“More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us,” Becker writes in his introduction. “But that control isn’t limited to the future—it’s here, now. Their visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.”
Ars caught up with Becker to learn more.
Ars Technica: The title of your book is More Everything Forever. Speaking as a physicist, is there such a thing?
Adam Becker: No, of course not. The one thing we know that’s absolutely always true about exponential growth is that it ends. If something is growing exponentially, you can just say, “Oh, well, that’s not going to last.” The classic example from nature is growth of a bacterial colony. If you’ve got a couple of bacteria and a really nice, happy growth medium and a Petri dish, they’re going to grow exponentially until they fill the Petri dish, eat all of the agar, and die, and then the growth ends.
We even take advantage of this in so many things in our everyday lives. This is how you make beer and wine. You put the yeast in the growth medium, it eats all the sugar and grows exponentially and excretes alcohol, and then it dies due to a combination of its own waste products and lack of food. Once it’s done, then we drink it.
Ars Technica: If nothing else, eventually one always comes up against the laws of thermodynamics, especially entropy.
Adam Becker: I’ve got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they’ve misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they’ve got to grapple with it because it’s the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase.
