Billionaire techbros are planning to escape to Mars, upload their minds into an AI, and then colonize the galaxy. Adam Becker, an author and astrophysicist, explains how this is never going to happen – in his book “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.”
The Rationalist community is tightly entwined with the Effective Altruism movement, which aims to remake philanthropy by calculating how many people would benefit from each donation. This form of utilitarianism aims to benefit not just people who are alive today, but all the people who will ever live. Many Effective Altruists, or E.A.s, have decided that the best way to benefit humanity is to protect it from destruction by A.I.
. . . Criticism of the Rationalist and E.A. movements has been frequent, including claims of sexual harassment in group houses and complaints about the community’s interest in eugenics and race science. The community’s reputation was damaged in 2023 after Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who was one of the primary financial backers of the two movements, was convicted of fraud. But the movement continues to prosper.
. . . “When you think about the billions at stake and the radical transformation of lives across the world because of the eccentric vision of this group, how much more cult-y does it have to be for this to be a cult? Not much,” said Greg M. Epstein, a Harvard chaplain who saw the rise of the Rationalist and E.A. communities at the university over the last decade and the author of “Tech Agnostic,” a book that discusses technology as a new religion.
“What do cultish and fundamentalist religions often do?” Mr. Epstein added. “They get people to ignore their common sense about problems in the here and now in order to focus their attention on some fantastical future.”