Silicon Valley Wants ‘More Everything Forever’

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The futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it’s possible?

On this Angry Planet, astrophysicist and author Adam Becker joins us to explain all the problems with Silicon Valley’s dreams of the future. It’s not a short list. Much of the tech, and even the physics, don’t work the way techno-utopians say it does. Some of the people hawking robot slaves and immortality are chasing the impossible for tragic personal reasons. Others are just trying to sell you something. It’s all the subject of Becker’s new book: More Everything Forever.

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• Franics Fukuyama and the end of everything
• “Death is the ultimate limit, the ultimate loss of control.”
• Moore’s law, the singularity, and Ray Kurzweil’s father
• The Face on Mars and large language models
• Elizas all the way down
• The false binaries of the tech bro future
• Silicon Valley’s lost boys
• “Death is avoidable and taxation is theft.”
• Stasis for me but not for thee
• “Mars sucks”

Against Life Extension by Francis Fukuyama

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