"More Everything Forever" Author On Magical Futurism Bullshit Churned Out By Musk, Thiel, Altman, et. al.

[hatrack]

EDIT

Rei Takver: You’ve said that writing More Everything Forever started after uncovering that evangelical Christian tech billionaire and Palantir founder Peter Thiel was funding a science magazine, Inference: International Review of Science, that was publishing not only creationism, but full-on climate science contrarianism. Why did Thiel’s climate denial take you over the edge?

Adam Becker: People take Silicon Valley’s ideas about science and technology very seriously, as though the leaders of the tech industry actually know anything about science or tech. It’s an understandable mistake to make, but it’s a mistake. When I started thinking about what I already knew about that, I realized that there was this through-line in Silicon Valley of climate denial of a kind, usually not the outright climate denial that you find in that Thiel-funded magazine, but a more insidious form of climate denial that minimizes climate change as a problem and says, “Oh, this is something that we can solve later, once we’ve built an [artificial intelligence] god, or gone to space.”

Rei Takver: When I see the phrase “more everything forever,” it conjures visions of endless power — more oil, more gas, more nuclear, forever. You’ve written about how many of these tech billionaires, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, love dreaming about tapping into endless sources of infinite energy — often alongside the Trump administration. Why do you think Altman, and a wide selection of other tech leaders are aligning with the Trump administration’s aggressively fossil-fuel dominant AI energy policy?

Adam Becker: Let me answer your question with a segue. Nuclear fusion is one of these false promises of the tech industry, right? There’s a company, Helion, saying that they’re going to get a nuclear fusion power plant online at commercially competitive rates by 2028. I’m a physicist. That’s delusional. More realistically, we’re talking 40 years, and even that is probably optimistic — 2028 is not going to happen. Guess who’s the single largest investor in Helion and chairman of the board? It is Sam Altman. In an interview in January he was asked, what’s the best way to combat climate change? And he said, oh, we need to loosen up permitting for nuclear fusion plants, something that doesn’t exist and will not exist for probably decades.

EDIT

Rei Takver: Hasn’t Altman even said he believes AGI, artificial general intelligence, a supercomputer that in theory would match or exceed the intelligence of a human being, is going to solve climate change when it’s invented?

Adam Becker: Yeah, he said back in 2023 that climate change isn’t going to be that big a deal for a super intelligent AGI, because we can just ask it for three wishes to solve global warming. That’s not a viable plan. That’s not even a concept of a plan. The thing about these insane, futuristic visions that Altman and other tech billionaires are trying to sell the rest of us on is that it allows them to justify any action that they possibly want to take. As in, sure, we can just burn as many fossil fuels as we want right now, because the AGI is going to solve it for us.

EDIT

https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/04/qa-tech-billionaires-ai-space-empire-fantasies-are-an-insidious-form-of-climate-denial/

[rampartd]

1. i feel like a luddite on this ai stuff

i don't think these programs "think" at all, and in fact this mass deportation policy (among other) seems to be generated by something without human values, needs, limitations, or experience.

"without human values, needs, limitations, or experience." i could be talking about trump

[dlk]

2. AI is a glorified math algorithm, nothing more

The oligarchs, who are working overtime to vacuum up all of our resources, want us to believe they have special insights into the mysteries of the universe, as though they are the oracle, and we are all four years old.

It’s easier to steal from us, then.

[OldBaldy1701E]

4. "It doesn't get pissed off. It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes."

"It just runs programs!" - Short Circuit

Yes they think they are 'divine'. That is because we keep on letting them think they are. We continue to file their delusions by bowing to their every whim.

But, we have been doing this with the rich since before the last century, so it is nothing new to us.

[dlk]

6. There is no relation between someone being rich and having ethical standards

Too often they are mutually exclusive.

[OldBaldy1701E]

9. Too often, indeed! (n/t)

[rubbersole]

14. I worked with a gentleman that was "laid off"...

..after the company owner heard him opine that "Christianity and capitalism were incompatible". And his logical explanation wasn't arguable. I quit the next day when the Union Business Manager wouldn't try to get him rehired. (It was 2009 and employers were scarce.)

[GB_RN]

13. You Are Definitely Describing Cantaloupe Caligula The Corpulent...

And Reichsmarschall für Propaganda Steven Miller.
And…the rest of that criminal cabal.

[Roy Rolling]

3. That's it!

Best description ever for a gazillionaire unhappy until he flies to Mars.

Which, by the way, the sooner the better if you ask me. Send him today to make his SpaceX wet dreams come true.

[lapfog_1]

5. the problem is one of learned expectations

You see, silicon tech executives have grown up and lived ( and made billions of dollars ) in an industry that produces revolutionary new products almost on an annual cycle... ever faster, cheaper, and smaller.

One might even think that we are making new "technology" not as evolution ( breaking Moore's Law ) but as revolution... that aliens from Zenu are giving their technology to us ( think back to Terminator 2 and the scene where the time traveled chip technology arrives 4 or 6 decades from the future to inspire the 1980s Cyberdyne scientists "in completely new direction" ).

Only that is complete bullshit. None of today's computer technology is "revolutionary"... there is a direct path from the 1940s to 2026 and the evolution of circuits. Electrons go in, electrons come out. timing signals are generated by vibrating bits of crystals, gates open and close based on circuit logic... and the output is predictable. We have simply gone from "hundreds of such operations per second" to many billions of operations per second. In fact... over the last 10 years, the rate at which these circuits execute ( the computer clock speed ) has slowed down dramatically. The very "fastest" CPU today operates at 5 GHz whereas 10 years ago... it was 3 GHz. What has changed is that instead of 1 core or CPU doing 1 operation... we have packed thousands of special CPUs, each doing 1 operation, into a computer chip not much bigger than the older generation CPU ( and we call these GPUs or NPUs or even ASICs ).

The folks who were lucky enough to ride this evolutionary scale ( make use of this technology to apply to new things that people like and pay for ) became billionaires. But for every Facebook, there was a MySpace.. and for every Google there was an "askjeeves". where the not so lucky maybe made some money, but not billions.

So naturally these Silicon Valley types think they are geniuses... that all problems faced by mankind are tractable to the same "we just need to wait a few years for high tech to solve the problem". Sometimes in those other fields of endeavor that does happen ( in the 1960s is was postulated that we would never be able to feed 2 billion people, but now we "sort of" feed 9 billion, thanks to some scientists like Norman Borlaug. However, fusion energy has always been ( in my lifetime ) "30 years away" and, maybe... but just maybe... is now 20 years away. Not much evolution, no revolution - certainly not at the speed of computer technology.

Climate change is another place where there doesn't seem to be a solution in the offing. Not only that, but I don't know if AI will ever be able to help... or rather will be able to help soon enough. AI reminds me of Douglas Adams and his "Hitchhikers Guide" set of books where the aliens from a distant planet decide to build a huge computer to answer the ultimate question about "life, the universe, and everything" only to wait hundreds of years for the computer to spit out the answer "42"... and then they demand to know what that means and the computer says "you have to ask the right question, and for that you need to build a new computer, one that will be the size of a planet... and we will call it Earth... and the jokes abound (mice that are actually multi dimensional aliens that built the planet doing experiments on people by running around in a maze to get some cheese _ "how subtle"... to another alien that enjoyed making fjords in Norway).

I Forgive the tech billionaires a little bit because of their lived experience with computer tech... but that doesn't make them into the geniuses that they imagine themselves to be, nor does that mean they can solve the big science and big tech problems with more big science and big tech solutions. That Fusion energy is just 2 more years away from being commercial and providing at least as much electricity to the grid as their AI "token factories" will consume by then.

Such statements are a function of ego gone wild and too much money being thrown at them, often in a space of just a few years...

These are not the people that we should turn to for a solution to all of mankind's issues. OTOH, they are the only people with enough concentrated wealth to replace governments in the funding of new science or technology based solutions ( since governments now want to ignore that the problems even exist ).

[littlemissmartypants]

7. Kick

[3Hotdogs]

8. My friend who lived across the street was one of the original Bell Labs researchers on A.I..

I think he would be appalled at what has come from his work.

[Clouds Passing]

10. AI is based on thievery of all information accquired by humans. AI will never be able to access true creativity.

[hunter]

11. Artificial Intelligence isn't even on the horizon.

We do have machines, however, that are quite good at rendering and reconstituting internet gibberish appealing to the vanities of fools.

Trips to Mars and fusion power plants are equally fanciful.

The delusions of billionaires are destroying the natural world as we humans have known it, the natural world that shaped our genes, the natural world that brings species into existence and takes them out. As we ignore this reality we hasten our departure.

In the blink of an eye these billionaires will be gone and life on earth will carry on the same as it ever has, nothing left of humanity but a curious layer of trash in the geologic record and some inert scraps of metal in space.

Forever is the fantasy of fools.

[angrychair]

12. Never understand this

Hasn’t Altman even said he believes AGI, artificial general intelligence, a supercomputer that in theory would match or exceed the intelligence of a human being

Hey, just thinking out loud here...we already have really intelligent human beyin real life. They are already working on solving human caused climate change.
Why do I need a computer as smart as a human? We already humans. A lot of them. And a fair amounts are pretty damn smart. Some are really, really smart.
I'm in IT and I absolutely hate Al and everything about it.

[Pinback]

15. Thanks. Looks like a good book.

And DeSmog is new to me — will check out more on that site.