various points. And he read it and he said, I think this is great. Obviously, it's an early draft and it needs some work. I also think your title isn't more forever. I think your title is more everything forever.

And I said, oh, damn it, you're right. It's like Facebook was originally the Facebook. Right, exactly. From the social network. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I was like that. I just saw it, you know, I saw what he said and I'm like, oh, damn, that's right, isn't it?

It's good. No, it's very good. I got that feedback early. Yeah, absolutely. And so I took that to my editor and he said, oh, yeah, that's just absolutely correct. And so we had the title. And then the subtitle, we knew had to involve AI and space because the title of the book is good, but it doesn't really give you a sense of like what the book's

about. And so, you know, we kicked around a few different ideas for a while. And then finally, once we had a fully, like, finished and, you know, stable draft of the book, once I'd finished that, I sat down with my publisher and then, well, yeah, with my editor and then his boss, the publisher. And ultimately, you know, kicked around a few ideas. And then finally, we said, okay, let's do this one more time. And one of the first things that I think I was the one who wrote it down and not one of them, but I'd have to go back and confirm was this subtitle. And my editor's boss saw it and she said, yeah, that's it. You received the most prized possession in all of San Diego County, which is to get the Keating Medal. Now, this is loosely modeled on the Nobel

Prize. And in the book, you talk about the repository for germinal choice, although you call it by its more common name, the Nobel Prize sperm bank, which was actually here in Escondito, which is North San Diego County. Yeah, we can go take a, you know, make a deposit. No, I'm just kidding. We don't have the Nobel Prize. So it was actually shut down. So this was actually developed in part by many of the kind of Silicon Valley Nobel laureates,

including William Shockley, who had reportedly had the maybe distinction or maybe humiliation of being ranked one of the lower IQ candidates that won the Nobel Prize. But nevertheless, he did win the Nobel Prize. So he had to give it to him. But he was a big proponent of eugenics. And many of the people that were early pioneers were at least eugenics adjacent, shall we say. How is AI perhaps impacting underrepresented communities, racism, playing into it? Is that just amplifying what's latent in society?

Or is it something that's generative in the worst possible sense of the work? I think it's a little of both. It's definitely amplifying stuff that's already there, right? It's taking these existing biases and just, you know, making it possible to automate them. because it just takes existing data, which, you know, reflects these biases and then says, oh, okay, I guess that's, you know, if that's the goal, then this is what we're going to do. And that's not even restricted to generative AI. That's something you'll see in almost any machine learning system that's been, you know,

trained on human behavior, right? But there's also sort of a deeper philosophical tie as well, which I talk about in the book, which is the idea that intelligence is this single number that you can sort of dialogue up or dial down is historically something that is strongly associated with eugenics, right? Even IQ testing is strongly associated with eugenics. It's part of why the IQ test was developed. And so it's not particularly surprising to see that, you know, in communities that have formed around the idea of AI and super intelligent AI where you just dial that knob all the way

to the right, that there's not just this sort of historical philosophical connection with eugenics, but that a fair number of people in these communities actually advocate for various forms of eugenics, right? And this is something, like I said, I talk about this in the book. There are people in the effect of altruist and rationalist communities, which is where a lot of this modern thinking about AI and AGI came from, who are very comfortable and advocates for a kind of racist pseudoscience called human biodiversity, which is something I went and talked with a fair number of geneticists, and I think it's the longest end note in the book, actually, is two or three pages long, where I talked to them, and they said, oh, yeah, that's nonsense. That is not science.

And yet there are full-throated defenses of it made by some prominent people in these communities. And I don't think it's a coincidence. Yeah. Stitch fix. Stop shopping. Get styled. Not today, sweatpants. Somebody's wearing jeans that fit. Wow! No photos, please. I'm just a regular dad who happens to have a stylist. I really look my best when someone else makes the decisions. Hey, we can all see you two-way mirrors. Just share your size, style, and budget, and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door.

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