[Tech billionaires] will keep looking for ways to extend their control over the world unless they are curtailed. Their dreams are dreams of endless capitalism of the most brutal sort, because they know that such a system would allow them to win still more money and power. This is another reason it’s difficult to imagine a future other than the ones they promote: as the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism….

This is why the tech billionaires tell us their futures are inevitable: to keep us from remembering that no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. They want to establish a permanent plutocracy, a tyranny of the lucky, through their machines. They are too credulous and short-sighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now….

Excerpt from More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, published by Hachette Book Group, New York, USA, 2025, pp. 288-289.