Adam Becker: "Earth is always going to be a better option"

While copies of July’s book of the month are heading across the country to all of our members, I’d like to share the conversation I had a few days ago with the author of June’s pick. Adam Becker was kind enough to spend an hour answering my questions about the people and ideas he put under the microscope in More Everything Forever.

We discussed a range of topics prompted by the beliefs of Silicon Valley elites in ideas like space colonization, transhumanism, existential threat and the Singularity. We discussed the idea that the Earth is disposable, whether techno-utopianism is a religion, why mathematics is important, and how Silicon Valley has been huffing on the scale pipe.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. I hope you enjoy it!

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Bobbie: I got the feeling that there was a moment when something happened, when you said “Enough!” and started writing the book. Am I right? Was there a straw that broke the camel’s back?

Adam: That’s a good question, and it is true in a way—although oddly, insofar as there is a single sort of moment that broke the camel's back, it was not something that really made it into the book. It's in there in passing, in a parenthetical note, but it didn't end up being central. It wasn’t long after my first book, which was about the foundations of quantum mechanics, came out in 2018.

It did surprisingly well, and I got invited to write for a lot of other places in the wake of that, and got this email from a magazine I'd never heard of called Inference. I asked for more information, and I did a little digging, and I took a careful look at the website and realized that I couldn't say yes: the website had some reasonable articles about various scientific ideas, but it also had junk, and some of that junk was actually creationist junk arguing that evolution is not real and stuff. So I decided instead to go digging and write about them. I had figured for a variety of reasons that the money was coming from this hardcore Christian right-wing think tank, but then I discovered that all of it was coming from Peter Thiel.

By that point I had lived out here in the San Francisco Bay for quite a few years, and had been to quite a few parties where I'd heard a lot of people say a lot of crazy things about AI and the Singularity and space colonization and whatnot, but something about that moment where I saw Peter Thiel funding a creationist magazine, I thought: Wait, OK, I have got to do something about this. 

I kept thinking about how people who don't spend a lot of time paying attention to the tech industry just sort of assume—and reasonably so, although incorrectly—that its leaders really know what they're talking about when it comes to science and technology, and the future of science and technology. So that’s the beginning of the journey that ultimately led to this book, though there were quite a few twists and turns along the way.

B: There are a wide range of targets in the book, both people and ideas. Let's start with AI, since you can't move without AI hitting you around the face at the minute. At its core, you argue that Silicon Valley elites believe that artificial general intelligence is achievable, it is close, it is very dangerous… and also that it's incumbent upon us to bring it about. But AI is doing some pretty crazy things right now, so why are they wrong in their belief?

A: There's a few things at work here. One is this idea of artificial general intelligence. I argue in the book that it's not particularly coherent, it's not a well-defined idea. It's really more of a way to gesture at the idea of AI like we have in science fiction. 

While it is certainly true that the systems we have now that we call AI—a term that I don't love for them, by the way—certainly do some very impressive things, there's a lot of good reason to think that those very impressive things are really not closely related to being able to get to human capacity at all sorts of things that humans do that AI currently can't do. 

Just to be really, really clear about this, that is not to dismiss the fact that the system can do some interesting and in some cases impressive things. But there's this claim that I talk about in the book, and that you also hear a lot if you just hang out in the Bay Area, that scale is all you need: if you just throw more and more computing capacity at large language models, or things a lot like large language models, then it becomes an AGI. 

This is a really bizarre claim that has essentially no evidence behind it, and a lot of evidence against it. Human cognition is not very much like a computer, and the analogy between computation and cognition is just that, an analogy.

B: Scale is really a drug, right? It's like they're huffing on the scale pipe. It seems to be this magical answer to everything. Can't figure out how to solve your problem? Don't worry, scale will solve it. Just multiply everything! That seems to be a constant refrain through all of these things.

A: You also see that in their business practices as well. Your startup’s not profitable? That's fine, don't worry about profit, just scale. Scale is all you need, right?

B: One of the areas where this really struck home is space. I thought your deconstruction of the ideas underpinning space colonization and space travel really rang very true—how this magical thinking works. So: they believe that the only way for the human race to survive in the medium-to-long term is to go to other planets, other solar systems, to really expand. And they think we can do it in a bunch of ways that, as you lay out, just rip apart physics or rely on everything we know to be true no longer being true. Can you just walk us through that a little bit?

A: The obvious guy to pick on here is Elon Musk, someone who I really never tire of picking on. Musk wants to put a million people on Mars, he has said over and over again that he wants to put a million people on Mars by 2050 and very, very recently started saying no, actually, 2050 is not going to happen: We have to go to the moon first. But Mars is the ultimate goal. 

And Mars sucks. Mars is just terrible. The radiation levels are too high, the gravity is too low, there is virtually no air, and the dirt is made of poison. And as awful as all of that sounds, that isn't even all of the problems with Mars. 

Musk is nonetheless right about one thing, implicitly: after Earth, Mars is the next best habitable surface in the solar system. The only real competition it has for that title is the moon, and really the only thing the Moon has going for it over Mars is that it's much, much easier to get there because it's so much closer. Other than that, the moon is really worse than Mars in basically every single way. 

It is true, actually, that the Moon doesn't have poison dust, but it does have razor sharp dust that's also electrostatically charged, so it's really abrasive and really sticky, and just gets on everything. Every Apollo mission was pushed to its operational limits just based on the dust problems alone. It’s not to say that you can't find a way around that, but there are some very, very, very serious problems that you have to face, and the Moon and Mars are far and away better than anywhere else in the solar system in terms of solid surfaces. 

You will hear Musk and others say we have to get off Earth because we need a lifeboat in the event of a massive nuclear war here on earth, or an asteroid as big as the one that killed off all the dinosaurs except for the birds 66 million years ago. But the day that asteroid hit was a better and nicer day for life on Earth than any day in the last few billion years in the history of Mars. We know that because mammals and birds and all sorts of other life survived, and none of those creatures could survive unprotected on the surface of Mars. Earth is always going to be a better option. 

So there is nowhere in the solar system that we can go, and we are not leaving the solar system because the other stars are just too far away. The speed of light is just too slow, and even getting up to the speed of light is this herculean task that causes all sorts of problems. If you do manage to get up to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, you have serious radiation issues, and we're not going faster than the speed of light. That's been very well tested within physics. 

And there's good reason to think that planets like Earth going around stars like the Sun are actually pretty rare. We have found that there are planets around almost every star that we've been able to observe properly, but most stars are smaller than the sun, and there's good reason to think that you need a star the size of the sun in order to really have a good ecosystem.

I actually don't really talk about very much in the book, because leaving the solar system is something that I just dismiss out of hand, and I think that's reasonable, but just to get into a little bit: There's this sort of Goldilocks thing going on with smaller stars. In order to have liquid water, you have to be too close in, and you get lots of flares and you're also likely to end up in this tidal locking scenario, where you have one side of the planet baking under constant sun, on the other side freezing under no sun. 

But stars bigger than the sun die faster, so the bigger the star, the shorter its lifetime, and so you don't have as long for complex life to evolve, So you end up sort of in this situation where it seems like, actually, if you want anything like the kind of life that we have on Earth, you probably need a star like the sun. We don't know for sure, of course, but you know that while those stars are not uncommon, most stars are quite a bit smaller.

So even if we could leave the solar system, it might be hard to find a hospitable world, but that's beside the point, because we're not going anywhere. We're not leaving the solar system. 

Space is a wonderful thing to explore scientifically. The solar system is a great place to send robots, but we are not going anywhere.

B: It’s going back to the scale point, really. Size is no impediment to this thinking. It’s like “by the time we get there, we'll have fixed that.” The math is being manipulated to whatever ends they need. Are these people just really bad at math? Is that what's going on here?

A: I feel like they're bad at doing certain kinds of math, I think that they are used to thinking of math as a kind of magical incantation that gets them a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for any sort of argument. They're like, "Oh, but the math works out.” But I’ve said "OK, I checked your math and it doesn't work.” 

Actually I’m gonna walk it back. The magical incantation thing I agree with, but I don't actually think that they're bad at math. I think what they're bad at is picking what math is relevant. 

One of the things that ends up being a very difficult part of physics, going back to my academic background, is picking out the right way to approach a problem. In physics we are basically always looking at simplified versions of real world things. The question is, what features of those real-world things are the right ones to focus on, and which ones are the ones that we can safely ignore in order to figure out a good approximation to, or in some cases, the exact answer to the question that we're asking. 

The most well-known example of this is the high school physics version of, OK, we're going to do everything in a frictionless vacuum, because we don't want to think about friction, and we don't want to think about air resistance. So when you answer questions about how long it takes for something to fall, you're not actually looking at how that actually works, you're looking at how it would work if there were no air, because what you actually want to do is understand how gravity works, right? 

And you can do some back-of-the-envelope, napkin math that will suggest that you can colonize the Milky Way within the space of a million years or maybe less. But that napkin math is based on the wrong kind of oversimplification. That napkin math is “OK so if you have something that can go at 1/10 the speed of light, and it takes this much time to collect the resources to make another copy of it, and so on and so forth…” but what you're not looking at is where did I get those assumptions to begin with. The problem in these arguments is almost always the very first step that they take.

B: Long-termists and existential threat thinkers, often do seem to assign somewhat randomly generated likelihoods to an event happening that they have generated themselves, and not drawn from many other people who have thought about it. And then they turn that into a rule that then cements not just their own thinking, but all of the people who are building on top of it. But you are asking those questions. What reaction have you had from the people in these communities?

A: Honestly, the people in those communities have mostly not been responding to me directly. I haven't seen very many responses, you know. I've gotten a couple of angry emails, but those angry emails are mostly about “the AI is going to kill us all, what's wrong with you?” that kind of thing. There was one person who I saw posted a review of my book on one of the Effective Altruist forums, and he got really hung up on some of the stuff that I said about climate change and global warming and ended up sort of giving the game away. He was saying, “well, but you know, [effective altruist philosophers William] MacAskill and [Toby] Ord said these things, and they can't possibly be that far outside the mainstream, so Becker must be wrong. Like: I have endnotes, man. You could just go look at my sources.

B: That takes me on to something else I wanted to discuss. When I hear a response like that, it just makes me think: this is just a religion. This is just this a faith that people have. Now, we all believe things that we don't understand. I don't understand 95% of the scientific stuff that's coming my way, but I trust that there are peer reviews and checks and balances and all the things. But the techno utopians have all of these different, overlapping, intersecting beliefs. They're not one package, it's not like a singular faith: the transhumanists are not necessarily the same as the space colonizers, but they all reinforce each other in different ways. To what extent do you think it forms some kind of coherent, religious-style belief system?

A: I definitely think that it's a religious style belief system. I think that's a good phrase for it. Even the differences between these communities and individuals within these communities, where they take some parts and leave others, that itself sounds like a religion: different sects of the same religion, different flavors of Christianity, or something like that. 

I was raised Jewish, and my family is Jewish, and when it comes to Christianity, I've always been on the outside looking in, with my nose pressed up against the glass. When I was a kid and I was trying to understand all this stuff, I had a really hard time understanding all the different sects of Christianity. There are different versions of Judaism as well, but there are just so many more Christians, and so there's so many more Christian sects, and I had trouble, you know, keeping them straight.

I see this as being quite a bit like that, and I also see the sort of picking-and-choosing of different parts of the belief system as being very similar to the way that people will pick and choose different parts of a system of religious faith that that sort of work for them. 

This certainly wouldn't be the first time that Silicon Valley has reinvented the wheel, right? And, there is, as I say in the book, quite a bit of connection to Christian religious belief in particular. I think it's not a coincidence at all, and I've actually had people within the community say this to me as well. 

Actually, going back to responses from people within the community: a lot of people who are really into and really deep in these rationalist and effective altruist communities, in particular, are people who came from very hardcore religious backgrounds, often Christian fundamentalist backgrounds of some kind. You'll get like people who are raised evangelical Southern Baptist, or Mormon, really hardcore versions of these faiths, and then they leave those faiths and end up gravitating toward this, I mean, even [Elezier] Yudkowsky, he was raised Orthodox Jewish. I really don't see that as a coincidence. 

As I say in the book, Yudkowsky and others dismiss this as people trying to psychoanalyze their way to the truth. But I'm not saying that you were wrong because it looks like a religion, I'm saying you're wrong and it looks like a religion.

B: And Peter Thiel has been doing his Antichrist spiel. He’s leaning very hard into that. 

The whole category of super-powerful, incredibly wealthy technologists we’re talking about are now heavily involved in politics and the media, assaulting the institutions of government or taking them over, finding ways to help the system increase their wealth and influence. But your book asks them questions they never really get asked otherwise: Do you really believe that? Why do you believe that? Do you think they believe these things? 

A: You know, I don't know what they genuinely believe. I mean, I've got that list at the end of my book about the people who did agree to talk to me and the people who didn't, but…

B: What do you think are the most dangerous ideas that are being smuggled into the mainstream here?

A: I'm not going to be able to pick just one. But the first one that pops into my head is this idea that Earth is disposable, that that there is a planet B. As the saying goes, there is no planet B. Musk's actions really are predicated on a rhetoric of earth being doomed, and we have to leave, we have to get out before it's too late, so it's OK to use up the resources here on Earth and do whatever it takes in order to get out. 

And that's just not true. There's nowhere to go, we don't have to use up the resources here, we can find a way to live in balance here. So I think that's really, really dangerous, and I think that he's not the only one pushing something like that: You see similar rhetoric from people like Bezos, Thiel and so on. 

Then there’s this idea, going back to the origins of the book, the idea that tech billionaires are uniquely qualified to understand the technologies that their own industry creates, and the future of those technologies, and that that future is inevitable. That rhetoric of inevitability—that AI is the future and it is coming and there's nothing you can do. AGI is coming, and there's nothing you can do. 

These are choices. The development of technology is always inevitably a human choice. We have decisions that we as a society can make about these things, and some of those decisions can end up taking the form of regulation. This idea that these people are unique geniuses, and the future of technology is inevitable, is ultimately an attempt to spike the very idea of regulating the tech industry. Because how could you do that when it's coming anyway? These people are uniquely qualified, and the democratically elected leaders are clueless and feckless—all they could do is make things more painful on the way to the inevitable glorious future of technology. I think that's really pernicious, and has been around since the early days of Silicon Valley, and it's only gotten louder. 

Those are the two that I think really keep me up at night, or end up being related to the stuff that keeps me up at night.

B: So there’s an accelerationist mindset of: “there's a skid, and we're steering into the skid, and I'm the best person to steer into the skid because I started us skidding, and I drove us here in the first place.” I keep coming back to the atom bomb; this idea that you can dramatically accelerate a very dangerous thing as long as the right people are in control of it… we’re fighting a war ostensibly about access to nuclear weapons right now, but the only nation that's ever actually used a nuclear weapon is America. It's really become a defining question of the last 75 years or more of human history, precisely because of a sort of accelerationist moment that America leaned into in order to win a war.

A: That’s really exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about, and it's really quite dangerous, The alarm bells go off for me the minute anybody says that they have the unique right to determine the future for the rest of us, regardless of what everyone else thinks is best because they know best, or their hands are the safe hands. This is why even if I thought the Doomer argument worked—which it doesn't—even if that were true, I would still think that Anthropic is deeply suspect. The fact that the Doomer argument doesn't go through means that you know Anthropic is just spinning pure nonsense, but the idea of them as the “good” AI company, doesn't make sense even on their own terms.

B: How do we inoculate ourselves against these ideas becoming accepted into mainstream thinking? Your book is saying “look at what these people actually say and think!” but how do we spread that further? How does media and society put these beliefs in the place they belong?

A: I mean, get more people to read my book! I’m joking, but also I very much see my book in the same vein as a kind of vaccine against these views. That question is something that I've been wrestling with throughout the writing of the book, and it's also a question I've been wrestling with on my podcast, Dreaming Against the Machine. 

But I don't have a pat answer. I do think that it's so easy to just point the finger at the media and forget that the media is part of our larger society. We live in a society, as the meme says, and if the media is falling down on the job, there's probably societal conditions that are making it easier for it to fall down on the job. 

There’s billionaire ownership of media, and private equity firms that are buying up local media organizations and then selling them off for parts, and these are creating conditions that foster media failure. 

But I will say I think that in the biggest media outlets there has been a failure to really hold billionaires accountable for the things that they say about the world. There's a lot of “billionaire says” journalism. A billionaire said a thing, and it was completely fucking unhinged, and this is one of the most powerful people in our society. You know, the old journalistic saying: if one person says it's raining outside and the other person says it's not, it's not your job to report what both of them said—it's your job to go outside and check. 

When I was first thinking about writing this book and in the early days of writing it, I had the usual panic that I think any psychologically healthy author has which is asking what the hell am I doing? With this book for me it was I'm not a tech journalist, I'm a science journalist. What am I doing here? 

It took me quite some time to realize what my book editor had known from the start, because he's a lot smarter than I am, which is that you have to be a science journalist to write this book. Because a good science journalist—which is what I strive to be, and sometimes on my good days am—doesn't just report the science, but actually reports on the feasibility of whatever the scientists are talking about, tries to get outside comment, tries to figure out whether this paper that you’re reporting on is a major breakthrough, or nonsense, or somewhere in between. 

This is not as far as I can tell, the norm in tech journalism. Tech journalism has a lot more “billionaire says” and access journalism going on, and you need to actually be able to look at this stuff critically. 

I think science journalism often does a pretty good job of this. I don't see enough of that in tech journalism. This is not me calling out every single tech journalist out there—there are obviously some very good ones out there—but I just don't see enough of it.

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Thanks Adam for a great conversation. One more plug for his podcast, Dreaming Against the Machine: it’s a weekly interrogation of these ideas, and guests have included some of my favorite folks, including Cory Doctorow, Reo Eveleth and Kim Stanley Robinson. 

Hopefully by this time next week folks will have received their copies of Positive Obsession: we’ll be talking about some of the reasons I liked it.

Onwards 

Bobbie