Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker

19:04Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

19:26Kara Swisher:Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Want smoother, brighter skin without adding another complicated step to your routine? Try Daily Microfoliant from Dermalogica. This exfoliating powder activates with water to gently polish away dull, flaky skin, leaving it feeling smoother and looking brighter. It's gentle enough to use every day, so keeping your skin looking healthy and fresh is easy. Ready to see the difference? Visit Dermalogica.com and use code SMOOTH at CART for an exclusive gift with your$65 purchase. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space.

20:08At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at$50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more. Whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your hedge trimmer blade with an angle grinder, The Home Depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list. Shop Labor Day savings at The Home Depot and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving.

20:34Kara Swisher:So one of the things you write in the book, quote, lurking underneath all the dreams and desires and resentment of the tech billionaires lies a fear of death and a final loss of control. So you latch on to the idea called transhumanism. humanism, a sort of secular religion that says we can transcend our biological bodies and upload our consciousness into the AI. One of the people working on this is Sam Altman. There's many others. There's lots of them doing it. And you can see it physically manifest in someone like Jeff Bezos, for example. How seriously do tech billionaires actually take this idea?

21:04Kara Swisher:And how does it shape the political and moral assumptions they make? They do seem to take it very, very seriously. This is, I think, a lot of the idea, not just behind the AI companies, but behind companies like Neuralink. This is Musk's Neuralink. Yeah, Musk's company, Neuralink. But there's others. There's others. There are, but that's like the most notorious one. The idea there is to, you know, bridge the gap between computers and the brain. This is also part of why I am so skeptical about the idea of AGI. The brain is not a computer. You know, a lot of this stuff is premised on the idea that the brain is a kind of computer.

21:42And it's not. It's just, it's not. It's an evolved organ. But I think that there is like a real faith in the idea that you can transcend these biological limits, which is like the main project of transhumanism. The idea that we don't have to be confined to our bodies and their limits as they are now. That we can upload our minds into computers or make ourselves into cybernetic organisms and greatly extend human lifespan, go out into the cosmos, and colonize the universe. And all of that's just pure fantasy.

22:23Kara Swisher:What's one that you're like, okay, this is interesting? This is what they're working on. So I think that basic brain-computer interfaces actually kind of are interesting in that, like, they could, in theory, allow people to regain capabilities that they lost due to some sort of accident or injury. Like, you know, like if they can't move their legs, a brain-computer interface could maybe, maybe let them control, like, a wheelchair more efficiently or something like that. Or if they can't control, like, if they're quadriplegic, a brain-computer interface might allow them to control a substitute for their hands or something like that.

23:12There is some work in there that has shown some promise. I think that's cool, right? You know, and I think that that's useful. The problem is then taking that step and saying, okay, and then once we do that, we'll be able to, you know, upload the entire brain into a computer. That's just nonsense.

23:28Kara Swisher:Right, and it's not going to happen. Now, effective altruism is the idea that a good way to make the world a better place is to make a lot of money and give it away to worthy causes. And long-termism is the idea that we have a moral obligation to future generations. Both seem fairly benign, not like the grandiose plans that we've been discussing, but you argue they've created a toxic self-serving philosophy that justifies extreme inequality. Walk us through your reasoning. Yeah, so first of all, yeah, it sounds good. We should care about future generations. We should try to put more money toward worthy causes.

24:03But the devil always is in the details, right? First of all, relying on philanthropy has its own problems. Billionaire philanthropy is democratically unaccountable. It's an exercise of power. It would be much, much better if we could fund worthy causes through, you know, some democratically accountable means like government funding. And that way, you know, we can all collectively make decisions together about where the money should go. So, of course, you know, we've seen that Musk doesn't care about that and has cut USAID.

24:36Kara Swisher:He doesn't give anything away. You don't have to worry about that. Yeah, of course, he doesn't care. Yeah. But on the other hand, you know, I just described effective altruism, right? So what's the problem? The problem is that, first of all, there are some problems that you can't just solve by throwing money at them, right? If you want to create, like, systemic change and address problems like, oh, I don't know, massive wealth inequality, you can't just throw money at that problem. You have to like commit to systemic change in some way. But the other thing is there is a utilitarian philosophy that comes along with effective altruism.

25:13The idea that what we need to do is make the most happiness and reduce the suffering most in the world. And that, you know, this is something that can be quantified. and this leads the effective altruists and especially like this influential subgroup within that movement, the long-termists, to the idea that what we really need to do is ensure that there are as many people in the future as possible living lives that are at least barely worth living. And so this creates what one of the leaders of that movement, Will McCaskill, called a moral case for space settlement, which again is nonsense. That's not happening.

25:54And it also leads them to prioritize what they call existential threats to humanity and human civilization over other pressing problems. Then you get into questions like, okay, what counts as an existential threat? And which existential threats are more pressing? And they have a very bad track record of answering these questions well.

26:15Kara Swisher:You mean example. Yeah, yeah. An example is Toby Ord is a leader in this effective altruist movement who has pushed long-termism. And he came up with estimates of the, you know, severity of or probability of different existential threats causing either the extinction of humanity or unrecoverable collapse of human civilization in the next hundred years. And, you know, if you asked me to make a list like that, or if you asked, I think, like most experts in the subject to make a list like that, top of the list would be things like global warming, nuclear war, right? Maybe a pandemic. And Ord does rate pandemics pretty highly, especially an engineered pandemic.

27:01And that seems reasonable. But at the top of his list is the threat of a super intelligent AGI wiping out humanity. And he rates that as 50 times more likely than collapse or extinction from climate change and nuclear war combined. And when I asked him why, his answer was essentially, oh, I made those numbers up. It was my best guess. And the man is an Oxford philosopher, right? That gives him a platform, right? Power and influence. He has been advising UK Parliament on AI issues. And I think it's really irresponsible for him and others in that movement to make these claims based on very, very little.

27:50Kara Swisher:Oh, Adam, they make a lot of things up. That's been my history with them. So let me pull something up you wrote, and you can read it out loud, then I'll ask you a question about it. Sure. Silicon Valley's heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions, with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth, are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker. They come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience. How did eugenics end up driving so many of their grand schemes, And do they really grasp how deeply racism underpins their plans?

28:30Kara Swisher:Because most of them would strongly reject the notion that they're racist. Yeah, well, but I think most racists will strongly reject the idea that they're racist, right? It doesn't mean they're not racist. I don't know if, say, Mark Andreessen, just to pick one of these guys, I don't know if he understands how, you know, deeply enmeshed his worldview is with eugenics and racism. But it is. Explain that. Give me an example. Yeah. So, for example, just the idea of intelligence, just the markers that they use for intelligence, the idea that IQ is a good measure of intelligence, which you'll see over and over again in the writings of these billionaires and the subcultures that they fund.

29:20You know, IQ is not a measure of inherent intelligence. There is not, as far as we know, a single number that you can call, you know, intelligence. And yet, you know, the notion that IQ is really, like, deeply important is a racist notion because IQ is, you know, not actually measuring intelligence. It's been shown over and over again to have cultural biases. Another example, and maybe this is a more immediate and direct one. If you go and look at, like, Musk's plans for Mars, he talks about backing up humanity on Mars. Like, who makes the decision about, like, who gets to go to Mars? Who gets to decide who is worthy of going to space?

30:07What cultures and ethnicities get to be backed up on Mars? The space program historically has excluded a lot of people and, you know, has favored people who look like me.

30:20Kara Swisher:Seems to be mighty white in what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Talk a little bit about how they reject the idea that they are, that they're a meritocracy is typical of their arguments. Yeah, exactly. But then, you know, you come back to the question, okay, you're a meritocracy. How are you measuring merit? I think that they believe that being racist means that you want to be mean to people of a different color to their face by, like, using slurs. And, like, that's not what racism is, right? Racism is when you reinforce a system of oppression against people of a certain race. And, like, that's what these guys are doing very explicitly.

31:04Kara Swisher:So let's talk about the consequences, real-world consequences of these fantasies. Google just released its yearly environmental report. It says that emissions have gone up 50 % since 2019. A separate report by an advocacy group actually found Google's emissions had increased by 65 % during the same period. And Google reports its electricity consumption from data centers has doubled since 2020. AI is clearly using a tremendous amount of energy. They're obviously talking about using nuclear facilities and everything else. But if you ask some AI proponents, they say artificial intelligence will come up with a solution to global warming.

31:38Kara Swisher:You say global warming requires social and political solutions, not technical solutions. There is probably a combination of these things. But talk a little bit about that, the energy usage, because it's off the charts at this point. Yeah, it is. I mean, just the amount of energy needed to run these generative AI systems is truly enormous. Like, just one statistic. The AI-powered Google search. Mm-hmm. One search query takes 10 times as much energy to answer now than it did before they integrated generative AI into the search solutions. Gemini. And I think most people are annoyed that they did that.

32:27It doesn't make the search better. It made it worse. We all want old Google back. And so they are expending 10 times as much energy to make their product worse. So here's something that's not in my book because it happened too late for me to put it into my book. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, tech venture capitalist, billionaire, he said in, I think, October that we're not going to meet our climate goals anyway. so we should use more energy and more resources and pour them into AI so we can get to super intelligent HEI, and then that will tell us how to solve global warming.

33:09Kara Swisher:You left out the faster than the Chinese. That's usually stuck in there somewhere. Right, yes. There's the faster than the Chinese part as well. Yeah. So essentially, it's a problem we're never going to solve, and therefore we should just use more energy to find a solution to the problem technologically. That's the circular logic. It's a circular logic, and we don't need much more by way of technological solutions to solving global warming. At this point, the primary barriers to solving the climate crisis are social and political, not technological, right? Like, we have cheap, clean energy. We just need to, you know, get through the various barriers to deploying it.

33:47And a lot of those have to do with government subsidies and interest groups and whatnot. And, you know, that's not a technological problem. That's a problem of persuasion and politics.

33:57Kara Swisher:Yeah, I'm not surprised he said that. My favorite nickname for him is that fucking guy. We used to have a thing at Code where he would say crazy stuff, and we had a ball gag, you know, a red, you know, a ball gag. You've ever seen them? They're sexual. But every time he said something dumb, we put the picture of him with a ball gag, and then whatever he said. And we'd say, that fucking guy talked again. So we had to put the ball gag on. I mean, look, you know, I had an idea in my head of what my book was actually titled rather than more everything forever. I thought of it as these fucking people.

34:30Kara Swisher:These fucking people. Yeah. So. I would have been a good, maybe that's my next book. So Burn Book is kind of these fucking people. Yeah, exactly. So at its core, the book is saying that more everything forever mentality leads to less real life for regular people. But AGI, Colosize, Mars, and Transhumanism seem so far in fact it's not obvious how far off projects really do affect the public. So does wasting money and energy on them simply exacerbate existing problems like racism, income inequality, global warming, or do they create new intractable problems? I mean, I think that it's a little of both, right?

35:06Like, I think that certainly the idea of these, you know, high-flying ideas that don't work has created cover for these billionaires to amass more power and wealth. And that's, you know, not just exacerbated existing problems, but sort of like the amount of power and wealth that they have at this point is so extreme that I would argue it's created like a sort of new kind of problem, right? just because it's such an extreme concentration of wealth and power. And so, you know, they are able to, like, openly support fascism and, you know, and, like, still, you know, go about doing their business in ways that, you know, would have previously been unthinkable if they'd taken those stances even just a few years ago.

35:57Kara Swisher:Mm-hmm. So as we discussed, you think tech billionaires have an authoritarian worldview? They do. And many of them have embraced President Donald Trump, who seems like an aspiring authoritarian at the very least. Do you see Trump and his tech industry moving beyond standard Republican deregulation and working together on an actual authoritarian project? It's unclear because of the breaks that are happening rather quickly. What would it look like if that was the case? I think it's over the minute. I think it's over already, personally, because they've squeezed the lemon as much as they can on some levels.

36:27Kara Swisher:But do you see it continuing? And who is the more dangerous authoritarian group, the tech people or Donald Trump? Yeah, it's a good question. Which one's more dangerous? I don't know. They're dangerous in different ways, right? Like Trump is dangerous in all of these like very obvious ways of like eroding and destroying confidence in democracy, democratic institutions, guardrails, eating an entire political party. But the tech billionaires are going to be with us for longer, and not just because they're younger, but because they're unelected, right? And like, yes, Trump is trying to, you know, transform America into an authoritarian state, and he may succeed.

37:11You know, he's already succeeded in a lot of ways that are horrifying. But ultimately, there is hope that he can be stopped or those changes can be halted and reversed through organizing and at the ballot box. Doing that with the billionaires is a lot harder. So I feel like the tech billionaires, like if I had to pick one, are the bigger problem because they're going to be with us for longer.

37:38Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

37:45Kara Swisher:I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, Autobotulinum Toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

38:17Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

38:38Kara Swisher:Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Want smoother, brighter skin without adding another complicated step to your routine? Try Daily Microfoliant from Dermalogica. This exfoliating powder activates with water to gently polish away dull, flaky skin, leaving it feeling smoother and looking brighter. It's gentle enough to use every day, so keeping your skin looking healthy and fresh is easy. Ready to see the difference? Visit Dermalogica.com and use code SMOOTH at CART for an exclusive gift with your$65 purchase. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space.

39:21At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at$50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more. Whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your hedge trimmer blade with an angle grinder, The Home Depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list. Shop Labor Day savings at The Home Depot and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving.

39:47Kara Swisher:So every interview, we get an expert to send us a question for our guests. Now let's hear yours. Hi, I'm Cory Doctorow. The big question I would ask is that sometimes technical breakthroughs really do change the game, whether that's antibiotics or packet switching or other more modern inventions. Obviously, everyone who comes up with a technical idea wants to market it as one of these game changers and not some little incremental effect. I guess what I would ask is, how do we know when someone has got one of these big game-changing ideas? And how do we know when they're just tinkering in the margins?

40:24And how do we assess those claims? Yeah, that's a really good question. And thank you to Corey for asking it. Part of why that's a good question is the real honest answer has to be, we can never be completely sure. But there are some signs, right? And to me, the most reliable answer to that question, which is not always going to be right, but it's often right, the real breakthroughs tend not to be hyped right out of the gate. They tend to be, hey, we might have something interesting here. You know, we've got this very interesting looking result in this Petri dish, and we're not sure, but it seems like it may be killing off bacteria.

41:10We've got this interesting result with silicon, where it seems like you might be able to use it as a semiconductor, but we're really, we're not sure. Of course, there are examples of real game-changing technologies that were hyped straight out of the gate.

41:27Kara Swisher:Electricity. Yeah, although even electricity, it took a while to develop, right? Right. You know, you can't use this as a hard and fast rule. But the other thing is, I would say that the most reliable guide is also the hardest thing to do, right? The hard answer to the hard question is you look at it skeptically. Always, yeah. And you say, okay, sure, can it really do this? Are we sure? Right. And, you know, with something like electricity, the answer was relatively clear early on, oh, yeah, this is actually extremely promising. And, you know, the same thing with, say, nuclear power. Whereas with a lot of these technologies that I've been ragging on, a skeptical look makes them look less likely, not more likely.

42:20Kara Swisher:That's interesting. Now, you've also said, quote, we don't need more Elon Musk. We need at least one fewer Elon Musk, which is funny. Putting aside the last few years and his descent into far-right politics for the moment, don't we also need these creative geniuses who push the boundaries of what's possible, the risk-takers in fields like electric vehicles, reusable rockets, satellite internet, the 21st century equivalents of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell? Some of them are obviously deeply flawed. Henry Ford, principal among them. There's a point where we do need those inventions.

42:54Kara Swisher:And I would say Musk really does get credit for pushing forward electric vehicles. He didn't invent it, but same thing with Steve Jobs, right? Very much pushing forward, not the inventor, yet critical. Would you rather live in a world without these inventions? I'm playing devil's advocate here. I just don't think that that's the choice that we're facing. Okay. Like you said, Musk didn't invent the electric car. Sure, he pushed it forward, but, you know, Tesla existed before he came along. There are other electric car companies. It was the kind of thing that was going to happen with or without him.

43:28I would argue that most of these tech billionaires, really all of them, are people who, you know, insofar as they themselves created these innovations at all, rather than like, you know, just being the person at the helm of a company that did, that they were things that would have happened without them. And if it hadn't been them.

43:51Kara Swisher:Inevitable. Although I would say without Elon, Tesla was going to be another traffic accident. That's probably right. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a question of someone who could push it through with such risk-taking. Risk-taking is one of his best qualities, actually. Sure. But there's a difference between risk-taking and recklessness, right? Correct. And he's crossed over. Yeah, most certainly. I also think that, yeah, okay, maybe Tesla would have gone down without him, but there are ways of pushing that kind of technology without being the kind of monster that Musk is. Yeah, and they often come hand in glove, unfortunately.

44:33Kara Swisher:So toward the end of the book, you write, for example, the fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is a fundamental problem at the core of this book. And you propose 100 % wealth tax on personal net worth of over$500 million. Now, Mondami just noted this, and everyone lost their ever-loving minds. Is the real problem Silicon Valley's ideology of technological salvation, or is it capitalism itself? If tech weren't the dominant industry right now, if it were agricultural, oil, all big industries, shipbuilding, coal, name any of them, would we be dealing with the same core issues of exploitation?

45:03Kara Swisher:We did, I think, in each of these areas for a long time. This is not a – this could be just a different twist. Yeah. And talk about the not having billionaires. Yeah. No, I think that there is something in common here with, you know, all of these other industries that have dominated society at various times. I do think that there is something sort of unique about the kinds of narratives that are spun by the tech industry. I don't seem to recall like, you know, the 1980s masters of the universe in Wall Street and financial industry claiming that what they were doing was, you know, bringing about a permanent utopia for humanity.

45:44Kara Swisher:No, they didn't. No. Yeah. And while those sorts of billionaires and other billionaires in other industries have often had really weird ideas, they have been like not of the same kind. Of the religious kind. Yeah, exactly. They're very religious in a weird way. Yeah, I mean, but not having billionaires. Look, you know, I think that a lot of what's happened in this country over the last, at this point, 10 years has shown like the kinds of risks that we as a society take by having billionaires, by allowing that kind of concentration of wealth. It erodes the democratic fabric of the country. And at this point, our democracy is in mortal danger and may already be lost.

46:29Kara Swisher:Okay. And that's awful. So you imagine that passing? No. No. Yeah. I mean, I think— No. Everyone wants to be a billionaire. I think that everyone wants to be Superman, too. Right. But nobody actually thinks that they're going to gain superpowers, right? Right. And everyone's Superman. No one's a Superman. Right. So the book is full of real-life characters who exude humorous. Powerful men who want to summon godlike powers to create new worlds and escape death, and it's all inevitably doomed. it's right out of Greek tragedy or myth, essentially. In this metaphor, the tech billionaires are like Icarus.

47:03Kara Swisher:They've gotten humanity strapped to their back, so they fly too close to some, we'll all go down with them. So let's give us reasons for hope and optimism. I hate to say that to you, because it's not an optimistic book, I would say, but what is your most optimistic? Is that we're onto them, or they will die, or how do we build safeguards so there's a better ending to this story? I mean, I think that the fact that we are onto them is actually really important and optimistic, right? You know, like there was for a long time a narrative about Musk, like a story about Musk in our society that he was this great genius who was going to save us all.

47:43And I never bought that, but a lot of people did. And for a long time, people were confused by the fact that I didn't like Elon Musk. And they would say, but Adam, you know, you're an astrophysicist. You like space. Why don't you like Elon Musk? He loves space too. And I would say, no, I really don't think he does. But not the real stuff. He has this fantasy. You know, the fact that now there is widespread distrust and distaste for Musk and most tech billionaires, I think is actually very hopeful because that's the first step that we need to, you know, make the changes that we have to make. Like, if we are going to, you know, save our democracy and safeguard it from these tech oligarchs, when people ask me what hope is there, the answer that I generally give is, like, we have to organize against these people.

48:39And part of the reason that answer always feels kind of unsatisfying, I think, is it sounds boring. It sounds unsexy. And it's like this boring, unsexy solution to a big, looming problem that feels larger than life and intractable. But I think that, like, the history of politics and the history of humanity has shown that often it is boring, unsexy solutions that win out and actually solve our greatest problems, right? Because there is, for example, something very boring and unsexy about developing a vaccine, right? There's something very boring and unsexy about, like, doing the administrative work you have to do to build, like, a healthy welfare state.

49:30There is something boring and unsexy about, like, building a better computer. And yet these things can solve real problems and have solved real problems.

49:42Kara Swisher:Right. That's a very good answer. Thank you. It's a very difficult thing because, as you note, the money and the power, because they go on and they never stop and they never change. And they get worse in many ways. Musk is the perfect example of that. But the others are, I think, more dangerous. I think Musk is more troubled and has other issues going on. But someone like a Bezos or Zuckerberg in particular, I call them the world's most dangerous man for a reason. And I stand by that to this day. And part of it is ignorance, which is really difficult. You know, ignorance and ineffectiveness and lack of expertise.

50:17Kara Swisher:And I think, you know, on some level, you appreciate, you know, if you're very wealthy, you give away money. But in a lot of ways, it comes with such a price. And the learning curve for them is so high. At one point, I wrote a piece called The Expense of Education of Mark Zuckerberg, and I meant at our expense, not his. And I think that's where we are, unfortunately. But I agree with you. When being onto them is the beginning of the steps of doing so. So even if you have hope that some other things can help us all in some way. Anyway, I really appreciate it, Adam. This is a great book, and everybody should read it.

50:49Kara Swisher:It's called More Everything Forever. And you don't want more, and you don't want everything, and you don't want it forever. But I appreciate it. Thank you, Cara.

51:03Kara Swisher:On with Cara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Skylar Mitchell. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, we get a healthy welfare state. If not, you're a small, stupid troll. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at On with Kara Swisher. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

52:07We'll see you next time. gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving.