Is God Billionaire? How can faith in future technology delay real solutions in the present
The belief that technology protects mankind – some ideas on the current open debate on death, poverty or land can have a great deal of impact. This expectation is not born in universities or scientific research centers, but in Silicon Valley. And the system of these beliefs demolished the physicist and journalist Adam Becker Forever more.
Published in late April, the book was launched under the influence of some radical visions of the future – self -conscious artificial intelligence, space colonies, Mind upload – Business Action Plan from Sci -Fiction, Risk Capital Support, Parapital Donations and Governments and Public Policy.
Becker defines this view as ideology rather than a technical plan. And it builds its criticism in three axes: reductionism, profitability and violation. The first feature is a tendency to simplify complex problems – social, moral, and environmental – computation. The second is the return on alignment and investment with ghost growth patterns. Third and more dangerous, promise to salvation: to overcome death, to give up the planet or to ensure digital eternity.
This is not an exaggeration, Becker writes, but expanding concrete project. Companies and foundations connected to statistics such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Theel and Ray Kurzwheel, for example, research resources for research and programs to assess the disaster AI scenes or to imitate human consciousness.
The author is not a scientific ulation hostage, but it is the way it is used as a tool of authority – as big luck and foresight expectations are delivered with empirical validation.
The book argues that these “radical future” projects are already creating a present. Thoughts such as specialty, super intelligence or migration of planetary migration are not only worked on laboratories or social networks: they are public policies, investments, security guidelines, charity guidelines, and – perhaps very serious – society is as severe as possible.
Becker warns of the danger of defining the terms of this digital elite discussion, what is progress, moral and what should be afraid. If the significant existence is the most important existence machine revolt or cosmic extinction, the problems such as inequality, appetite, and the fall of the atmosphere have seen the distraction – or, in the valley language, “local problems”.
The beauty of Mars, IA and Impossible
This book dedicated to technical details in low pages and inary rumor behind projects. Ida to Mars, for example, is not considered an engineering proposal, but is considered a symbol: from the escape, personal heroism, the right to enormous expansion. Criticism is not just for technical feasibility – Becker disputes with data on radiation, logistics and residence – but for the idea that it is desirable or morally neutral solution.
In artificial intelligence, criticism follows such logic. Instead of focusing only on the debate between optimists and Alarmists, Becker suggests that both share the same error: AI is considered an inevitable, autonomous and political decision. He argues that the central problem is “killing us”, but what these machines do, who will serve them and who decides on what values.
One of the most blunt chapters deal with the movement Effective alignmentIt proposes to use metrics to decide how to do better. The criticism of Becker is that by multiplying the smaller probability of saving the future lives of billions, this system turns into real and emergency issues – such as malaria or food insecurity – turning into less preference.
He cited expectations that IA security investments are “effective” than any public health intervention today. Consequently, according to the author, the legitimacy of business interests is calculated by neutral equations, as moral commitments.
Back to land
Despite the hyperbolic title, Forever more This is a book on limits. Against the idea that more technology is always more progress, Becker proposes more attention, more responsibility and more humility. “We are here now, in the world more than what we can reasonably ask,” he wrote. “We can find and understand this world to make this world a little better.” Instead of ining the salvation by rockets or algorithms, this represents another way: slowly, note and take care of existing ones.
