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9 hours ago
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As I admitted at the time, my review essay on Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity was a bit of a bait-and-switch. Becker’s book explains how the dreams of science fiction have shaped Silicon Valley’s dreams of technology in general. I deliberately made a comparison that was both narrower and more fantastical: emphasizing how debates over AGI resembled the dreams of Renaissance alchemy. In partial redress, here’s a more specific argument about the relationship between science fiction and Silicon Valley.
Again, it’s more a riff on Becker than a bald presentation of his argument, but the connections are much clearer, even if it isn’t quite the same argument that Becker makes. What Becker sees as rooted in 1950s and 1960s science fiction arguably goes back a few decades further: to the fusion of “scientifiction” and technocracy that happened in the early 1930s, right at the beginning of the so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction.
Silicon Valley is trapped in a new version of the Gernsback Continuum - a situation in which it is collectively haunted by the visions of an imaginary future of endless expansion that didn’t happen and never will. Our escape route, as Becker suggests, is to acknowledge the physical and social limits that we can’t escape, and to try to construct better futures within those limits.
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Becker contends that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future borrows heavily from the dreams of a particular era of science fiction.
The 1950s and ’60s are the middle and end of the Golden Age of science fiction, which started with pulp sci-fi magazines in the very late 1930s like Astounding Science Fiction. The authors who dominated … were almost all white men, and they wrote primarily about a future in space. Asimov’s stories were often centered around robots, space empires, or both, with nuclear power depicted as a nigh-limitless energy source used for everything from rockets to radios. Heinlein’s stories frequently had a flavor of Ayn Rand in space, usually featuring a self-reliant, polymath male hero dabbling in eugenics or undermining workers on strike for a living wage.
I think that’s right, but I’d go back a few decades further than Becker. If you want to understand the relationship between science fiction and technocratic aspiration, you should start with Hugo Gernsback, the man who brought them both together. To understand this, read William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” which is one of the great science fiction short stories of the last half-century, as well as a sly and pointed social history of the genre. It’s in his collection, Burning Chrome, and can easily be found in pirated versions online that I’m not going to point you to, because that would be rude.
Gibson’s 1980s short story depicts a man who is haunted by hallucinations of a future that never happened of “flying-wing liners” that pass above in the sky, and freeways that perpetually threaten to unfold into “gleaming eighty-lane monsters.” He has been hired to photograph the isolated remnants of 1930s and 1940s buildings that promised a future of vast art-deco cities surrounding gleaming ziggurats, traversed by curving roads in the air, hovering blimps, air-cars and gyrocopters. As the narrator travels in search of fragments of this lost American dream of a clean and efficient future, he becomes infected by its “semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.” Gibson’s hero finally exorcises himself by plunging into the seediest aspects of the “near-dystopia we live in,” watching Nazi Love Motel until the ghosts fade away.
It’s a wonderful short story that influenced me at an early age, but I didn’t really know what it was about until I read Finn Brunton’s book Digital Cash a few years ago. Finn’s book begins by describing the Technocrats, a group that I had never understood were an actual political movement, which really got going in the Great Depression.
The Hugo Gernsback of the “Gernsback Continuum” was the founding publisher and editor of Amazing Stories, the pulp magazine that launched the genre of “scientifiction.” Science fiction’s most important awards, the Hugos, are named after him. But Gernsback also the founding publisher and editor of a briefly lived publication, Technocracy Review. I own a copy of Issue 1, Volume 1 (I’ve made an imperfect but readable scan available here if you want to read it; the various illustrations throughout this post are taken from it). As one of the articles describes the technocratic movement:
With a slide rule in one hand, the other gripped upon the switch of a dynamo, Technocracy says pompously, “Science - that is the solution. You babbling fools know not this industrial machine you quarrel over. Only I know it, for I have made it from my brain. I and the technicians I represent. You should surrender it to me, therefore, and when that is done your troubles are over. With this left hand I will work out formulae. With the right, controlling almost infinite power, I shall send new life, the pulsing life of electricity, into the sluggish veins of industry. Away with your foolish theories, they are old, stale and unprofitable. A new world opens, the world of Technocracy.”
Substitute “software” for “power,” and you have Marc Andreessen circa 2011. Substitute “power” back in again and you have Silicon Valley energy debates circa 2025.
In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that science fiction merges into technocracy which in turn merges into techbro exhortations. All are narratives of technological enthusiasm, depicting a future in which the engineers have taken charge, and in which innovation is a fountain of boundless possibilities. As the writer J.G. Ballard described the science fiction genre in a 1967 interview:
There’s a tremendous confidence that radiates through all modern American science fiction of the period 1930 to 1960; the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems.
And as Becker’s book emphasizes, much of this was based on assumptions about boundless energy. Technocracy’s entire political ideology centered on energy, proposing a new currency denominated in watts.
This dream of limitless energy and endless possibility is notably congenial to a particular kind of politics. The most crucial passage of “The Gernsback Continuum” describes a nuclear families from this imagined future:
They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. … They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. … They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.
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Gernsback’s future of shark-finned aircars and gleaming cities is the proximate ancestor of today’s Silicon Valley rhetoric. Becker writes about J. Storrs Hall, whose book, Where Is My Flying Car: A Memoir of Future Past, is one of the keystone texts for Silicon Valley right luminaries such as Peter Thiel. Hall’s book begins with the “classic art-deco exposition of the technological Utopia” in the 1930s movie, The Shape of Things to Come. It goes from there to ask why we expected flying cars, the spread of mankind throughout the galaxy, and other such forms of progress and to inquire why we never got there. The answer, crudely summarized, is that we gave up, and we shouldn’t have. Hall mentions Gibson’s other writing in passing, but doesn’t seem aware that he is performing a thudding cover version of “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which Gibson’s mordant humor is excised in favor of technophilic literal-mindedness. Hall’s extended discussion of the mechanics of gyrocopters is actually quite funny, viewed from a certain perspective, but it certainly isn’t intended to be.
More recent texts of the Silicon Valley right, such as Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto similarly exhort a return to this defunct dream world of the future, where the problems of technology dissolve into the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems, provided only that we smash the obstacles - DEI, regulations, environmentalism - that stand in their way.
Like the Golden Age science fiction that they draw on, these arguments are not based on scientific claims, but an elaborate ideology in which science is a kind of magical artifact from which progress inevitably flows. Ballard again (this interview from 1968):
The science fiction written in those days came out of all this optimism that science was going to remake the world. Then came Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and the image of science completely changed. People became very suspicious of science, but SF didn’t change. You still found this optimistic literature, the Heinlein–Asimov–Clarke type of attitude towards the possibilities of science, which was completely false.
Or in the Silicon Valley remix: once we begin to construct our flying cars; once we again reach for the stars; once we have AGI to create the earthly paradise, there is nothing that can constrain us from grasping the destiny of our species.
Just as in Gibson’s story (written more than 40 years ago!) there is a decided political whiff emanating from many versions of this ideology. If you get its logic, it is not at all surprising that so many people on the Silicon Valley right have jumped from techno-optimism into fascism, nor that they see little distinction between the two. Notoriously, Andreessen’s manifesto riffs on Marinetti, a technology obsessed fascist.
Equally, not all people who embrace this style of thinking are fascists, or even slightly fascist adjacent. If you read the liberal-leaning technocratic utopianism of Demis Hassabis or Dario Amodei, you’ll find the suggestion there too that technology - and in particular AI - is a limitless cornucopia of possibilities. See Hassabis’ WIRED interview a few weeks ago:
If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era. AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources. If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.
Again, this leans on a particular reading of science fiction. The future that they aspire to is explicitly the future of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, in which vast intelligent AI Minds underpin a civilization in which people can do more or less whatever they want.
I think the Culture’s values are a winning strategy because they’re the sum of a million small decisions that have clear moral force and that tend to pull everyone together onto the same side. Basic human intuitions of fairness, cooperation, curiosity, and autonomy are hard to argue with, and are cumulative in a way that our more destructive impulses often aren’t. It is easy to argue that children shouldn’t die of disease if we can prevent it, and easy from there to argue that everyone’s children deserve that right equally.
I would recommend “Consider Phlebas” by Iain Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me, and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it’s the best depiction of a post-A.G.I. future, an optimistic post-A.G.I. future, where we’re traveling the stars and humanity reached its full flourishing.
On the one hand, this is obviously much more attractive, and far less sinister, than the Andreessen version. It’s an optimistic liberal bet on the boundless cornucopia of technology. Banks was a Scots socialist who detested authoritarianism with a passion.
On the other, Banks was making a much more complex and ambiguous argument than the version that Hassabis and Amodei present. The Culture is, to steal Ursula K. Le Guin’s term, an ambiguous utopia, in a universe that is emphatically not a mere backdrop for the playing out of the manifest destiny of mankind.
Some of the best and most moving parts of Becker’s book describe the difference between this ideology of science and what science actually says. Becker has a Ph.D. in cosmology, and knows that the universe is a place of hard, cold limits. He quotes Carl Sagan:
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. . . . There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
That too, is Banks’ understanding. The physical universe is a “dark background,” shaped by the brute limits of material existence rather than human desire. As Francis Spufford emphasizes in his wonderful obituary, Banks revived the form of the classic Golden Age space opera, but combined it with an enduring sense of human tragedy. The Culture is indeed a kind of flourishing - but it is one that will wither and die (the books repeatedly emphasize that it is a temporary and evanescent phenomenon; at best a footnote in the history of the galaxy).
Banks uses the trappings of utopianism to convey a far bleaker and more realistic understanding of the human condition. What speaks definitively in the end is not human destiny, but what Banks describes elsewhere as the “faint, not even ironic hiss” of the universal zero. Entropy, not human flourishing, is the logic of the universe.
The great advantage of Becker’s book is not simply that it explains how tech thinking has gone wrong by positing a universe of “more everything forever,” where all that we need is gumption and optimism to transform the human condition and bring about the universal utopia. It is that it also articulates the beginnings of an alternative understanding, which sets out the actual limits of what we can do.
As Kim Stanley Robinson (another poet of hard physical limits) emphasizes in his recent work, we are almost certainly not going to be able to spread out among the stars. What we have on this planet is pretty well what we have. That doesn’t mean that we can’t do much better than we are doing. We can achieve greater forms of material abundance. But pretending that the hard problems simply don’t exist, or that they will be solved by some magical technology that is right around the corner, is a recipe for the embrace of fascism at the worst, and starry-eyed ingenuous optimism at the best. As I’ve written before, we need usable futures. But to get there, as Becker argues, we need to discard the imagined futures of a past world whose aspirations and understanding of the world are a very poor fit with the present that we find ourselves in.
