The targets in his new book More Everything Forever are the names we’ve come to associate with the great leaps forward in the march of what Becker calls the religion of technological salvation: Sam Altman, genius progenitor of artificial intelligence; Elon Musk, technocrat extraordinaire and SpaceX honcho; space-colonization guru and Amazon godhead Jeff Bezos; Mark Andreesen, billionaire software engineer, venture capital investor, and avowed technofascist; and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to so-called “longtermist” think tanks that provide the ideological ground for the religion of tech salvation. He also aims his guns at Ray Kurzweil, grand wizard of software engineering, inventor, planner of the immortalizing digitalization of human affairs called “the Singularity;” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer and researcher who attributes fantastical (but as yet non-existent) powers to artificial general intelligence, or AGI; and the crew of longtermist tech apologists at Oxford University on whom Moskovitz and other Valley barons have lavished funding.

Musk and Bezos’s “power fantasies” of space colonization and visions of “AI immortality” will usher in a future of unlimited wealth and resources, beyond the confines of Earth, the solar system, the galaxy. Ray Kurzweil’s dream of the Singularity involves the uploading of minds into digital simulations, so we can live forever. All of this, Becker says, is a divorced-from-reality sales pitch driven by the primordial fear of death. Overarching it is what’s called “engineer’s disease”: the mental derangement of believing that engineering can solve anything and everything.

In Becker’s telling, for example, Kurzweil is an unhinged fantasist manically attempting to resurrect his dead father into an artificial intelligence “Dad Bot.” Like a Christian apocalyptic prophet, the high priest of the church of tech salvation promises the Singularity to arrive as early as 2045, when AI computing becomes so fast and so powerful it will transform society, Earth, and the universe itself to overcome “cosmological forces,” including time and aging, the laws of physics and entropy. All existence would become one giant computer spinning forever out across the vastness of space. “The objective is to tame the universe, to make it into a padded playground,” writes Becker. “Nobody would age, nobody would get sick, and – above all else – nobody’s dad would die.”