Henry Farrell, We need to escape the Gernsback Continuum, Programmable Mutter, July 2, 2025. The three opening paragraphs:
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.
Then we have a lot of this and that, about Becker's argument, about the Golden Age of science fiction, William Gibson, Hugo Gernsback, visions of the future, limitless energy, and Andreessen's techno-optimism. Then:
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.
After some discussion of Iain Banks we get:
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.
Amen. Usable futures. That's what I'm up to:
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