The Mad Religion of Technological Salvation

Adam Becker has done an invaluable public service by exposing the fever dreams of Silicon Valley elites. Becker, a science journalist and Ph.D. astrophysicist, spent the last few years investigating the futurological vision of our tech bro masters — and found it’s all a dangerous bunch of nonsense.

His targets in “More Everything Forever” are the familiar names we’ve come to associate with the great leaps forward in the march of what Becker calls the religion of technological salvation: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Dustin Moskovitz. He also aims his guns at Ray Kurzweil, the man behind the immortalizing digitalization of human affairs called “the Singularity,” artificial general intelligence cheerleader Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the crew of longtermist tech apologists at Oxford University on whom Moskovitz and other Valley barons have lavished funding.   

What unites these players is lust for power and control based in the seduction that technology will solve all humanity’s problems and overcome the human condition. Musk and Bezos’s “power fantasies” of space colonization and visions of “AI immortality” will usher in a future of unlimited wealth and resources, beyond the confines of Earth, the solar system, the galaxy. Kurzweil’s dream of the Singularity involves the uploading of minds into digital simulations, so we can live forever. All of this, Becker says, is a divorced-from-reality sales pitch driven by the primordial fear of death. Overarching it is what’s called “engineer’s disease”: the mental derangement of believing that engineering can solve anything and everything.

It’s the ultimate revenge of the nerds — and a dangerous fantasy because of our subservience to the immense money and overhyped influence of the tech religionists. What to do in answer?  Understand the authoritarian nature of these zealots, so we can repudiate them. As Becker puts it, channeling George Orwell’s “1984”: “If you want a picture of [the] future, imagine a billionaire’s digital boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

I spoke with Becker recently via Zoom about his book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Truthdig: Let’s start with what inspired you to write this book. Like, why go after Sam Altman, Ray Kurzweil, Bezos, Musk, the whole techno-optimist crowd?

Adam Becker: I’ve been following these sorts of subcultures — longtermists, general techno-optimism, Singularity stuff — for a very long time. I’m a science fiction junkie and first encountered a lot of these ideas in science fiction in high school or earlier. I think I first heard of Ray Kurzweil in college. And I thought, oh, yeah, these ideas are bad, but they don’t seem to be getting a lot of traction. And then the funniest thing happened: tech billionaires took this stuff seriously and started giving these people a lot of money. I moved out to the Bay Area about 13 years ago, and this is ground zero. I realized how deep in the culture this stuff is, these things like the singularity and AI hype, the idea that technology is going to solve every single problem. I was amazed at the uncritical and ubiquitous acceptance of these ideas out here. What people don’t seem to realize is these communities are becoming bigger and more influential. So even though their ideas are sort of prima facie ridiculous, we have to engage with them because they are gaining more power. Fundamentally, that’s where the impulse for the book came from.

TD: What drives this zealous acceptance by the technocrats of what you describe as prima facie ridiculous ideas?

AB: Because it provides all kinds of excuses for them to do and say the things that they already want to do and say, and that makes these ideas really appealing and compelling and persuasive for them. It makes the world simple. It provides a sense of direction and meaning. It lets them see themselves as the hero of the story of humanity, that they’re going to save us by taking us all to space and letting us live forever with an AI god. They’re going to be the people who usher in a permanent paradise for humanity. What could be more important than that? And of course, all of that’s nonsense. 

TD: What you describe is, of course, a religion, in that it provides all the various salutary, mentally assuaging elements of religion — meaning, purpose, direction, a god of sorts.

AB: It even provides, in some cases, a kind of community.

TD: Let’s talk about the religion of technological salvation. The religion long predates this movement, no? Tell me how the current iteration of the religion of tech salvation fits into the history of industrial society.

AB: I think science is great, and I think it is true that science has brought about really amazing things. It’s also brought about horrors. It gave us vaccines, but it also gave us thermonuclear weapons. What scientific truths we discover, that’s not really up to us. What technology we build off of the scientific advances that we’ve made, that is up to us. There is no inevitable future of technology. It can enable us to do things that we previously couldn’t, but which things it enables are a combination of the constraints placed on us by nature and human choice. The narrative that technology will inevitably lead us to a utopia or inevitably lead us to apocalypse — these are just stories that we tell.

The specific version of this ideology of technological salvation that the tech oligarchs and their kept intellectuals and the subcultures that they fund is ultimately something that springs from a mix of early-to-mid-20th century science fiction and various Christian apocalyptic movements. Because there’s a fairly long history in Christian apocalyptic movements of the idea that technology will bring about the second coming that you find in Christian apocalyptic writing. 

TD: Why should we beware the rule of engineers?

AB: Because there’s no democratic accountability. And because engineers often suffer from engineer’s disease, which has a couple of different definitions. First, there’s a tendency to just ignore the humanities and ignore anything that’s not in the narrow domain of STEM as fundamentally not important. But engineer’s disease really boils down to the idea that if you are an expert in one technical domain and know how to solve one kind of very difficult problem, that makes you an expert in every domain because you know how to solve all kinds of difficult problems. And that’s just not how the world works. If you are really, really good at, say, string theory, that does not mean that you’re going to be really, really good at geopolitics. It’s not like Albert Einstein would have been the world’s greatest psychotherapist if he had just gone into Freudian psychology rather than theoretical physics. That’s not how the world works. That’s not how expertise works. 

Expertise is not transferable like that. It’s not innate. And this is especially pernicious when talking about computer science in particular and software engineering. In software engineering, the problems that you learn to solve are fundamentally human problems, because the systems that you’re working with and within are designed and built by humans. And so there is a legible logic to them because the systems were designed — and designed such that questions that humans would ask of them would have answers. But the world that we live in is an aggressively non-human world, and the logic that underlies it is not a human logic. 

TD: I noticed throughout your book a kind of implicit critique of the blinkeredness of anthropocentrism. The example of Kurzweil seems to take this anthropocentric blindness to absurd heights. How do we take someone like Kurzweil seriously when he proposes something manifestly outside the realm of the physically possible, just not based in any known science today?

AB: In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to take it seriously.  But the problem is that there are powerful and influential people who do take these ideas seriously. Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful and wealthy people alive, takes Kurzweil’s ideas very seriously. And unfortunately, that means that we have to take those ideas seriously in order to tear them apart. We have to say, “That’s ridiculous, and here’s a detailed explanation of why.”

TD: I’ve noticed a phrase you like to use: That’s not how the world works. These people, it seems, are divorced from the reality of the world. 

AB: Yeah, they are. They have completely misunderstood how the world works, how science works, how people work. I know I keep hammering away at Andreesen, because he’s my least favorite person in the entire book. He says in his manifesto that he is the keeper of the true scientific method, contrasting himself with academic scientists. The real scientific method is not to have a statement of beliefs about what the world is and how it works, or what the inevitable future of technology is. The real scientific method is to be curious and questioning about the world and be open to the possibility that you’re wrong — in fact, expecting that you’re wrong. And that’s not something that I think that these people are capable of.

TD: One of the versions of utopia as envisioned by Bezos and Musk is space colonization. You show very clearly that this is divorced from reality. How much of a fantasy are we talking about here? And why go to Mars in the first place?

AB: To pick on another guy who absolutely deserves it, Elon Musk has been very consistent about the vision he has for Mars and the justification for it. He says that we need to become an interplanetary and interstellar species to preserve the light of consciousness. His plan is to have a million people living on Mars by 2050 in order to form a self-sufficient colony that will survive even if rockets from Earth stop coming. It doesn’t work for so many different reasons. Mars is absolutely terrible. The radiation levels are too high. The gravity is too low. There’s no air! The dirt is made of poison. It is a horrible place.

Musk talks about Mars as a refuge in the event of an asteroid strike here on Earth. More asteroids strike Mars than Earth. And Earth, after an asteroid strike like the one that killed off the dinosaurs, was still a nicer place than Mars. And think about what getting a million people to Mars would require. Say that you could somehow cram a hundred people into a single spaceship, into a single rocket. That is more than 10 times the number of people that have ever gone up in one space mission ever before. And the mission that sent eight people up, that was just to Earth orbit. They could get back to the ground in a couple of hours. And it took less than a couple of hours for them to even get to Earth orbit in the first place. A mission to Mars takes six to nine months, minimum.

TD: And the radiation that would accumulate or that would be absorbed by the passengers during that period, would it not then result in terrible cancers over time?

AB: Yeah, it would massively increase the cancer risk. It would probably sterilize some of the people on board, or at least make it much harder for them to have kids. 

TD: All for the greater good of realizing utopia. So, you’ve arrived on Mars, you’re living presumably in an underground community. You never see the sky. It sounds like a nightmare. It sounds like a place for people to go insane.

AB: No, it’s hellish. I mean, look, it’s hard enough to find people who want to winter over at the South Pole. If you winter over at the South Pole, you still get to go outside. You still get to see the sky. You don’t go outside for long, but they do it. You can’t leave the polar station in the winter. You’re stuck there with people, but there’s oxygen to breathe. All you need is to have food and to be able to stand staying there with the same people for upwards of six months. And it’s still so psychologically brutal that very few people are willing to do it. That is a walk in the park compared to Mars. 

I’m very careful to say this in the book: I am not saying that we will never, ever, ever live on Mars for sure. I am just saying that we might never live on Mars, that there is nothing inevitable about it, and that we absolutely do not have anywhere near the technological ability to do that right now, or in the foreseeable future.