AEWCH 299: ADAM BECKER on THE STUPIDITY OF TECH & A.I.

Against Everyone with Conner Habib

Against Everyone With Conner Habib

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 100 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Friends,

After writing my previous episode, AEWCH 298, where I laid out my thoughts on how to reflect on A.I. to get to beyond the basic, boring conversation, I read ADAM BECKER's excellent book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity .

I immediately invited him on the show, and I wish I would've read it before. Even though there is plenty of overlap, Adam's vantage point offer a full vision of tech culture, and reveals just how deeply anti-science is is.

That impact comes from the fact that Adam is great writer but also an astrophysicist, and author of the excellent popular book on quantum physics, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics.

We talk about how we got here in science and technology, why technology has been conflated with science, how conspiracy and science intersect, and what physics has to do with all of this.

Of course the conclusion is that A.I. is not super smart, not supported by smart people, that the fantasies of tech billionaires are bonkers, and that the singularity is not near because it's not even a thing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb.
0:03.4	Friends, here in Ireland and in some other places, there is the story of the changeling.
0:09.2	You might know this, or not, but basically, the fairies or otherworldly beings come and replace someone's child with one of their own children.
0:20.2	And then this baby, which is a strange being
0:24.6	with strange demands and needs, even though it kind of looks human, takes up all the attention,
0:30.9	time, energy of the parents, and never really gives the kind of love back that you would expect from being nurtured
0:39.5	and supported. And who knows what happens to the kid? Well, probably taken off to the fairy
0:45.9	realms and raised there. In our time, science has been replaced by a changeling, which is tech culture.
0:57.0	Tech culture is a culture that glorifies science, but doesn't really seem to give us any of its
1:04.1	wonder, excitement, or enthusiasms for life. It also doesn't seem to put much stock in science. It makes wild projections not based
1:13.7	in any truth or investigation and then proceeds to build out from them using the discoveries
1:19.2	that science has offered to make money to set up a support system for fantasies and anxieties of people who have made investments.
1:33.2	One of the best things about my science education with Lynn Margles is that it taught me just how
1:38.8	little I knew about the world, how vast the world was. And yet where science has led us in culture now into tech culture,
1:47.0	conversations about AI and communication and networks, they all feel so constraining and
1:52.7	constrictive, even when they tell us we're going to go to other planets. After writing my
1:58.9	previous episode, uh, against everyone with Conner Beebe 298,
2:03.0	I had laid out all my thoughts on how to reflect on AI to get beyond the basic, boring conversations.
2:11.1	After that, I read Adam Becker's excellent book, More Everything Forever,
2:16.4	AI Overlord's Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's
2:19.4	crusade to control the fate of humanity. I immediately invited Adam on the show, and I wish I would
2:25.9	have read his book before I wrote that episode, because there's a lot of overlap. But even though
	...

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