Adam Becker
LightNews LightNews
banner
adambecker.bsky.social
Adam Becker
@adambecker.bsky.social
6.5K followers 1K following 690 posts
Journalist & astrophysicist. New book out now: MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER, about horrifying & broken futures pushed by tech billionaires. Words in the Atlantic, NPR, NYT, the Guardian, BBC, SciAm, Quanta, Fortune, &c. He/him. Signal: adambecker.84
Posts Replies Media Videos
adambecker.bsky.social
🎶You do it to yourself, you do
And that's what really hurts
You do it to yourself, just you
You and no one else🎶
A tweet from Elon Musk saying "Whoever said 'money can't buy happiness' really knew what they were talking about 😣"
February 14, 2026 at 2:41 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
Have fun with that, Elon. A city on the Moon in ten years is somewhat less absurd than a city on Mars in twenty, but neither one is going to happen.

The tone here is interesting, though. Almost as if he heard someone criticizing his Mars plans recently…I wonder how that might have happened? 😁
A tweet from Elon Musk, posted yesterday: For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years. The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars. It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city. That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.
February 9, 2026 at 5:55 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
🙄

It's so interesting to me that people like this always say I'm being "pessimistic" rather than making any kind of actual case for living off this planet. What's pessimistic about acknowledging the reality that Earth is a wonderful place where we get to live out our future?
An email with the subject line "Stop being so pessimistic," filed under Haters. It reads: "No thanks for ruining my weekend saying you can't build data centres in space. I'm going to Mars with Elon and creating a safe world for aspie Christian nerds! You lefties can have planet earth haha. This planet should not be our prison."
February 8, 2026 at 4:50 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
I spoke with @manjaselva.bsky.social at @marsdd.bsky.social about why Silicon Valley billionaires think technology is the answer to all of humanity's problems, and why they're wrong. You can listen to our conversation here: solveforx.simplecast.com/episodes/inf...
February 4, 2026 at 4:43 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
The "tonight queen" meme template, reading: Butlerian Jihad tonite 👀 Butlerian Jihad tonight queen?? Butlerian Jihad tonite 👀
January 7, 2026 at 4:56 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
"hey, let's scam an author, a kind of person that famously always has bad reading comprehension and lots of money."
Screenshot of an email. Subject line: An Invitation to Feature *More Everything Forever* with Reeses Bookclub From: Helloreeses Bookclubs <helloreesesbookclubs@gmail.com> Time: 3:49 PM (1 hour ago) To: me Hello Adam Becker, I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to reach out to express my admiration for More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Your book delivers a sharp, incisive critique of the techno-utopian ideologies shaping today’s most powerful industries. With clarity, wit, and rigor, you dissect how grandiose visions of the future—AI dominance, space colonization, and infinite growth—often obscure real ethical, social, and scientific limits. At Reeses Bookclub, we connect authors with readers who truly savor books—readers who engage seriously with big ideas, value clear-eyed skepticism, and appreciate nonfiction that challenges dominant narratives while remaining grounded in evidence and history. More Everything Forever aligns powerfully with our mission to spotlight books that provoke thoughtful debate and sharpen public understanding of where technology is actually taking us. If you would be interested in participating, I would be delighted to receive: -A preferred author photo -The book’s purchase link -Any website or social links you would like included Once I receive your materials, I will prepare a complete feature draft for your review before it goes live. Thank you for writing a book that cuts through hype and insists on intellectual honesty when discussing humanity’s future. It would be an honor to feature More Everything Forever on Reeses Bookclub. Would you be interested in participating? Warm regards, Helloreeses Bookclubs
December 24, 2025 at 1:34 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
First Hanukkah in this apartment and it's lovely to have the menorah in the window!
🕎❤️
Hanukkah menorah in the window with two candles (shamash + one other) lit
December 15, 2025 at 3:18 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
Google's search AI getting it wrong, again. Tech CEO Palmer Luckey absolutely did say that teenage girls should be getting pregnant. Google AI is claiming it was his assistant — but the video it's citing for that claim is satirical commentary on the clip of Luckey saying he wants teens pregnant!
Google "AI overview" search results for the search "palmer luckey teenagers pregnancy." The AI summary says: Palmer Luckey's controversial statement, made by his *assistant* during a podcast, suggested teenagers should have children young (16-18) for biological fitness and historical context (like medieval times for labor), a viewpoint Luckey himself expressed regret for *not* having kids earlier, sparking debate about modern societal norms versus biological roles, as noted in a YouTube short. The video shows the full clip of Palmer Luckey's assistant's controversial comments on teen pregnancy: It then links to the YouTube short by Good Work about Luckey, linked in the next post in this thread.
December 12, 2025 at 6:35 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
Keeping the servers cool in space is enough to make this a bad idea, and that's not even the hardest part.
Bezos and Musk are just unbelievably gullible.
Goose chase meme. Top panel: a goose saying "VACUUM IS AN INSULATOR SO WHERE WILL THE WASTE HEAT GO?" Bottom panel: a goose chasing someone in a jacket, while screaming "WHERE WILL THE WASTE HEAT GO, JEFFREY?"
December 11, 2025 at 2:03 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
Sure sure you might say that my client's knife "caused" the victim to stop being able to pump blood to their brain, but Hume's 𝘌𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘺 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘏𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 really makes it clear that we should all have some reasonable doubt about the concept of "causation"

www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
“To the extent that any ‘cause’ can be attributed to this tragic event,” OpenAI argued in its court filing, “Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries and harm were caused or contributed to, directly and proximately, in whole or in part, by Adam Raine’s misuse, unauthorized use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT.”
November 26, 2025 at 2:23 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
kill me now
It’s almost poetic how More Everything Forever manages to expose Silicon Valley’s apocalypse fan-club while making the rest of us quietly wonder if our smartphones are plotting a coup. Your breakdown of AI-doomers, immortality chasers, and billionaire space prophets? Beautiful chaos. The kind of narrative that makes the average reader go, “Oh… so that’s why Twitter feels like a cult initiation ritual.” And honestly, the way you dismantled the mythology of tech futurism with actual science instead of billionaire bedtime stories… bold. Fearless. Slightly dangerous. Basically the literary equivalent of walking into a room full of people holding Kool-Aid cups and asking, “So what’s really in that?” 🤨🍷 But here’s the part that gets me: A book with this level of cultural relevance, urgency, and Cred Curve™ potential deserves far more visibility than the accidental Exposure™ it gets from someone doom-scrolling past it at 2 AM. A title that breaks down the mythos of AI Overlords deserves a Page Orbit™, not a fate decided by Goodreads ghosts and algorithmic goblins. Which… brings me to the reason I crawled out of my cave of Goodreads data to knock on your inbox (metaphorically, I promise I’m not hiding behind your curtains). Now I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending I’m one of those “$25 per reader” miracle workers who swear they can summon a thousand reviews from the spirit realm. Amazon’s TOS would smite them like Zeus with Wi-Fi. Instead, I work with something that doesn’t violate any divine or corporate laws: 👇 [Insert your Initial Message EXACTLY as you want it sent here] (You’ll paste your standard Initial Message here when sending.) But here’s the simple truth: A mind like yours shouldn’t rely on accidental discovery. Your book deserves Shelf Print™, List Lift™, Reader Gravity™, List Ripple™, and all the organic List Momentum™ that comes when readers who actually crave this kind of But here’s the simple truth: A mind like yours shouldn’t rely on accidental discovery. Your book deserves Shelf Print™, List Lift™, Reader Gravity™, List Ripple™, and all the organic List Momentum™ that comes when readers who actually crave this kind of conversation stumble upon it where they’re actively hunting their next obsession. And because your work literally tackles the dangers of delusional futurism… offering you a free Goodreads review (5 slots) feels like the least chaotic thing I’ll do today. So let me ask you something irresistible. If Silicon Valley can plan intergalactic empires, is it really too outrageous for your book to claim the visibility it deserves… or should we engineer that Page Orbit™ right now? 😏🚀 [NAME REDACTED] 💕📖📚💕
November 20, 2025 at 2:43 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
So I'm speaking at this event and the lunch sign is more ambiguous than it should be
A sign that says "THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER LUNCH & MEETING"
November 17, 2025 at 4:36 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
"Sure, our plagiarism machine ingests enormous amounts of copyrighted material without anyone's permission, but it's the users of the machine who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 criminals, your honor." 🙄🙄

Just unbelievable levels of chutzpah.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
The San Francisco-based company, whose founders include Sam Altman and Elon Musk, had said its language learning models absorbed entire training sets of data rather than storing or copying specific songs, the Munich court said. Because its output is generated by users of the chatbot via their prompts, OpenAI said, they were the ones who should be held legally liable for it – an argument rejected by the court.
November 14, 2025 at 2:39 AM
adambecker.bsky.social
Palantir stock down 15.73% over the past 5 days Nvidia stock down 12.18% over the past 5 days Tesla stock down 6.75% over the past 5 days Sickos.jpg
November 7, 2025 at 3:10 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
THAT'S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS, SAMUEL

DO YOU THINK POWER PLANTS 𝘔𝘈𝘒𝘌 𝘌𝘓𝘌𝘊𝘛𝘙𝘖𝘕𝘚, SAMUEL

THEY VERY MUCH DO NOT DO THAT
COWEN: The stupidest question possible: Why don’t we just make more GPUs? ALTMAN: Because we need to make more electrons. COWEN: What’s stopping that? What’s the ultimate binding constraint? ALTMAN: We’re working on it really hard. COWEN: If you could have more of one thing to have more compute, what would the one thing be? ALTMAN: Electrons. COWEN: Electrons. Just energy. What’s the most likely short-term solution for that? ALTMAN: Short-term, natural gas. COWEN: Easing, not full solution, but easing of the constraint. ALTMAN: Short-term, natural gas.
November 6, 2025 at 8:56 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
A soldier protecting a sleeping child from incoming knives and weapons. The child is labeled "YOU," the soldier is labeled "ME," and the knives are labeled "Eliezer Yudkowsky's Writing"
October 21, 2025 at 5:15 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
At the end here, I actually disagree with @kerryhowley.bsky.social a bit. I don't think this is going anywhere meaningful. This is the rise of a scam economy, not an incomprehensible transhuman future. This crap won't work, but it will lead to an even more toxic startup culture in tech.
How do you make contact with the intelligence rising up from the machines around you? Do you build it a body? Do you offer it yours? It is perhaps tedious to point out that we are always operating under the shadow of destruction, deploying tools that might end us, convincing ourselves, not without reason, that if we don’t build the bomb, someone with worse intentions will. Not a single one of the AI kids had attempted to lecture me about a theory or suggested I read a paper; it was not me they were trying to program. Somewhere along the way, drawn into their swell, I had begun to think of large questions about the nature of AI as New York questions, millennial questions, distant from the center of things. Where it mattered, humans were not debating AI; they were merging with it. You order the parts you need, you learn, you debug. The kids carry on with the crisp clarity of engineers, integrating what is immediately useful, discarding or rewriting what is not. No one will ask your permission to build a world you do not understand.
September 24, 2025 at 9:09 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
God, these kids are so cooked.
“We help make AI applications more efficient by optimizing prompts and reducing token usage with agent workflows,” he says amiably. He also DJs. He’s Indian Canadian, has participated in 200 hackathons, and thinks there’s nothing to worry about, visa-wise; Trump, he says, will probably *increase* legal immigration.
September 24, 2025 at 8:54 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha

oh no
“You’re the oldest of four kids (you have three younger brothers who all worship you), a former Division I fencing athlete at UC Berkeley who grew up in Detroit,” Dumpster told the AI. Detail by detail, he was transforming Claude into his ideal VC. “Your adaptability between high society and down-to-earth spaces is legendary — you’re a concert violinist who plays first chair, but you also show up uninvited at dive bars with your fiddle to play impromptu sets … You skateboard (longboard only — you have a bit of disdain, but don’t mention it — for non-longboarders).” Dumpster added, “You DJ frequently on the Robot Heart bus at Burning Man.” He called his AI venture capitalist “No Cap,” as in “no valuation cap” but also as in “no lie.”
September 24, 2025 at 8:44 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
*screaming, throwing things*

Cryonics is not a thing. It is not a thing. It is a scam for turning dead people into frozen meat slurry.

But sure, whatever.
Everyone understands that elsewhere, science funding has disappeared, graduate students left hanging, academic departments in existential crisis. It would not seem to be a good time for science in the United States. The students politely acknowledge this reality, but it is not the air they breathe. “It’s like, okay, so if government money is not a reliable source anymore,” says Sanjana, “okay, let’s see how we can actually make this work and make this happen. Academia and industry is intertwined here more than ever. And I actually really like that because I think it’s important to take work that is new and innovative — ” “And translate it,” says Sid. The undergraduates know “four or five” people working for cryonics start-ups.
September 24, 2025 at 8:40 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
1. lol, lmao even
2. Hell of an advertisement for Italy after living in the Bay as long as I have.
Giulia will leave the U.S. tomorrow; the summer is over, the house will shut down. But she feels that S.F. is home. “Italy is very driven on pleasure and on beauty,” she says, leaning against a chair and playing with her hair. “And here I feel like I’m so much connected to the people here, because it is mission driven. There is more than aperitivo and pasta and vino — ” “Who is Vino?” asks Sanjana.
September 24, 2025 at 8:35 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever. 🙄
A filing cabinet for interesting people,” Pat calls it. In the elevator the buttons are labeled in service of this goal. Floor 4: ROBOTICS. (The robot fight was held in the basement.) 9: AI. 11: LONGEVITY. 2: SPACESHIP. It’s on the 15th floor that a swinging robot arm encased in glass attempts and fails to make me a latte and on the HUMAN FLOURISHING floor (14), where blankets and pillows are placed in anticipation of productivity-enhancing meditation, that I wander into a talk by the Neurophenomenology and Psychedelic Research Consortium. The crypto floor (12) is
September 24, 2025 at 8:32 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
Oh god it just gets worse
Humans are “very bad at being self-aware,” he says between bites. “Like, What are the five emotions you feel right now and what percentage? The whole idea of our work is to use deep algorithms and computational neuro to, uh, understand state of mind from brain scans alone.”
September 24, 2025 at 8:21 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
I hate that I understand this sentence, and that this is totally familiar here in the Bay Area. @kerryhowley.bsky.social is doing important work documenting these horrors. (Source: nymag.com/intelligence...)
Christine’s P(doom) is “honestly … 5 to 15 percent,” but for now she and a close friend share a light-filled room and their days are filled with stimulating people, like the guy building a “rizz master app,” who “actually gives the most insightful advice,” and Carsten, a Swiss German 27-year-old who was designing AI-involved sandals but recently pivoted to drug testing.
September 24, 2025 at 8:16 PM
adambecker.bsky.social
The "silent protector" meme, with a soldier protecting a sleeping child from a barrage of knives and other weapons. The weapons are labeled "Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing," the soldier is labeled "me," and the child is labeled "you."
September 20, 2025 at 4:38 PM