Seminar
US Mountain Time
Speaker:
Adam Becker
Our campus is closed to the public for this event.
Abstract: There are limits to growth. But many tech billionaires don’t agree. Instead, they have made promises of an endless human civilization, enabled by AGI and space colonization. Silicon Valley money has poured into subcultures such as effective altruism and rationalism in an attempt to produce intellectual ballast for these ideas about the future. Drawing on my forthcoming book More Everything Forever (to be published by Basic Books in April 2025), I will give a tour of this ideological ecosystem, tracing out the bizarre and troubling rise to prominence of concepts like AI alignment, the Singularity, and the purported need for eternal growth.
Speaker
