… One prominent paper concluded that $100 spent on A.I. safety saves one trillion future lives — making it "far more" valuable "than the near-future benefits" of distributing anti-malarial bed nets. "For a strong longtermist," Becker writes, "investing in a Silicon Valley A.I. safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics."
Tech billionaires' pet projects can sound deliriously futuristic, but lurking underneath them all is an obsession that is very old. It's the primal fear of death, encased in a shiny new rocket ship. Becker quotes other writers who have noticed how Silicon Valley, with its omnivorous appetite, has turned existential angst into yet another input. "Space has become the ultimate imperial ambition," the scholar Kate Crawford writes in "Atlas of A.I.," "symbolizing an escape from the limits of Earth, bodies and regulation." In "God, Human, Animal, Machine" (2021), Meghan O'Gieblyn describes how technology took over the domain of religion and philosophy: "All the eternal questions have become engineering problems."
The "ideology of technological salvation" that Becker identifies can therefore be understood, too, as a desperate attempt to deal with despair. Amid his sharp criticisms of the tech figures he writes about is a resolute call for compassion. He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.
"We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for," Becker writes. "We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everything-forever-adam-becker.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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