Basic Books
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker
Published in April 2025
More Everything Forever is a book both jam-packed with arguments and desperately in need of an iron-fisted editor. As long as you bring some patience to accompany author Adam Becker as he works through his thinking by writing, you will be rewarded with some insights that can be applied to our current peak moment int he higher ed AI hype cycle.
One big thing they don’t teach us in Ph.D. programs is the extent to which every university is entangled with for-profit companies. As academia has evolved from analog to analog plus digital, our dependence on the corporations that supply and operate the technologies our institutions rely on has only grown stronger.
The next wave of university/company enmeshment will be with AI companies. That new university/company AI involvement will be with either existing companies (Google, Microsoft) or new players (Anthropic, OpenAI, X, Perplexity, etc.).
Given that AI company entanglement is in our future, it makes sense to get a handle on how many of the people who run the big AI companies think. We (universities) are buying access to a technology (AI), but in doing so, we are supporting a worldview. When it comes to AI, the tech and the ideas are inseparable.
While the worldviews of the good people who work for the AI companies are not universal, More Everything Forever unpacks a common set of beliefs that seem to underpin the thinking of the tech billionaires who run these corporations. These beliefs include:
- Artificial general intelligence, also known as the “singularity” or superintelligence, will arrive very soon.
- AGI will be the key to solving challenges such as economic scarcity, disease and global warming.
- AGI is also potentially a greater existential threat to society than everything else (including inequality, climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, etc.).
- To ensure human survival, we must prepare to go to space.
In More Everything Forever, Becker seeks to understand the basis of these beliefs and then proceeds to fundamentally dismantle the underlying logic of each. His approach is to apply data, evidence and science to all of these AI-adjacent assertions. Becker’s skepticism of the veracity of any of the claims above is persuasive, and his concerns about the social costs should these ideas translate into policy are convincing.
Should the fact that a few AI-adjacent billionaires have maybe crazy and potentially dangerous philosophical leanings impact how universities approach AI? Maybe.
Reading More Everything Forever has convinced me that higher education needs to lead with its own worldview, values and beliefs about the future in driving our own institutional AI strategies.
If we don’t think AI is the key to solving societal challenges, and we believe the costs of AI adoption (including on our campuses) must be weighed against its benefits, then perhaps we can be a counterweight to Silicon Valley’s dominant AI narrative.
What are you reading?
