Review of Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever

 AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. 

 

 

There is a notion that science fiction is a form of future history, that science-based hard SF predicts future technology. This is almost entirely wrong. Issac Asimov’s robots had positronic brains and obeyed the three laws of robotics, Arthur C. Clark’s aliens hollowed out asteroids and humanity became a deathless spacefaring species of pure mind, Larry Niven’s Ringworld surrounded a star at its centre. Space empires feature in many books, as does colonisation of the solar system, generation ships travelling to distant stars, people crossing space in cryogenic stasis or as uploaded minds. After decades of reading hard SF and believing that humanity’s destiny was in space, I know that none of this has happened, and lately I have accepted with great sadness that none of it is likely to happen any time soon.

 

In his book on ideas about the future of humanity, Adam Becker describes his experience of this: ‘When I was a kid, I thought Star Trek was a documentary about the future … that this was the future that smart adults had worked out as the best one, that this was what we were going to do … We’d go to space, we’d seek out new life and new civilizations, and we’d do a lot of science. I was six, and that sounded pretty good to me.’  He then says ‘The future, I knew, ultimately lay in space, and going there would solve many - maybe even all - of the problems here on earth. I believed that for a long, long time.’

 

His book is also about a group of influential people who have taken SF as an attempt to predict the future, the tech billionaires who ‘explicitly use SF as a blueprint.’  Elon Musk (Tesla) wants to go to Mars, Jeff Bezos (Amazon) wants a trillion people in space, Sam Altman (OpenAI , the developer of Chat GPT) thinks AI will literally produce everything, Marc Andreessen (a leading Silicon Valley investor) wants a techno-capitalist machine to conquer the cosmos with AI. The list goes on. 

 

Becker argues the ‘credence that tech billionaires give to these specific SF futures validates their pursuit of more … in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist.’  That threat is a machine superintelligence that can rapidly improve itself, leading to an out of control Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) whose creation could, would or will be an extinction event, because an ‘unaligned AGI’ does not share human gaols or motives. 

 

Becker’s book dissects the ideas and ideology that many tech billionaires believe. He follows the money through the institutes, organisations and foundations that they fund, finding the connections and overlaps between networks of funders, researchers, philosophers, philanthropists, authors, advocates and activists. Over six lengthy chapters he discusses the history and development of eight separate but similar belief systems, that collectively I’m calling the ‘transhumanist bundle.’ Transhumanism is ‘the belief that we can and should use advanced technology to transform ourselves, transcending humanity’,  and it is the foundational set of ideas shared by the tech billionaires. 

 

Transhumanism is using technology to create a new ‘posthuman’ species with characteristics such as an indefinitely long lifespan, augmented cognitive capability, enhanced senses, and superior rationality. It was originally a mid-20th century idea associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, an intelligence explosion that would allow humanity to break free from time and space and ‘merge with the divine’ (he was a Catholic priest), then popularised by his friend Julian Huxley with his ideas on transcendence and using selective breeding to create the best version of our species possible. Nick Bostrom founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, rebranded as Humanity+ in 2008 with its mission ‘the ethical use of technology and evidence-based science to expand human capabilities.’ His Future of Humanity Institute was founded in 2005 and closed in 2024. 

 

The transhuman bundle of ideologies has become enormously influential, especially in Silicon Valley and the tech industry, and have been a motivating force behind a lot of the research and development of AGI. Followers of this movement typically believe that AGI will become capable of self-improvement and therefore create the singularity. As Becker notes, there is an element of groupthink at work here. Besides Musk, Bezos and Andreessen, billionaires associated with these ideologies include Peter Thiel, Jaan Tallinn, Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz, and Vitalik Buterin, whose donations finance institutes, promote researchers, and support the movement. 

 

Becker starts with effective altruism, known for the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried who funded effective altruism conferences, institutes and organisations before his conviction for fraud. Based on the ideas of utilitarian philosophers Peter Singer, William MacAskill and Toby Ord, the premise was that people should donate as much of their income as possible to causes that provide maximum benefit to mankind, the ‘earn to give’ idea. Initially the focus was on global poverty, but later morphed into a focus on AI safety, based on the assumption that  the threat of extinction from unaligned AGI is the greatest threat to humanity. 

 

MacAskill gave effective altruism an ethical perspective based on the very long-term future and a view that what is morally right is also good. Because the future could potentially contain billions or trillions of people, failing to bring these future people into existence would be morally wrong. Longtermism is therefore closely associated with effective altruism, MacAskill (‘positively influencing the longterm future is the key moral priority of our time’), and Ord  (‘longtermism is animated by a moral re-orientation toward the vast future that existential risks threaten to foreclose’). 

 

Longtermism is based on the reasoning that, if the aim is to positively affect the greatest number of people possible and if the future could contain trillions of future digital and spacefaring people, then we should focus our efforts today on enabling that far future, instead of focusing on current people and contemporary problems, except for preventing catastrophes like unaligned AGI or pandemics. The utilitarian calculation is that the low probability of this future is outweighed by the enormous number of future people. On longtermism Becker says ‘The likelihood of these futures is small, not just because they are scientifically implausible but also because they’re rather specific, depending on so many small things falling into place, things we can’t know about.’

 

Then there is Singularitarianism, a related idea that there will be a technological ‘singularity’ with the creation of AGI. This would be an ‘intelligence explosion’, a point in time when technological progress becomes recursive and so rapid it alters humanity. Associated with Ray Kurzweil and his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, when humans will merge with intelligent machines and expand into space to flood the universe with consciousness, which he predicted would happen by 2045. His new 2025 book is called The Singularity is Nearer. A different version from Nick Bostrom takes creating Superintelligence (the title of his 2014 book) as the transformative moment that enables us to become posthuman and colonise space. 

 

Eliezer Yudkowsky predicts the singularity will happen in ‘more like five years than fifty years’ from now. He believes an unaligned AGI is an existential threat and all AI research should be stopped until there is a way to ensure a future AGI will not kill us all. His Machine Intelligence Research Institute (founded 2005) website opens with: ‘The AI industry is racing toward a precipice. The default consequence of the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) is human extinction. Our survival depends on delaying the creation of ASI, as soon as we can, for as long as necessary’.

 

Rationalism arose around a website founded in 2009  by Yudkowsky called Less Wrong, ‘dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making’ and motivated by his fear of the threat of an unaligned AGI that exterminates humanity in pursuit of some obscure AI goal, like using all available matter (including humans) to create more computing capacity. This is Bostrom’s paperclip problem, where a powerful AI kills everyone and converts the planet, galaxy and eventually the universe into paperclips because that was the goal it was given, or more generally, a ‘misaligned AGI is an existential catastrophe.’

 

Extropianism was another variant of Transhumanism, with the foundation of the Extropy Institute in 1992 by Max Moore, who defined extropy as ‘the extent of a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality and capacity for improvement’. The Institute’s magazine covered AI, nanotechnology, life extension and cryonics, neuroscience and intelligence increasing technology, and space colonisation. The Institute closed in 2006, but it successfully spread transhumanism through its conferences and email list. 

 

Cosmism combines these ideas with sentient AI and mind uploading technology, leaving biology behind by merging humans and technology to create virtual worlds and develop spacetime engineering and science. Originating with Nikolai Fedorov, a Russian Christian ‘late nineteenth century philosopher and librarian’ who believed technology would allow the dead to be resurrected, and the cosmos to be filled by ‘everyone who ever lived.’ There is a strong eschatological element to the transhumanist bundle, with the centrality of belief in transcendence and immortality.

 

Effective accelerationism is the most recent addition to this movement. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published his ‘Techno-Capitalist Manifesto’ in 2023 and argued ‘advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do’, technology is ‘liberatory’, opponents of AI development are the enemy, and the future will be about ‘overcoming nature.’  Andreessen writes a ‘common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true, yet more than offset by the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.’

 

There is significant overlap between these different ideologies, and the argument that an AGI will safeguard and expand humanity in the future allows believers in the transhumanist bundle to make creating AGI the most important task in the present. This utopian element of the transhumanist bundle believes a powerful enough AGI will solve problems like global warming, energy shortages and inequality. In fact, the race to develop AGI is inflicting real harm on racial and gender minorities (through profiling based on white males), the disabled (who are not included in training data), and developing countries affected by climate change and the energy consumption of AI. 

 

There are so many problems with the transhumanist bundle. Becker argues they are reductive, ‘in that they make all problems about technology’, for tech billionaires they are profitable, and they offer transcendence, ‘ignoring all limitations … conventional morality … and death itself.’ He calls this ‘collection of related concepts and philosophies … the ideology of technological salvation.’ The transhumanist bundle has presented progress toward AGI as inevitable and grounded in scientific and engineering principles. However, while science is used as a justification for these beliefs, the reality is that they are scientifically implausible.

 

First, AGI has not been achieved, and may not ever be achievable. Superintelligent machine do not exist, but the corporations developing AI have convinced policy-makers and politicians that preventing a hypothetical AI apocalypse should be taken seriously. Second, the threat of unaligned AGI is used to divert attention from the actual harms of bias and discrimination that are being done. Third, mind uploading will not be possible any time soon, and may never be possible given how little understood human intelligence, consciousness and brains are. 

 

Fourth, space colonisation is difficult. It may have to be done by robots because space is increasingly understood to be an inhospitable environment for people, given half a chance it will kill or harm anyone. Mars dust is toxic, Moon regolith is sharp splinters, Venus is hot and the moons of Jupiter cold. There is no air or water. Gravity seems to be necessary for health and growth. The technology to launch and build large space stations or hollow out and terraform asteroids is non-existent. 

 

Fifth, sustained economic or technological exponential growth is impossible, but is built into effective accelerationism, longtermism and the singularity. Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, where technological advances feed on themselves to increase the rate of further advance, is neither supported by the history of technology, which shows diminishing returns as technologies mature, nor the laws of physics, which imposes physical limits on size, speed and power. 

 

In his conclusion Becker asks the question “if not an immortal future in space, then what? ‘He answers ‘I don't know. The futures of technological salvation are sterile impossibilities and they would be brutally destructive if they come to pass.’ He quotes George Orwell: Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness’, and argues the problems facing humanity are social and political problems that AI is unlikely to help with. ‘Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.’ He suggests technology can be directed and we have to make choices about what we want technology to do as part of the solution to our problems. 

 

His ’specific policy proposal’ is to tax billionaires because there is ‘no real need for anyone to have more money than half a billion dollars’, with personal wealth above that returned to society and invested in health, education and ‘everything else it takes to make a modern thriving economy.’ This would address inequality and provide political stability, and  ‘Without billionaires, fringe philosophies like rationalism and effective accelerationism would stay on the fringe, rather than being pulled into the mainstream through the reality-warping power of concentrated wealth.’ 

 

This is a really interesting book that draws together a lot of scattered threads that are not commonly or obviously connected. Becker has deeply researched these ideas and people, who he quotes extensively in their own words (there are 80 pages of references in the Notes). His analysis is sharp and the critique is insightful. The delusional futurism of the tech billionaires is exposed as self-serving and dangerous. 

 

A more structured format with shorter, more focused chapters would make all the detail easier to follow. The chapters are long, between 40 and 60 pages, and each one covers a number of different related topics, for example he covers Kurzweil’s singularity and Eric Drexler’s nanotechnology in the same chapter, but these could have had their own chapters. This doesn’t affect readability, as an experienced science writer Becker writes well, but it makes it hard to keep track of what was discussed where.  The absence of an index doesn’t help either. 

 

Science fiction is stories about possible futures that may or may not happen, that may not be physically or practically achievable within any reasonable timespan. The further into the future a story is set, the less likely it is to be realised. Becker argues to base decisions today on such future stories ignores the problems that challenge us in the present, and to substitute the hypothetical danger of AGI for the real issues of climate change, geopolitical instability, inequality and economic uncertainty is foolish. Therefore the tech billionaires and the ideology of the transhuman bundle they follow is a real threat to the future of humanity. 

 

 

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Colonies and Silicon Valley’s Quest to Control the Future of Humanity. Basic Books, 2025.  

Researching the Far Future

Where is Humanity Going and How Will We Get There?

N.B. Holiday post, off topic and longer than usual. The construction industry does not get a mention, although one assumes there will be a construction industry in the future.

While the idea of researching the future may seem like an oxymoron, thinking about the implications of current issues and trends in technology, and applying the limited amount of information we have about potential new technologies, is not a pointless exercise. While it is true that many, if not most, of these books date quickly, that is because they focus on relatively short-term effects or are overly speculative. There have, however, been a surprising number of notably prescient writers who have tried to think realistically about technological development over time, Moore’s Law and Metcalf’s Law for transistors and networks are good examples

As it happens, 2016 saw a number of particularly interesting books on the future, Although the four reviewed here are very different they share certain methodological similarities. In each case they use what we already know from both history and the present in a sensible way, by not relying on some hypothetical breakthrough like fusion power or conscious machines (as opposed to machine intelligence). Secondly, they avoid specific predictions and forecasts, rather presenting their view of what is possible based on what is understood to be technologically feasible. And third, they do not propose some fundamental restructuring of human nature or the organisation of society and the economy, although they are generally aware of the feedback between them and technological change, and the importance of that link.

The similarities and differences between these four authors are interesting in their own right. As researchers they seriously address the topics and issues chosen, and each has singular insights that should be considered if the far future is of interest to you. The books from Peter Frase, Kevin Kelly, Robin Hanson and Yuval Noah Harari are discussed below.

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Peter Frase describes himself as a lapsed academic sociologist. His Four Futures: Life After Capitalism presents scenarios for the next few decades. This is the most conventional of these books, in that his scenarios (two good, two bad) are constructed following a widely accepted approach and reflect his Marxist perspective. He describes his approach as “social science fiction”, and his futures are interesting and plausible because they are magnified versions of the present.

Communism - a society that is so productive and egalitarian that nobody has to work. As a result of unlimited clean energy, robots and automation we have the material basis for a post-work, post-scarcity and post-carbon world. In fact, this is the sort of Communism originally expounded by Karl Marx, where we get “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

Rentism - abundance exists, but in a wold where a small elite retains dominance by owning and monopolising the technology used to produce it. This monopoly is maintained by owning not just the robots, but the data that tells them how to do their job. In a world where you can automate anything, you can encode any task as information. In this world the software that robots run on can be copyrighted as intellectual property, and to use them you have to pay a fee. That means people need a job, however there aren’t enough jobs because all the work is done by machines. Therefore, it is only workers required to sustain the regime that get paid, and most people will be unemployed or under employed. The economy will be stagnant because it requires consumers but the jobless masses won’t be able to afford to consume. This scenario also assumes abundant clean energy.

Socialism - in this third future automation exists but the breakthrough to carbonless energy doesn’t happen, which means we deal with climate change through a massive, state-lead campaign to reshape infrastructure and consumption. Because climate change affects different groups of people differently, some will do much better than others, particularly those in less vulnerable geographies or can afford to insulate themselves from the effects of climate change. Through policies like a universal basic income and market planning a democratic, egalitarian outcome is produced.

Exterminism - here we have the robots and scarcity of socialism without the egalitarianism. The result is a neo-feudal dystopia, where the rich retreat to fortified enclaves and everyone else is left outside in a hot, damp hell of a rapidly warming planet. Without needing labour, because of automation, the rich may have no reason to try and save the masses.

One of the strengths of this book is the insistence that creating the future we want is ultimately as much about politics as technology. In these four scenarios automation and machine learning are the drivers, what changes is the political and ecological context. Who owns the robots and how climate change affects the outcomes will still be issues after the robots arrive. Frase argues that the future is (can be?) what we make it, and between nihilism and utopianism lies politics, with its patterns of long, slow struggle punctuated by an occasional social explosion. A sophisticated argument informed by history that is intuitively appealing, despite the ideological baggage.

Where the weakness of a class based analysis really shows is in the missing parts of his scenarios. Although automation and robots feature strongly in his future, the wider impact of massive amounts of information and huge data flows does not. It’s a strangely limited view of technology, tailored to suit a particular argument. The second missing element is the potential of technologies like genetic engineering, nanotechnology and computer interfaces to upgrade human abilities.

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Kevin Kelly was a founder of Wired magazine in 1992, which documented the rise of new tech over the next two decades, and before that was editor of the Whole Earth Review. His 2010 book What Technology Wants argued tech evolves in a fitness landscape with a recognisable ecology like biology in a natural system, and suggested 12 trajectories. In this year’s book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future he pushes that view to another level, envisioning a world utterly mediated by data that constantly streams and flows around us while ubiquitous technology reshapes society.

The chapter titles are verbs and capture his ideas about this future, which are, in order: becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, questioning and beginning. The 12 forces interact and reinforce each other. They overlap, so that sharing encourages flowing and depends on it, cognifying requires screening, screening is inseparable from interacting, everything is remixed, and so on.

He argues that there are broad historical trends we can observe over the last few decades that will continue over the next few decades, and that the dynamics of technology tend to favour certain outcomes. He also believes that these trends and forces have accelerating momentum, and he wants to “expose these roots of digital technology because from them will issue the enduring trends of the next three decades”. He is interested in what he calls aggregate forces, rather than specifics. The fundamental change will be turning products into services and processes, so for example cars become transportation services, regardless of the type of car it is. This is his idea of becoming.

The book does not make predictions, these forces are “trajectories not destinies”, and he argues that understanding these will lessen the social and economic displacement they cause while increasing positive outcomes. Many will disagree, and the sometimes hyperbolic language and techno-optimism can seem strangely naive in a world beset today with so many issues to deal with.On the other hand, there is a global middle class of about one billion people whose jobs increasingly involved moving bits of information around and the first generation, the millennials, that have grown up in s connected enviroment.

Kelly believes that the combination of people, connectivity and silicon is creating a global super organism, and we are at the beginning of a century long process of creating “a new mind for an old species”. This is not a utopia, there will be firewalls, corporate monopolies, unequal access, and the rich will be privileged, as always. Nevertheless, he is optimistic that centralised authority and uniformity will diminish, while the techno-cultural forces he discusses come to dominate institutions and peoples’ lives. Maybe, but he heavily discounts the forces of reaction to his trends, because he sees them as inevitable and irresistible.

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Robin Hanson is known for his work in creating prediction markets in the 1990s, but he is a genuine polymath with a background in physics, early AI and economics. His book The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth is one of the strangest, most challenging books I have ever read. It is an extended analysis of a single ‘baseline’ scenario of brain emulations, or ‘ems’, a technology he sees as feasible within the next century, with implications so great they should be seriously considered.

Whole brain emulation is one of the possible pathways to artificial intelligence. Unlike alternatives such as building an artificial brain neuron by neuron or designing a conscious machine, a brain emulation comes with a personality and previous life, and will go on to have many more experiences. Hanson’s scenario is actually about what a society made up of many artificial intelligences might be like, so there is little discussion of what humans do and how they interact with ems.

These brain emulations are, of course, digital copies of an existing brain, so they can be easily created, copied and shared. They will live in a virtual world, but can inhabit robotic bodies when required. They will think and feel like humans, remembering their past and be capable of learning. They do, however, come at a cost in terms of energy, hardware and resources, which means they live in “a few tall hot densely packed cities where the volume is about equally split between racks of computer hardware and pipes for cooling and transport”. The interplay between cost and performance underpins much of his, highly speculative, analysis.

This is because em minds can run at different speeds, from perhaps one million times slower than humans to one million times faster, and the cost to run an em is proportional to its speed. Faster ems have higher status, and for those with robotic bodies their bodies are proportionally smaller. A typical em running a thousand times faster than human speed would be 2mm tall. The implications of this for em subjective time and capacity for work are analysed at length. At one thousand times faster than human speed, one human year is a millennium to an em. They will, however, require rest, sex and relaxation, and eventually retire at some very slow speed. All this is analysed at length.

The basic characteristic of ems is that they are a scan of a specific brain, thus carry in them the experience, talent and traits of an individual. Therefore, only the world’s best are likely to be copied, perhaps less than a thousand people, and those ems will them copy themselves to form clans: “Strong competitive pressures result in most ems being copies of the thousand humans best suited for em jobs. Ems are mostly very able focused workaholics at the level of Olympic medallists, billionaires or heads of state.” They are mostly happy, but can be moody, just like people. They have hierarchies, partners and long-term relationships.

The em economy will grow very quickly once started, perhaps doubling every month or so, driven mainly by population growth. Their clans specialise, have big financial and reputational investments in their subsidiary firms, and ems have less variation in wages and productivity. With many copies, em wages are at subsistence levels (i.e. running costs) and well below human wages. Humans will have to live off their investments in the em economy, which has high returns from its rapid growth, and some of the em economy does projects and production useful to humans.

Managing the transition to an em economy will be challenging, particularly as it has the rapid expansion characteristic found in other AI scenarios.  This is an important issue, so Hanson's scenario allows the question of where the first em city might be built. and his view that if only “a few suitable enough places give the new em economy sufficient support, opposition in other places would then be quickly overwhelmed by very rapid growth in those few areas.” Once started, the transition will happen one way or another. In fact what this depicts is an entirely digital economy, with ems managing all production and distribution. Exactly what and why they are producing anything is not clear.

This future is one of an em dominated economy, because they are so efficient, coordinated and well organised they take over. Hanson finishes his book with suggestions on how humans can prepare for the coming of an em economy, the policy options that could be considered, and strategies to use. He sees “many ways for individuals to work to help deal with the possible coming of an em world”, but “to succeed in this new world, prepare to become what it needs”. Whatever that may be.

Hanson seems to see the em era as the next stage in the evolution of humanity, a continuation of the progression from foraging to farming to the industrial age of the present. He points out that lives in the future may be as different from our lives today as we are from foragers and farmers: “If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you’d realise that you should expect your descendants to seem quite strange”. This view is one he shares with Yuval Noah Harari, who also starts with a similar long view of stages of development.

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Harari is the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, which explored the development of society and economy as humans’ abilities increased over millennia. From the prehistoric Cognitive Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and the discovery of the scientific method he draws a picture of progress and challenges. His follow-up is Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, an equally bold and expansive take on the big issues in the evolution of humanity, technology and society. He starts with the observation that of the perhaps 70 billion humans to have existed so far, the great majority died from famine, plague and war. That all changed in the 20^th century, and now humanity needs new challenges.

The first is aging and dying. The science of regenerative medicine is advancing quickly, with the unravelling of the molecular structure of cells, genetic engineering and nanotechnology well underway. Over the coming decades life expectancy will continue to rise and at some point death will become much less common, often due to misadventure. This is Harari’s technique, take a topic like death, designer babies, animal minds, consciousness or free will, and investigate it using the latest science. Many people would find his conclusions disturbing, as humanity reaches for his goals of immortality, bliss and divinity. Bliss is happiness and divinity is power, essentially power over nature. Both largely come from the combination of upgraded humans with machine intelligence, producing Homo Deus. His website leads with "History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods".

The decoupling of intelligence from consciousness is an important part of the scenarios Harari investigates. An intelligent machine is not a conscious one, we have lots of the former and none of the latter. Meaning and purpose are human qualities: “Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch this spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.”

The key to humanity’s success as a species is large-scale cooperation. This allows institutions to create meaningful stories about their purpose, culture, nation or religion. Harari calls these stories ‘fictions’. However, powerful institutions can evolve into entrenched bureaucracies: “Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imaginations. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?”

The answer is what he calls humanism, a broad-based shift that started in the 17^th century when we gave up believing in a cosmic plan to gain power over the physical world. We exercise that power through scientific progress and economic growth, and have thus solved the problems of plague and famine, and haven’t had a large war for some time. Humanism sees life as a gradual process of inner change, developing knowledge through a variety of experiences, and puts people at the centre. Because those experiences belong to an individual, they should be given as much freedom as possible to experience the world. Thus, individual liberty within a democratic system is the ideal state.

A humanist civilisation will invest in science to increase lifespans, improve peoples’ cognitive abilities and research new, powerful technologies. If genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are the means to achieve those goals, they will be pursued. The irony is that these technologies will also allow us to design the human experiences, the emotions and desires of people, that humanism places at the centre of the universe. At the end of chapter eight we come to the crux of the matter: “We are about to face a flood of extremely useful devices, tools and structures that make no allowance for the free will of individual humans. Can democracy, the free market and human rights survive the flood?”.

The 20^th century provided mass education and mass health, to provide the manpower needed in factories and armies. In the 21^st century there may be much less demand for the lower skilled workers that system produced. Therefore, elites maybe more interested in upgrading a few million rich people, rather than investing in fixing the problems of hundreds of millions of poor people. This would result in a small elite of upgraded superhumans with exceptional physical, emotional and intellectual abilities, and they would have quite different experiences to the rest of humankind. The alternative would be large scale upgrading, with cultures like the Amish being the exception. There is already an active biohacking movement.

Harari thinks upgraded humans could develop two new techno-religions to replace humanism, in the same way as humanism replaced belief systems and theology. The first, techno-humanism, believes we should use technology to upgrade to a superior human model, from Homo sapien to Homo deus. With upgrades like genetic engineering, nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces, humans will be able to hold their own against intelligent but not conscious machines, and their combined abilities will spark a new cognitive revolution as important as the agricultural revolution 7,000 years ago. It’s a recognisable version of evolutionary humanism that is reasonably comforting.

Unlike the alternative. He asks “What might replace desires and experiences as the source of all meaning and authority?” The answer is information, and the religion that worships information is Dataism. The universe is reduced to data flows and we understand life as data processing and decision-making. Organisms are algorithms, markets and politics are information flows, markets are flexible and adaptive, politics is not. Freedom of information becomes the new greatest good, replacing liberty and equality.

In this world, the generating and sharing of data is the best contribution we can make. Whether it’s answering emails, going to work, or posting on Facebook, it all contributes to the data flow. One bit of data is as good as another, but only humans share their experiences as data. However, Dataism sees those experiences as biochemical algorithms, purely physical processes that can be known and understood, and uploaded into a universal Internet-of-All-Things.

Using the data stored in the Internet-of-All-Things, non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms get to know us better than we know ourselves. How this might affect society, politics and daily life is discussed at length. Harari sees Dataism as the scientific paradigm of the 21^st century, as everything gets reduced to algorithms and data processing. Over the century everything and everybody could eventually get connected to the Internet-of-All-Things and the data it collects will be used to help us gain immortality, bliss and power. On the other hand, once the thing is up and running we may dissolve in the data flow “like a clump of earth within a gushing river”.

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These four writers are contributing to a debate about a future living with automation and machine intelligence that’s been going for a few years now. They are not making predictions, but extrapolating from trends that are already visible. They consider the implications of those trends and develop possible futures. It is mostly very analytical, with each writer laying a logical trail through their ideas to the main points and conclusions. They build their scenarios with care. Like them or not, those scenarios shine a light on an uncertain future and help frame questions and issues that need to be addressed. In all these futures there is an expanding digital world running parallel to the physical world we humans have lived in, and on, so far.

Just where the dividing line between the digital and physical worlds will end up in another hundred years is, I think, the great unanswered question. A wide range of different degrees of integration in the medium-term seems plausible, similar to the digital divide that exists today with access to broadband. Over the longer run an extreme version of the digital economy seems possible, maybe like one run by ems. How long is that? No-one knows, but it’s worth thinking about.

Frase, P. 2016. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso.

Hanson, R. 2016. The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harari, Y. N. 2016. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker.

Kelly K. 2016. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, New York: Viking.

The holiday post a year after this one is called Rethinking the Deep Past.