INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
"More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us," Becker writes in his introduction
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
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
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,
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.
