Adam

Becker

Astrophysicist, journalist, and author

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Adam

Becker

Astrophysicist, journalist, and author

Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written for The New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and other publications. He has been a science journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and a science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award.

His new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, is about the terrible plans that tech billionaires have for the future and why they don’t work. Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for humanity’s future. These wildly implausible and profoundly immoral fantasies distract from essential work on urgent problems like climate change.

Becker is an in-demand speaker at universities, conferences, and science and technology events, offering a bracing reality check on the fantastical beliefs of powerful tech leaders and the innovations they claim will change our world.

He lives in California.

College & University, Environment, Journalism, Library, Politics & Current Events, Science & Medicine, Technology & Innovation

What Everyone Gets Wrong about AI (or, Why AI Ain’t Inevitable)

There is an incredibly annoying drumbeat of hype around AI. We are told that AI will soon become radically better, and it will revolutionize business, education, science, healthcare, the arts, even our private lives, ushering in a utopia of lesiure and a golden age of new technology. The loudest voices pushing against that narrative offer up something even more radical: the idea that AI poses an existential threat to humanity, that it will kill everyone and take over the world. The good news – and the bad news – is that everyone is wrong. AI isn’t going to do any of those things. These ideas about the future of AI, both for good and for ill, are based on science fiction, not real science. In this talk, author and astrophysicist Adam Becker will take you on a darkly comic tour of the bizarre ideas behind the public conversation on AI, why those ideas aren’t true, and why people believe them anyhow.

Tech Billionaires’ Dangerous and Impossible Plans For Our Future – and How We Can Stop Them

Elon Musk says he’s taking us to Mars. Bill Gates says climate change isn’t a big deal anymore. And Sam Altman says that godlike AI is coming soon, and so is nuclear fusion, opening up a future of limitless energy and technological advancement. Most tech billionaires have a pretty specific vision of the future, one that involves incredibly advanced AI and abundant energy fueling an endless interstellar civilization. This is a reasonably familiar vision from decades of science fiction. It’s also never going to happen. Science, history, and politics all make it clear that these visions of the future are fundamentally hollow. Yet tech billionaires are using these ideas as an excuse to grab even more power and influence, wrecking the world in the name of pursuing these impossible dreams. We can stop them – but the first step is to expose these myths for what they are. Adam Becker, author, journalist, and astrophysicist, will show you that when it comes to ideas about the future, Big Tech’s emperors have no clothes.

Space Isn’t the Place (or There Is No Planet B)

The future isn’t in space. Space has been a staple of American ideas about the future from early science fiction up through the Apollo program to today’s private space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. The modern space barons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos spin out visions of humanity colonizing the Moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system – and the countless star systems in the galaxy beyond that. Yet none of that is going to happen. Space is awful, there’s no good reason to send large numbers of people there, and there are a lot of reasons we shouldn’t. The science is extremely clear, and astrophysicist Adam Becker is an entertaining guide to it, explaining in fun and pithy terms why going to space is a terrible idea, while giving us a fresh perspective on our unique and amazing home in space, Earth.

The Trouble with Quantum Physics, and Why it Matters

Quantum physics explains everything from semiconductors to the sun itself, to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. Yet it’s unclear what this fruitful theory says about reality. Is it really impossible to talk about what’s happening to atoms and subatomic particles when we’re not looking at them? For years, the standard answer to questions like this was “shut up and calculate.” A historical myth went along with this answer, claiming Einstein had once worried about these questions but was proven wrong by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Yet the myth is untrue, and these thorny quantum paradoxes are far more important than most physicists once believed. Adam Becker will explain the puzzles at the heart of quantum physics, why they matter, and what really went down between Einstein and Bohr 90 years ago.