YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Becker

lines on the record: 52
first: 2025-07-14
most recent: 2025-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And actually solve our greatest problems, right? Because there is, for example, something very boring and unsexy about developing a vaccine, right? There's something very boring and unsafe. And yet these things can solve real problems and have solve real problems”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Distrust and distaste for Musk and most tech billionaires. I think is actually very hopeful because that's the first step that we need to make the changes that we have to make if we are going to save our democracy and safeguard it from these tech oligarchs. When people ask me what hope is there, the answer that I generally give is like we have to organize against these people. And part of the reason that answer always feels kind of unsatisfying, I think, is it sounds boring. It sounds unsexy. And it's like this boring, unsexy solution to a big, looming problem that feels larger than life and intractable. But I think that the history of politics and the history of humanity has shown that often it is boring unsexy solutions that win out.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that the fact that we are onto them is actually really important and optimistic, right? There was for a long time a narrative about Musk, like a story about Musk in our society, that he was this great genius who was going to save us all. And I never bought that, but a lot of people did. And for a long time, people were confused by the fact that I didn't like Elon Musk. And they would say, but Adam, you know, you're an astrophysicist. You like space. Why don't you like Elon Musk? He loves space too. And I would say, no, I really don't think he does, but not the real stuff. He has this fantasy. The fact that now there is widespread...”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that everyone wants to be Superman too. But nobody actually thinks that they're going to gain superpowers, right? Right.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, but not having billionaires. Look, you know, I think that a lot of what's happened in this country over the last point 10 years has shown the kinds of risks that we as a society take by having billionaires, by allowing that kind of concentration of wealth, it erodes the democratic fabric of the country. And at this point, our democracy is in mortal danger and may already be lost. And that's”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And while those sorts of billionaires and other billionaires in other industries have often had really weird ideas, they have been not of the same kind.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I think that there is something in common here with all of these other industries that have dominated society at various times. I do think that there is something sort of unique about the kinds of narratives that are spun by the tech industry. I don't seem to recall like, you know, the 1980s Masters of the Universe and then, you know, Wall Street and financial industry claiming that what they were doing was bringing about a permanent utopia for humanity”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, most certainly, I also think that yeah, okay, maybe Tesla would have gone down without him, but there are ways of pushing that kind of technology without being the kind of a monster that Musk is.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you said, Musk didn't invent the electric car. Sure, he pushed it forward. But, you know, Tesla existed before he came along. There are other electric car companies. It was the kind of thing that was going to happen with her without him. I would argue that most of these tech billionaires, really all of them, are people who, you know, insofar as they themselves created these innovations at all rather than like, you know, just being the person at the helm of a company that did, that they were things that would have happened without them. And if it hadn't been them.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you say, okay, sure, can it really do this? Are we sure? And, you know, with something like electricity, the answer was relatively clear early on, oh, yeah, this is actually extremely promising. And, you know, the same thing with, say, nuclear power. Whereas with a lot of these technologies that I've been ragging on, a skeptical look makes them look less likely, not more likely.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, although even electricity it took a while to develop, right? You can't use this as a hard and fast rule. But the other thing is I would say that the most reliable guide is also the hardest thing to do, right? The hard answer to the hard question is you look at it skeptically”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. No, that's a really good question. And thank you to Corey for asking it. Part of why that's a good question is the real honest answer has to be, we can never be completely sure. But there are some signs, right? And to me, the most reliable answer to that question, which is not always going to be right, but it's often right. The real breakthroughs tend not to be hyped right out of the gate. They tend to be hey, we might have something interesting here. You know, we've got this very interesting looking result in this petri dish, and we're not sure, but it seems like it may be killing off bacteria. We've got this interesting result with silicon, where it seems like you might be able to use it as a semiconductor, but we're really, we're not sure”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like the tech billionaires, like if I had to pick one, are the bigger problem because they're going to be with us for longer.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a good question. Which one's more dangerous? I don't know. They're dangerous in different ways, right? Like Trump is dangerous in all of these very obvious ways of eroding and destroying confidence in democracy, democratic institutions, guardrails, eating an entire political party. But the tech billionaires are going to be with us for longer and not just because they're younger, but because they're unelected, right? And like, yes, Trump is trying to, you know, transform America into an authoritarian state and he may succeed. He's already succeeded in a lot of ways that are horrifying. But ultimately, there is hope that he can be stopped or those changes can be halted and reversed. Through organizing and at the ballot box, doing that with the billionaires is a lot harder.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that I think that it's a little of both, right? Like, I think that. Certainly, the idea of these high flying ideas that don't work has created cover for these billionaires to amass more power and wealth, and that's not just exacerbated existing problems, but sort of like the amount of power and wealth that they have at this point is so extreme that I would argue it's created like a sort of new kind of problem, right? Just because it's such an extreme concentration of wealth and power. And so, you know, they are able to openly support fascism and still go about doing their business in ways that would have previously been unthinkable if they'd taken those stances even just a few years ago.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, you know, I had an idea in my head of what my book was actually titled rather than More Everything Forever. I thought of it as these fucking people”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a circular logic and we don't need much more by way of technological solutions to solving global warming. At this point, the primary barriers to solving the climate crisis are social and political, not technological, right? Like we have cheap, clean energy. We just need to, you know, get through the various Barriers to deploying it. And a lot of those have to do with government subsidies and interest groups and whatnot. And that's not a technological problem. That's a problem of persuasion and politics.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That were not going to meet our climate goals anyway, so we should use more energy and more resources and pour them into AI so we can get to superintelligent AGI and then that will tell us how to solve global warming.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is. I mean. Just the amount of energy needed to run these generative AI systems is truly enormous. Like they're just one statistic. The AI powered Google search. One search query takes ten times as much energy to answer now than it did before they integrated generative AI into this. And I think most people are annoyed that they did that. It doesn't make the search better. It made it worse. We all want old Google back. And so they are expending 10 times as much energy to make their product worse. So here's something that's not in my book because it happened too late for me to put it into my book. Eric Schmidt, you know, former CEO of Google, Tech Venture Capitalist, Billionaire, he said in, I think October.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly, but then, you know, you come back to the question, okay, you're a meritocracy, how are you measuring merit? I think that they believe that being racist means that you want to be mean to people of a different color to their face by using slurs. And like that's not what racism is, right? Racism is when you reinforce a system of oppression against people of a certain race. And that's what these guys are doing very explicitly”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you go and look at Musk's plans for Mars, he talks about backing up humanity on Mars. Who makes the decision about who gets to go to Mars? Who gets to decide who is worthy of going to space? What cultures and ethnicities get to be backed up on Mars? The space program historically has excluded a lot of people and has favored people who look like meat.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for example, just the idea of intelligence, just the markers that they use for intelligence, the idea that IQ is a good measure of intelligence, which you'll see over and over again in the writings of these billionaires and the subcultures that they fund. You know, IQ is not a measure of inherent intelligence. There is not, as far as we know, a single number that you can call intelligence. And yet, you know, the notion that IQ is really deeply important. Is a racist notion because IQ is not actually measuring intelligence. It's been shown over and over again to have cultural biases. Another example, and maybe this is a more immediate and direct one,”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, but I think most racists will strongly reject the idea that they're racist, right? It doesn't mean they're not racist. I don't know. If, say, Marca Andreessen, just to pick one of these guys, I don't know if he understands how deeply enmeshed his worldview is with eugenics and racism. But it is”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the future. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker. They come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the threat of a super intelligent AGI wiping out humanity? And he rates that as 50 times more likely than collapse or extinction from climate change and nuclear war combined. And when I asked him why, his answer was essentially, oh, I made those numbers up. It was my best guess. And the man is an Oxford philosopher, right? That gives him a platform, right? Power and influence. He has been advising UK parliament on AI issues. And I think it's really irresponsible for him and others in that movement to make these claims based on very, very little.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. An example is Toby Ord is a leader in this effective altruist movement who has pushed long-termism. And he came up with estimates of the severity of or probability of different existential threats causing either the extinction of humanity or unrecoverable collapse of human civilization in the next hundred years. If you asked me to make a list like that, or if you asked, I think like most experts in the subject to make a list like that, top of the list would be things like global warming, nuclear war, right? Maybe a pandemic and or does rate pandemics pretty highly, especially in engineered pandemic. And that seems reasonable, but at the top of his list.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other pressing problems, then you get into questions like okay, what counts as an existential threat and which existential threats are more pressing? They have a very bad track record of answering these questions well.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a utilitarian philosophy that comes along with effective altruism. The idea that what we need to do is make the most happiness and reduce the suffering the most in the world. And that is something that can be quantified. And this leads the effect of altruists and especially like this influential subgroup within that movement the long termists to the idea that what we really need to do is ensure that there are as many people in the future as possible living lives that are at least barely worth living. And so this creates what one of the leaders of that movement, Will McCaskaskell called a moral case for space settlement, which again is nonsense. That's not happening. And it also leads them to prioritize what they call existential threats to humanity and human civilization over”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, he doesn't care. Yeah. But on the other hand, you know, I just described effective altruism, right? So, what's the problem? The problem is that, first of all, there are some problems that you can't just solve by throwing money at them, right? If you want to create like.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so first of all Yeah, it sounds good we should care about future generations We should try to put more money toward worthy causes But the devil always is in the details right first of all relying on philanthropy has its own problems Billionaire philanthropy is democratically unaccountable it's an exercise of power It would be much much better if we could fund worthy causes through some democratically accountable means like government funding and that way you know we can all collectively make decisions together about where the money should go of course you know we've seen that Musk doesn't care about that and has cut USAID”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think That basic Brain computer interfaces actually kind of are interesting in that they could in theory allow people to regain capabilities that they lost due to some sort of accident or injury like you know like if they can't move their legs a brain computer interface could maybe maybe let them control like a wheelchair more efficiently or something like that or if they can't control like if they're if they're quadriplegic a brain computer interface might allow them to control a substitute for their hands or something like that there is some work in there that has shown some promise i think that's cool right you know and i think that that's useful the problem is then taking that step and saying okay and then once we do that we'll be able to you know upload the entire brain into a computer like that's just nonsense”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are, but that's like the most notorious one. The idea there is to bridge the gap between computers and the brain. This is also part of why I am so skeptical about the idea of AGI. The brain is not a computer. You know, a lot of this stuff is premised on the idea that the brain is a kind of computer. And it's not. It's just not. It's an evolved organ. But I think that there is like a real faith in the idea that you can transcend these biological limits, which is like the main project of transhumanism. The idea that we don't have to be confined to our bodies and their limits as they are now, that we can upload our minds into computers or make ourselves into cybernetic organisms and greatly extend human lifespan. Go out into the cosmos and colonize the universe. And all of that's just pure fantasy”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do seem to take it very, very seriously. This is, I think, a lot of the idea, not just behind the AI companies, but behind companies like Neuralink.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that the AI stuff that we have right now is an interesting tool that was built in ways that are seriously troubling and that has an enormous carbon footprint, an enormous human cost to the training. They stole a lot of content in order to train them up in the first place. But even if you put all of that stuff aside, you were left with something kind of interesting that can make certain tasks easier, like say writing code. It is good for that.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? And that's part of what made it better. Moore's Law is over. The chips are not going to be getting appreciably smaller and faster ever because we already hit the atomic limits. You can't make the transistors really much smaller than they already are. This is exactly what Gordon Moore said was going to happen. He said Moore's law is going to end sometime in the 2020s. And here we are.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then it was better and better. Yeah, but that was mostly about people putting stuff on the internet, about people learning how to use the internet better and, you know, and also like the continuation of Moore's Law, right? You know, the continued increase in power of computers made it possible to, yeah, and cheaper, it made it possible to put more computationally intensive stuff on the internet like video.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, like, it's better at stringing together coherent sentences, and it can be useful for solving certain well-defined scientific problems like protein folding.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they're interesting. They can do some interesting things, but they have so far proven to be pretty bad at almost everything that people have tried to sell them to us for”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the dream is still this dream of AGI and singularity, the idea that once you get to AGI, it will then be able to design an even better and smarter, more intelligent AI, and then that will design an even smarter one and so on and so forth in short order. And so once you get to AGI, you very quickly get to superintelligent AGI that is smarter than all of humanity combined. I'm skeptical of this in part because there's no sign that anything like that is on the horizon. You know, these generative AI tools are”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Jervis, Commander Data, Hal, whatever. You know, like, if you take a look at the open AI charter. They have a definition of AGI in there, and the definition that they use is something that can reproduce any economically productive activity that humans engage in at a human level. Okay, first of all, that's still pretty vague. And second, economically productive. Why is that the measure? Like, there's so many important things that we do that are not economically productive. Like, I don't know, you know, having a long conversation with a friend.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I mean, okay, so... AGI, artificial general intelligence, is notoriously difficult to define, which is part of the problem, right? The sort of vague definition that's usually given is an AI that can do everything that a human can do or is at human level intelligence. I think the real definition, the true definition is AI like we have in science fiction.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Musk doesn't really know anything about space. He doesn't know anything about Mars. If he did, he would know that everything he has said about Mars is a complete fantasy.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Columbus had an inaccurate estimate of how large the earth was. He got very, very lucky that the Americas were there, and then, you know, went and killed off an enormous number of people to the point where, like, even by the European standards of his time, people thought that he was being incredibly brutal. And so, you know, you could say that the only thing that Musk and Columbus have in common is that they're both horribly racist. And also, with all of the difficulties that Columbus faced, what he wanted to do was still much, much, much, much easier than what Musk is trying to do.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Yeah. People at the time knew that the Earth was round. And the reason people were pushing back on Columbus's scheme was not that they thought the Earth was flattened and that he'd fall off, but that they actually knew how big the Earth was, because that's also something we've known for a very long time. And so they said, you're going to starve if you go that way. You're not bringing enough provisions. You are going to starve before you get to Asia. And he would have starved if the Americas had not been there, but the Europeans didn't know that the Americas were there.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So a couple of things. First of all, like the myth of Christopher Columbus, you know, proving the Earth is round, that's a myth, right?”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are way, way, way too high because the things that protect us from radiation here on Earth, the Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere, Mars doesn't have those. And so you'd have to live underground in pressurized tunnels, somehow keep all of that toxic dust out of your habitat. Musk wants to terraform Mars. We don't have the technology to do that, the schemes that he has proposed for doing it. Absolutely do not work. He's been told that over and over again. He just denies it.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Musk wants us to go to Mars as a backup for humanity in case an asteroid hits Earth. Mars gets hit by more asteroids than Earth does because it's closer to the asteroid belt. It's a terrible place, right? The radiation is too high. The gravity is too low. There's no air and the dirt is made of poison. And that's not even like a full list of all of the problems with Mars. You know, if you were on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you would die almost instantly. You would asphyxiate as the saliva on your tongue boiled off because the air pressure is less than 1% that of Earth and there's no oxygen. And if you were in a spacesuit hanging out on the surface of Mars, you would still die, like assuming you had all the food and water you needed. You'd still die in a few years because the radiation levels.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. It's like taking that leave me alone idea and mixing it with this belief that science fiction is a roadmap and that you really can use technology to solve all of these problems and then transcend all of”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, basically there's this belief that perpetual growth is possible and that through perpetual growth, you know, they will be able to solve all problems with technology and transcend all limits. And those three things, the growth, the reduction of all problems to technological problems, including like political problems, social problems, problems that are sort of inherently non-technical, still supposedly could be solved with technology. And I'm still waiting for somebody to explain to me, you know, okay, how do you solve the crisis in the Middle East with technology? That's not.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Science fiction is definitely where the ideas come from, right? It's where Musk gets the idea that we need to go to Mars, it's where Bezos gets the idea that we need to go out into space. It's where Altman gets the idea that superintelligent AI is inevitable.”
2025-07-14 · On with Kara Swisher · Science vs. Silicon Valley with Adam Becker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT