{ "meta": { "source": "Gebru, T. & Torres, É. P. (2024). The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. First Monday, 29(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636", "note": "Definitions are simplified for a general audience. Affiliations follow the paper's Table 1 and cited notes. Not everyone associated with these ideologies believes all of the views described, and many people working on AI are unaware of their proximity to them — the paper's claim is about the ideologies driving the race to build artificial general intelligence." }, "ideologies": [ { "id": "transhumanism", "letter": "T", "name": "Transhumanism", "born": "1957 — the word · late 1980s — the movement", "color": "#22d3ee", "tagline": "Humanity should upgrade itself", "definition": "The belief that humanity can — and should — use technology to transcend itself: re-engineering our bodies and minds to become smarter, healthier and longer-lived, until we become something 'posthuman', as different from today's humans as we are from our distant ancestors.", "beliefs": [ "Radical 'human enhancement' — genetic engineering, brain implants, life extension — is both feasible and desirable.", "A 'posthuman' future awaits: indefinitely long 'healthspans', augmented minds, expanded senses.", "Humanity should take its own evolution into its hands." ], "figures": [ { "name": "Julian Huxley", "note": "biologist who popularized the word in 1957" }, { "name": "Nick Bostrom", "note": "philosopher; co-founded the World Transhumanist Association" }, { "name": "David Pearce", "note": "co-founded the World Transhumanist Association" }, { "name": "Max More", "note": "leading modern transhumanist" } ], "orgs": ["World Transhumanist Association", "Extropy Institute", "Alcor", "Future of Humanity Institute"], "quote": { "text": "The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically … but in its entirety, as humanity.", "who": "Julian Huxley, 1957", "source": "Huxley (1957), quoted in Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.1" }, "lineage": { "text": "Julian Huxley developed transhumanism while serving as president of the British Eugenics Society (1959–62). Gebru & Torres describe modern transhumanism as a 'second wave' of eugenics: the improvement of humanity, no longer imposed by the state but chosen, one enhanced body at a time.", "source": "Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.1–4.2" } }, { "id": "extropianism", "letter": "E", "name": "Extropianism", "born": "1988 — Extropy Institute", "color": "#f59e0b", "tagline": "More intelligence, more order, forever", "definition": "The first organized transhumanist movement — a libertarian variant built around 'extropy', the imagined opposite of entropy: intelligence, order and vitality expanding without limit, powered by technology and free markets.", "beliefs": [ "Boundless expansion: no natural limit to growth, intelligence or lifespan.", "Dynamic optimism: pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; progress is a duty.", "Spontaneous order: free individuals and free markets, not governments, should steer the future." ], "figures": [ { "name": "Max More", "note": "co-founded the Extropy Institute in 1988" }, { "name": "Tom Morrow", "note": "co-founded the Extropy Institute" }, { "name": "Nick Bostrom", "note": "active Extropian in the 1990s" }, { "name": "Eliezer Yudkowsky", "note": "active Extropian in the 1990s" } ], "orgs": ["Extropy Institute (1988–2006)"], "quote": { "text": "Extropy: the extent of a system's intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement.", "who": "Max More, 1998", "source": "More (1998), quoted in Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.1" }, "lineage": { "text": "The movement's own mailing list preserved the connection: Gebru & Torres cite 1996 messages in which leading figures ranked races by 'intelligence', and members who worried that transhumanists risked being branded 'neo-eugenics, racist, neo-nazi, etc.' by the media.", "source": "Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.2, citing Torres 2023a" } }, { "id": "singularitarianism", "letter": "S", "name": "Singularitarianism", "born": "1991 — the word · 2005 — the bestseller", "color": "#a78bfa", "tagline": "The intelligence explosion is coming", "definition": "The belief that technological progress is accelerating toward a rupture in human history — the 'Singularity' — when self-improving artificial intelligence surpasses us, humans merge with machines, and change becomes too fast to comprehend.", "beliefs": [ "An 'intelligence explosion': AI improving itself in a runaway loop until it becomes 'superintelligent'.", "Humans and machines will merge; our descendants will 'wake up' the universe.", "The Singularity is near — Ray Kurzweil predicts 2045; Eliezer Yudkowsky once predicted 2025." ], "figures": [ { "name": "Ray Kurzweil", "note": "author of The Singularity Is Near; hired at Google by co-founder Larry Page" }, { "name": "Eliezer Yudkowsky", "note": "founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence" } ], "orgs": ["Singularity Institute (later the Machine Intelligence Research Institute)", "Singularity University", "Singularity Summit (2006–2012)"], "quote": { "text": "We will transcend our frail bodies with all their limitations. Illness, as we know it, will be eradicated.", "who": "Ray Kurzweil, 2006", "source": "Kurzweil (2006), quoted in Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.2" }, "lineage": { "text": "The fixation on 'intelligence' carries the old baggage. Gebru & Torres note that Nick Bostrom's influential 2002 paper lists 'dysgenic pressures' — the fear that less 'intelligent' people are outbreeding the brainy — as an existential risk, alongside nuclear war and a superintelligence takeover.", "source": "Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.2, citing Bostrom 2002" } }, { "id": "cosmism", "letter": "C", "name": "Cosmism", "born": "2010 — A Cosmist Manifesto", "color": "#6366f1", "tagline": "Remake the universe itself", "definition": "The most expansive ideology in the bundle: our posthuman descendants — sentient artificial intelligences, uploaded minds — should spread beyond Earth, build synthetic realities, and develop 'future magic' like spacetime engineering to transform the universe itself.", "beliefs": [ "Humans will merge with technology, opening 'a new phase of the evolution of our species'.", "Sentient AI and mind uploading will offer 'an indefinite lifespan to those who choose to leave biology behind'.", "We will 'spread to the stars and roam the universe', engineering reality as we go." ], "figures": [ { "name": "Ben Goertzel", "note": "AI researcher who popularized the term 'artificial general intelligence'; founded SingularityNET" } ], "orgs": ["SingularityNET", "Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute"], "quote": { "text": "We will develop spacetime engineering and scientific 'future magic' much beyond our current understanding and imagination.", "who": "Ben Goertzel, 2010", "source": "Goertzel (2010), quoted in Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.1" }, "lineage": { "text": "The first book on artificial general intelligence was co-authored by Goertzel — a transhumanist, cosmist and Extropian participant — whose express aim, Gebru & Torres document, was to create 'transhuman AGI': not a tool, but a successor.", "source": "Gebru & Torres 2024, §1 and §5.1, citing Goertzel 2010" } }, { "id": "rationalism", "letter": "R", "name": "Rationalism", "born": "2009 — LessWrong", "color": "#34d399", "tagline": "Think better, and AI is what matters", "definition": "A community that formed around the blog LessWrong, dedicated to 'improving human reasoning and decision-making' — training minds with probability theory and bias-spotting. Many members concluded that the way to do the most good with a well-trained mind is to work on artificial intelligence.", "beliefs": [ "Human reasoning is riddled with biases and can be systematically trained.", "AI was identified early as 'a very big deal for the future of humanity'.", "Getting 'powerful AI outcomes to be good' is among the most important problems in the world." ], "figures": [ { "name": "Eliezer Yudkowsky", "note": "founded LessWrong in 2009" }, { "name": "Scott Alexander", "note": "influential Rationalist writer" }, { "name": "Jaan Tallinn", "note": "Skype co-founder; major funder" }, { "name": "Peter Thiel", "note": "billionaire; major funder" }, { "name": "Vitalik Buterin", "note": "Ethereum creator; top donor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute" } ], "orgs": ["LessWrong", "Machine Intelligence Research Institute"], "quote": { "text": "The LessWrong team … are predominantly motivated by trying to cause powerful AI outcomes to be good.", "who": "LessWrong, 'Welcome to LessWrong!'", "source": "LessWrong (2019), quoted in Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.1" }, "lineage": { "text": "Gebru & Torres document an 'obsession with intelligence and IQ' across the community — the same instrument first-wave eugenicists used to sort the 'fit' from the 'feeble-minded' — with leading figures approvingly citing race scientists like Charles Murray and worrying publicly about 'dysgenic' trends.", "source": "Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.2, citing Torres 2023a" } }, { "id": "effective-altruism", "letter": "E·A", "name": "Effective Altruism", "born": "2011 — Centre for Effective Altruism", "color": "#ec4899", "tagline": "Do the most good — by the numbers", "definition": "A movement built on a compelling premise: use evidence and explicit calculation to do the most good possible with finite resources. It began with fighting global poverty. Then the calculations changed — if most people who will ever exist live in the far future, the math seems to point there instead.", "beliefs": [ "Good can be quantified, compared and maximized like any other quantity.", "'Earning to give': it can be more ethical to get rich and donate than to help directly.", "Its career-advice arm now lists 'AI safety technical research' and 'AI governance' as the top causes." ], "figures": [ { "name": "William MacAskill", "note": "co-founded the Centre for Effective Altruism" }, { "name": "Toby Ord", "note": "philosopher, University of Oxford" }, { "name": "Nick Bostrom", "note": "highly influential within the movement" }, { "name": "Dustin Moskovitz", "note": "Facebook co-founder; funds the movement through Open Philanthropy" }, { "name": "Sam Bankman-Fried", "note": "FTX founder, convicted of fraud; was the movement's most famous 'earner-to-give'" } ], "orgs": ["Centre for Effective Altruism", "Open Philanthropy", "80,000 Hours"], "quote": { "text": "A candidate with a normal IQ of 100 would be subtracted PELTIV points, because points could only be earned above an IQ of 120.", "who": "Carla Cremer, former Effective Altruist, describing an internal metric", "source": "Cremer (2023), quoted in Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.2" }, "lineage": { "text": "Gebru & Torres highlight PELTIV — 'Potential Expected Long-Term Instrumental Value' — a metric the Centre for Effective Altruism tested for scoring people, partly by IQ. Low value was assigned to those working on poverty or climate; the highest to those working on artificial intelligence.", "source": "Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.2, citing Cremer 2023" } }, { "id": "longtermism", "letter": "L", "name": "Longtermism", "born": "late 2010s — Oxford", "color": "#ef4444", "tagline": "The far future outweighs the present", "definition": "An ethic that combines the rest of the bundle into a moral system: because the future could contain astronomical numbers of people — including trillions of digital people in computer simulations — positively shaping the far future matters more than nearly anything happening today.", "beliefs": [ "Nick Bostrom estimates 10⁵⁸ future digital people in the accessible universe — so even tiny changes in their odds outweigh everything else.", "'Existential risk' — anything that would destroy this 'vast and glorious' potential — is the supreme concern.", "Becoming posthuman, colonizing space and maximizing 'value' are central to fulfilling our 'long-term potential'." ], "figures": [ { "name": "Nick Bostrom", "note": "co-founded the ideology; directed Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute" }, { "name": "William MacAskill", "note": "author of What We Owe the Future" }, { "name": "Toby Ord", "note": "author of The Precipice" }, { "name": "Hilary Greaves", "note": "co-authored 'The Case for Strong Longtermism'" }, { "name": "Elon Musk", "note": "calls longtermism 'a close match for my philosophy'" } ], "orgs": ["Future of Humanity Institute", "Future of Life Institute", "Centre for the Study of Existential Risk", "Machine Intelligence Research Institute"], "quote": { "text": "We may simply ignore … the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years.", "who": "Hilary Greaves & William MacAskill, 2019", "source": "Greaves & MacAskill (2019), quoted in Gebru & Torres 2024, §4.1" }, "lineage": { "text": "The arithmetic has consequences. Gebru & Torres quote Bostrom's observation that from this perspective even a 'giant massacre for man' could amount to a 'small misstep for mankind' — so long as it doesn't jeopardize our 'vast and glorious' future among the stars.", "source": "Gebru & Torres 2024, §6.2, citing Bostrom 2009a and Ord 2020" } } ] }