The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
Confused by the Singularity and the impending AI apocalypse? Theoretical physicist turned science writer Adam Becker is here to help with “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity,” a jaundiced tour d’horizon of the peculiar end-times stories that IT visionaries — particularly the richest and most powerful ones — tell themselves.
Human beings are the apes that tell stories. This is a problem. Since we communicate in narrative, rather than with canonical mathematics, a compelling story will always trump (pun intended) hard data and reasoned analysis.
And there’s no more compelling narrative than that of humanity’s endgame, which leads to either the AI apocalypse or the Singularity — the stories of how a rapid acceleration of machine intelligence, not just past human level, but beyond human control, — will yield either human extinction or exponential economic growth that will endow humanity with unlimited wealth. We’re either all going to die or all going to live happily ever after in a world of endless leisure in which all of the work is done by hyperintelligent robots and nanobots.
Keynes Foresaw a Leisure-Heavy Future
Becker’s book was released in early 2025, before the Anthropic/Hugging Face episode put the AI apocalypse on the front pages, but his treatment of the Singularity shines a light on how well AI experts forecast, which is not very well. At least regarding the latter, we’ve been here before. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” posited that modern economic growth over the ensuing century would allow all of us to live “wisely, agreeably, and well.” After working only three hours per day, we’d quit the grind and enrich ourselves with a vast array of cultural opportunities.
We’re nearly at Keynes’ century mark: It hasn’t happened. In the 1990s, Robert Solow wryly observed about that era’s economic techno-optimism, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
While it’s still early days, in the three and a half years since the release of ChatGPT, we’ve got nothing, at least so far, to show for a trillion or two of capex into assets that depreciate only slightly more slowly than a green banana.
But we’re getting well ahead of Becker’s story — an engaging jaunt through a dog’s breakfast of technological and social predictions that would be of little consequence save for the fact that their brotherhood of believers (sisters being few and far between in this sandbox) seems to have captured the developed world’s levers of power.
Kurzweil, the Singularity’s Loudest Advocate
If “More Everything Forever” has a central character, it’s Ray Kurzweil, the pioneering computer scientist behind advances such as optical character recognition and speech recognition. More importantly, he’s the most visible proponent of the Singularity, a term first used by the late mathematician John von Neumann to describe an inflection in human affairs from rapid technological innovation.
Kurzweil popularized the phenomenon in two books, “The Singularity Is Near” and “The Singularity Is Nearer,” both of which described the technological Valhalla awaiting mankind wrought by the merging of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the computer-brain interface. Look for it around 2045, Kurzweil advises.
Kurzweil’s initial sunny vision is weak tea compared to that of one of his more prominent singularity confederates, molecular nanotechnology researcher K. Eric Drexler, who postulated a multi-step process in which successive generations of molecular-level machines would replicate themselves. The later generations of these nanobots would eventually manufacture whatever humans needed, such as unlimited food and drugs that would abolish “a disease called aging.”
Not to be outdone, Kurzweil postulated nanobot fleets that would envelop our galaxy, “many trillions of them, with some of these ‘seeds’ taking root in another planetary system and then replicating by finding the appropriate materials . . . and building copies of themselves.” In short, the ultimate end-times narrative, in which the universe is turned into a supercomputer that executes 1090 calculations per second.
To label such a vision “grandiose” would be a gross understatement. First, there’s the slight moral problem of chewing up entire galaxies — and perhaps the rest of the reachable universe. Maybe we shouldn’t be annihilating entire alien populations for our benefit. No problem, say some Singularitarians.
The Fermi paradox, the fact that aliens have not visited us, provides a handy get-out-of-jail card: We must be alone in the universe, never mind the paradox’s many proposed solutions. Next comes the problem of the enormous amount of power that such intergalactic nanomanufacturing fleets would consume for travel and operation. Again, no problem: Just build Dyson spheres around alien stars to capture the necessary energy.
Finally, Becker’s physics background compels him to point out another problem with this intergalactic vision: The universe is really big: 90 billion light years across and home to two trillion galaxies. (About 90% of which lay well beyond the 16-billion-light-year “event horizon” and thus permanently inaccessible to us, even at light-approaching speeds.)
An Awful Lot of People
You’d think that any serious observer would ignore such cosmic-level nonsense. Then again, perhaps you’ve heard of effective altruism (EA), founded by Oxford philosopher William MacAskill and made infamous by Sam Bankman-Fried. Loosely speaking, the concept explores the most economically effective ways of improving humankind’s well-being — not just for today’s humans, but for tomorrow’s as well. According to MacAskill: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them.” And he does mean a lot: 80 trillion over the next million years.
Again, Becker cannot resist having some fun: His astrophysics training tells him that in about a billion years the sun, as it exhausts its main-sequence hydrogen fuel, will begin to expand and boil away the oceans, terminating life on earth.* If the earth maintains its eight billion population until then, MacAskill is now talking about 100 quadrillion future humans.
But, hey, why limit mankind to this planet? If 1% of the Milky Way’s stars contain habitable planets, now we’re talking about maybe 1040 humans. MacAskill’s math tells us that even if there’s only a one in 1020 chance of a radical intervention’s chance of improving the lives of those 1040 future humans, even if it carries a significant risk of nuclear holocaust today, then we should do it. After all, its effective value is still (1040) / (1020) = 1020 humans. You can’t make this stuff up, and as a bonus, Becker’s dissection of EA helps to explain the Sam Bankman-Fried story.
Spacing Out With Interplanetary Colonization
Compared to such ambitious moral philosophizing, Elon Musk’s plans for Mars colonization seem humdrum. Which doesn’t stop Becker from dismantling them, too. First, there’s the slight problem of radiation poisoning. Even in low-earth orbit, astronauts, no longer protected from cosmic rays by the atmosphere, perceive light flashes as this radiation penetrates their eyes.
Once outside the earth’s magnetic field — about 10 earth radii out — space voyagers are fully exposed, which would rapidly sicken them. NASA, for example, estimates a 5%–20% death rate from a Mars mission, with morbidity running much higher. And Mars colonization? Don’t ask: Human Mars residents would have to shield themselves underground.
What about terraforming Mars for multigenerational habitation? There are potential glitches here as well, like frigid temperatures and the near absence of an atmosphere. And that was before 2008, when the Phoenix lander found that the soil on Mars has a 0.5% concentration of perchlorate, which is toxic to nearly all life on earth.
In the end though, these are mere technical hurdles; mankind’s biggest problem is that if we somehow manage to escape the earth, we can’t escape ourselves: Even if we can successfully colonize other worlds, we’ll be taking our historical baggage with us.
Science Fiction Did a Better Job
If all this extravagant technological and moral speculation seems like science fiction, that’s because it comes from there. Elon Musk is a fan of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin hankers after physicist-turned-science fiction writer Gerard O’Niell’s rotating “space cylinders,” colonies containing tens of thousands. Peter Thiel approved of the supposedly capitalist ideology of the “Star Wars” films (and disapproved of the supposedly socialist one of the “Star Trek” franchise), and Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” reportedly inspired Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse strategy.
What today’s sci-fi fan tech titans missed is that the best science fiction doesn’t predict the future, but rather dissects the present. Ursula LeGuin put this best: “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. . . . I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.”
Thiel’s libertarian admiration of “Star Wars” is particularly telling: When asked about the films’ political subtext, George Lucas flatly stated that their rebel heroes were obviously communists: “They were the Vietcong. It was really about the Vietnam war.” When asked about the identity of one of the series villains, Emperor Palpatine: “He was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name.” The final word on the tech-bros' misappropriation of science fiction goes to one of Stephenson’s friends. When told of Zuckerberg’s admiration for “Snow Crash,” he texted Stephenson, “Sorry for your loss.”
A Couple Small Caveats
Becker’s book is not without flaws. His editor should have pruned several overly long interviews with his sources, and the final half dozen pages are given to a superficial recommendation of a confiscatory wealth tax that would eliminate billionaires, capping individuals at a $500 million net worth. Alas, wealth taxes prove so unworkable in the real world that even socialist bastions like France have abandoned them.
That said, if you’re seeking an understanding of the often-delusional mindset of today’s IT power elite, and especially of the likelihood of the AI apocalypse and how well they’ll be able to forestall it, you won’t do better than Becker’s treatment of the subject.
*An apocryphal story has a woman, upon hearing from an astrophysicist of the earth’s incineration in a billion years, asking him to repeat the prediction. He does, evincing a wave of relief from the woman: “I thought you said million.”
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and a writer with several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from the CFA Institute.
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The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
