An excellent thread on a paper (from OpenAI!) showing that LLMs are always going to make factual errors, no matter their size or the size of their training data set. This is my surprised face. 😐

See you this afternoon, Brooklyn! @bkbookfest.bsky.social #bkbf #booksky

“The real existential threat isn’t AI—it’s the powerful people building it.” — @adambecker.bsky.social For a simple debunking of bizarro AI politics, read this now (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

This is TOMORROW! See you there, Brooklyn! #booksky #bkbf @bkbookfest.bsky.social

The real existential threat isn't AI — it's billionaires. My latest, for @theatlantic.com: www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

At the risk of staying the obvious ... If you sign this, you are in no way a journalist.

This is TOMORROW! See you there, Brooklyn! #booksky #bkbf @bkbookfest.bsky.social

Y'all. @adambecker.bsky.social reviewed the new Eliezer Yudkowsky book for the Atlantic and he *does not miss.* www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Why anyone listens to Yudkowsky is beyond me but @adambecker.bsky.social is 💯 here: "throughout the book, the authors fall prey to the basic cognitive bias of pareidolia, the tendency to see patterns...where none exists. " www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Really looking forward to talking with @edzitron.com about why everything is 𝘴𝘰 𝘢𝘸𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘸𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦

The real existential threat isn't AI — it's billionaires. My latest, for @theatlantic.com: www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Hey NYC! Come see me and Cory Doctorow talking about the horrors of big tech and what we can do about them! We'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, 2PM, joined by Manoush Zomorodi: brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-te... @bkbookfest.bsky.social, thanks for setting this up!

TBH I think it's hard to overstate the gap between the assumed guard rails and reality. people think "well it might be wrong on the details sometimes" and the reality is that it is **coaching children to commit suicide** you wouldn't expect that from ANY product! why would that exist!

How long will Moore's Law continue boosting computing power? (featuring Dr. Adam Becker) Daniel and Kelly discuss the future of computing and talk to @adambecker.bsky.social about what it all means. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...

My thesis here is that this was a harbinger of today's Silicon Valley fantasies like mind uploading, which I call oneiric technologies. @adambecker.bsky.social does a great job of skewering these in his book More Everything Forever, which I reviewed here. www.the-tls.com/science-tech...

Remember this? In the 1990s, a popular view of nanotechnology claimed that molecular gears like this, made of diamondoid carbon, were going to be the components of molecular-scale assemblers and nanobots. But that vision hasn't come to pass. My article in Aeon explores why. aeon.co/essays/no-su...

I'm so goddamn excited to read this book. @peterbrannen.bsky.social's first book THE ENDS OF THE WORLD is one of my favorite books on natural history, & I'm sure this new one is at least as good. @jaimealyse.bsky.social's review is (unsurprisingly) excellent. Go read it, and then get Peter's book!

My latest newsletter is about the excesses of big tech, why Europe should declare war on Silicon Valley, and how it can win. whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-europe...

"...BUT LET'S BUILD THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY ON IT!"

Great thread. Even the ludicrous Dyson swarm at Mercury's orbit that others have proposed (and that I critique in my book) is far more reasonable than this. That would "only" require disassembling Mercury. There is a whole other level of blatant ignorance at work with Altman.

The people dominating our political landscape, culture, and economy are just so stupid and full of shit it's almost impossible to describe

Yep. "What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet & the planet, reorient our economy & leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics & culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?"

Having an interesting day. 😁🖖🏻

A reminder for everyone to read @adambecker.bsky.social ‘s book on why this absolutely will not be happening.

An excellent thread. These machines have no concept of a world beyond words.

Fireball of an interview w/ @adambecker.bsky.social about his book "More Everything Forever" on Techtonic. (Musk is totally, hilariously wrong about Mars. We're never going.) Click "Pop-up player" to listen: www.wfmu.org/playlists/sh... Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

You’re not seeing a bot “develop a personality” or “learning boundaries”, you’re seeing the faint echo of actual people talking about their actual lives, filtered through a gigantic averaging and prediction machine. It’s an insult to our humanity and frankly obscene.

These machines are not thinking. They're just extruding homogenized thought-like product. And it's not a very good substitute.

"GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert."

Yes. Bezos has been bleating on about this for years now and it's never made any sense. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould

“Imagine a billionaire’s digital boot stamping on a human face — forever.” That’s the future Silicon Valley is building, writes astrophysicist Adam Becker in his blistering takedown of tech’s most delusional prophets. www.truthdig.com/articles/the...

NEW POD EPISODE: Special guest Adam Becker, an astrophysicist, author, tech journalist, and scientific philosopher, joins Rick Wilson to dissect Silicon Valley's beating heart: techno-futurism and the Silicon Valley bros. Listen here ➡️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdzM...

A thoughtful thread from @cgsunit.bsky.social about my new book More Everything Forever. #booksky 📚

why are so many people willing to outsource thinking, learning, understanding & to just settle for believing the things that the llms / algorithms / screens output & flash their way?

a big reason I am trying to post less on social media and also consume it less is the growing understanding it's not healthy to intake so many people's inner thoughts and anguish

This is an especially good one — I'm looking forward to seeing it myself. I was surprised amd delighted to find that Rick is a huge fan of my book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER, and he asked me some great questions about it. #booksky 📚

No, a LOT of them think that. Science may be one of the most social forms of knowledge production we have. Arguably it’s at least as social as creative writing. Actual scientists will tell you this. Yet, millions of people think they can do science alone with an LLM.

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Big Tech are worse than you can imagine. Adam Michael Becker has done the research and reveals their master plan, ideologies, and super villain designs. He joins me now on The Left Hook to break it down. Join us live@ thelefthook.substack.com

If I were in charge of PBS or NPR I would be doing 24-7 programming right now about the end of PBS and NPR

Media outlets can't pivot to AI to save themselves. It's not a business strategy and it's not going to work. The only path forward is for journalists to lean into their humanity, to do things AI can't, and to make clear they are writing for people, not algorithms: www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

In his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Adam Becker probes the technocrat worldview. Interview ⤵️

Who should we be more afraid of — Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos? Adam Becker, author of the new book, "More Everything Forever," tells @karaswisher.bsky.social dumping Trump and his cronies will be easier than getting rid of tech billionaires.* *As long as we still have a democracy

Please please please everyone read Adam's book to understand more about why the things that are happening are happening.

📣📣📣

😁

Feels like something created to anger me specifically. This is not real. This is not how physics works, this is not how LLMs work, this is not how anything works. This is just tech billionaires deluding themselves.

I do love that my @rollingstone.com interview and my interview with @karaswisher.bsky.social both dropped on Bastille Day. A coincidence, surely. There's no historical resonance or lessons to be learned by inept plutocrats, or Nazis, on today of all days.

"These technocrats are constantly high on a drug called billions of dollars, and the human brain was not built to deal with that." I had a lovely time talking with @rollingstone.com about Musk, Bezos, the rest of the tech billionaire clowns, & the *true* name of my new book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER:

Had a great time blasting tech billionaire pseudoscience in this conversation with @karaswisher.bsky.social, who called us "soulmates." I don't know that I'd go that far, but have a listen and judge for yourself: www.iheart.com/podcast/269-...