More Everything Forever vs The Master and His Emissary

I’m currently reading Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever (2025), a physicist’s tour of the ideologies of Silicon Valley: the Singularity, AI doom, effective altruism, longtermism, Mars settlement. Years ago I read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009), a psychiatrist’s account of the divided brain and how the two hemispheres construct different worlds - in his title metaphor, the right hemisphere is the Master and the left is his emissary.

I’m seeing eerie parallels between the two books, which is interesting given that they were written about 16 years apart and from very different perspectives, and Becker doesn’t reference McGilchrist.

This note just captures a few commonalities that stood out to me.

McGilchrist ends his book with a thought experiment: “Let us try to imagine what the world would look like if the left hemisphere became so far dominant” (Conclusion). I’ll use this to find corresponding ideas in Becker’s book.

1. Death as loss of control Link to heading

McGilchrist: for the left hemisphere, “death is the ultimate challenge to its sense of control” (Conclusion).

Becker: “The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever.” (opening pages). And: “Lurking underneath all of the dreams and desires and resentment of the tech billionaires lies a fear of death, the final loss of control” (ch. 5).

McGilchrist predicted that death would become taboo, while Becker’s subjects talk about it endlessly; I guess these are two coping strategies for a problem that no one will ever be able to solve.

2. The body as machine, the person as software Link to heading

McGilchrist: to the left hemisphere the body is a thing among things, “devitalised, a ‘corpse’” (ch. 2), and in its world “The body would come to be viewed as a machine” (Conclusion).

Ray Kurzweil, quoted by Becker: “A person is a mind file. A person is a software program, a very profound one, and we have no backup” (ch. 2).

Becker’s rebuttal, which draws on embodied cognition research: “We are not just our brains. We are our bodies, situated in our environment” (ch. 2). This is pretty much McGilchrist’s central positive thesis, that we are embodied. McGilchrist attributes this embodied perspective to the right hemisphere.

3. Numbers replace people; either/or replaces degree Link to heading

McGilchrist predicted that numbers “would come to replace the response to individuals”, that “Morality would come to be judged at best on the basis of utilitarian calculation”, and that “‘Either/or’ would tend to be substituted for matters of degree” (Conclusion).

Longtermism is this, arithmetically literal. Becker: “This is how the longtermists, ultimately, are forced to see people: as numbers” (ch. 4). Toby Ord, in his own words: “There must therefore be an amount of happiness so valuable that it is more valuable than avoiding a million people being in extreme agony” (quoted in ch. 4).

And the either/or: Becker describes the rationalist worldview as “eternal paradise or extinction, with no third option” (ch. 3).

4. Certainty conjured rather than earned Link to heading

McGilchrist’s left hemisphere “needs certainty and needs to be right”, and “prefers to make something up rather than admit to not knowing” (ch. 2); the medical stroke literature he quotes calls the isolated left hemisphere “crippled by naively optimistic forecasting of outcomes”.

Becker asks Ord where his famous one-in-six probability of existential catastrophe this century comes from: “I don’t have a simple recipe for creating my number… I guess it would ultimately be like, live my experiences or something” (ch. 4). (To be fair, Ord volunteers that the estimate “is meant to be pretty rough”, but he will still defend it.)

Kurzweil, meanwhile, rates his own forecasting accuracy at 86 percent (ch. 2).

5. The past dismissed for the engineered future Link to heading

McGilchrist: “Cultural history and tradition, and what can be learnt from the past, would be confidently dismissed in preparation for the systematic society of the future, put together by human will” (Conclusion).

Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of Google’s self-driving-car project, quoted by Becker: “I don’t even know why we study history… In technology, all that matters is tomorrow” (ch. 6).

6. The hall of mirrors Link to heading

McGilchrist describes the left hemisphere’s world as “trapped in a hall of mirrors: it only discovers more of what it already knows” (ch. 2).

Becker describes the endpoint of the whole programme, minds uploaded into a simulated paradise, as “a high-definition metaverse that you can’t actually leave” (ch. 2), everything fitted to “the single Procrustean solution of code and compute”. A self-enclosed world of representations.

Where they don’t line up Link to heading

I wouldn’t expect a perfect correspondence, and here’s a few places where they diverge:

• McGilchrist’s left-hemisphere world comes with a vast expansion of bureaucracy; Becker’s subjects loathe bureaucracy and dream of escaping regulation entirely.
• McGilchrist predicted disenchantment - “Religion would seem to be mere fantasy” (Conclusion) - while Becker documents the opposite: an accidental machine religion, transhumanism as “an outgrowth of Christian eschatology” (ch. 6).
• Becker is a scientific materialist, and McGilchrist files scientific materialism itself under left-hemisphere products. I think they would probably argue with each other?
• Becker, on humanity’s biggest problems: “They’re social problems, requiring social solutions. … Nothing is coming to save us” (ch. 6). McGilchrist would say that we need to recover the kind of attention we pay to the world.

Conclusion Link to heading

McGilchrist closes his book, in 2009, with: “This is what the world would look like if the emissary betrayed the Master. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that his goal is within sight.”

I feel like this is where the world is headed, and - at least in McGilchrist’s terms - the AI/LLM boom will only accelerate it.

Related: Becker discusses the book on the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast: Every Exponential Ends - Silicon Valley Forgot - Adam Becker.