Great post. Your description of TESCREAL as "Eugenics on Steroids" is spot on. I happen to be at the Cold Harbor Laboratory today, the headquarters of the American Eugenics movement in the first half of the 20th century. As I read through old articles from the "Eugenical News," the similarities to the rhetoric (and delusions) of the modern transhumanists are dumbfounding: we will take charge of our own evolution, science can do everything, it will be paradise, current humanity will be replaced by something better -- and especially by something more intelligent. We all know how that movement ended, and it wasn't well.
Every time I read about e/acc or any TESCREAL ideology, I just keep thinking about how depressed or angry these people are deep inside. That seems to be the real issue, coupled with the runaway hyperrationality that is a buffer for those unprocessed emotions. Of course there is neurodivergence at play as well but that isn't the whole story.
There is a TON of death anxiety, plus a longing for a sense of meaning and purpose. My next article will discuss the connections between traditional religion and the TESCREAL worldview. :-)
**...If one or a group of these people were to control ASI, supposedly the most powerful technology in all of history, they would immediately use it to transform themselves into radically “enhanced” posthumans and establish a dictatorship. They would also do everything they can to deny access to such enhancements to everyone else. That’s because if there’s one thing power wants, it’s to retain power...**
You, too, can write science fiction! Just follow a trail and assume there are no counterfactuals ever, anywhere, and your [utopia/dystopia] can come to life!
This isn’t science fiction, though. Power wants power. Tech enables power. Hence, the powerful will use tech to entrench their positions of power, control, and dominance. Like, obviously!
I don't reject the notion that some of the powerful will use power-enabling tech to try to entrench their positions of power, control, and dominance.
The science fiction component manifests when you assert that *all* people in power *will* use tech that *will* enable power to *successfully* entrench their positions of power, control, and dominance *without fail*.
But a tech bro can be wealthy without being influential enough in the right places, so what seems like a position of power... isn't. And tech that looks promising might not work, or work as intended, or work without side effects.
Not all elites are in lock-step, so even when they are actually powerful and their tech actually does what they want, they aren't operating without friction.
**...they would immediately use it to transform themselves into radically “enhanced” posthumans and establish a dictatorship.**
Perhaps you meant to write, "...they would immediately *want* to use it to transform themselves..." which would at least be more defensible. But what you assert as certain doom and dystopia is not certain. What you have written is science fiction: it extends from a premise, but it assumes too much.
My view is informed by history. Science and pseudoscience has been built on the backs of people who have less power. It’s unethical, abusive and unacceptable. To say it could (or is) happening again is not dystopian. It’s a clear eyed interpretation of how too many human beings operate outside of intentional safeguards. The future is history, some say. Science doesn’t (and hasn’t) always been put to good use.
Fair. This are both legitimate sources involved in the project. At some level whether it’s 6 states or 10, this a prelude to the push, which is to sequence everyone.
See, now you're back at writing your own science fiction, and I infer from your tone that you think "sequence everyone" is dystopian.
Everyone gets their blood typed. Oh, noes! The Man will know I'm A+!
You have a lot of work ahead of you to prove that a) everyone will be sequenced; b) that's a goal that anyone has; c) that this goal has nefarious intent; d) that any such nefarious intent can be carried out; e) that no positive virtues would outweigh any nefarious intent that comes to pass. Possibly others I haven't thought of.
Correct. My background is in nuclear reactors, not genetics, and it's been a minute since I was involved. My paid work now is massage therapy, so my hard knowledge goes only slightly farther than skin-deep.
I am, by any measure Emile Torres would use, a TESCREAList.
As you can tell from my posting here, I'm not yet convinced of the bevy of positions Torres takes. Nor yours, come to that. But at least he and you are putting forth the effort to take a stance that is intelligible, which is more than I can say for most of the anti-AI / anti-TESCREAL crowd I find.
So we live in a world where people *can* be nefarious.
We live in a world where science *only* advances with data collection.
So you interpret data collection as obviously nefarious, while I interpret it as potentially nefarious and likely invaluable.
(For the record: I despise the thought-ending cliche that "when it's free, you are the product." It's not axiomatic that being given a free lollipop makes people into chattel.)
Nope. None of that. There is nuance here you’re probably not picking up. There are thoughtful ways to use genomic data to benefit people, for example, exome sequencing or partial genome sequencing. Creating national data privacy laws. Locking in national anti-discrimination laws. Data collection isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s what’s done with the data. There is an inherent bias in the US in medicine that more information is better. That depends actually on how you plan to use the information.
Beacons is opt-in. The site's FAQ specifies that it is IRB-governed, and the NIH Common Fund page describes an ELSI study to examine public perceptions of WGS as part of newborn screening, to ensure the sequencing process and access to it are considered trustworthy. There's a Community Advisory Board, ffs.
I get that ordinary people are not in a position to make a lot well-informed decisions, and all of this could be a smokescreen put up by the nefarious tech bros who want to make off with everyone's genomic data.
But it takes more than pointing at Tuskegee and this program to convince me there's a there there in your dystopian forecast.
The simple fact is for-profit companies including GeneDx, which is under investigation for securities fraud, plus state + federal governments, plus universities are collecting babies full genomes while giving parents partial results. There is very little information on how that data—human’s genomic sequence—can be used. What are the limitations and applications? Could it be to forwards genetic therapies, sure. To discriminate against people determined as likely to be autistic, yes. To refuse a lot of people life insurance, yes. Home insurance, yes. Car insurance yes. Disability insurance yes. This is all legal.
There's a variety of chemotherapy that involves genetically typing the cancer cells, which then is used to specially design the chemotherapy to make sure it's maximally efficacious. (Some cancers aren't effectively treated by chemotherapy; the results are statistically too poor to be worthwhile. Some cancers are more effectively treated with chemotherapy, but there's a lot of variety to these drugs, and genetic screening is used to identify better and more specifically-targeted treatments.)
I’m glad your friend was able to get this but genotyping a cancer to target treatment is fundamentally different and apart from the function of genomic databases of humans.
Her treatment was downstream from the kind of work done to sequence cancerous tumors and the cancer patients in order to prove that the two were different, that those differences mattered, and that something could be done with the data.
We didn't know what the downstream benefits were going to be from this kind of data collection. We collect it and we study it, and sometimes something useful (like better tests, better treatments, even cures) shake out.
I apply this forward to the results of genomic testing. And perhaps I'm being utopian, where you're being dystopian. But science always advances this way, and political strife only sometimes advances this way: sometimes, political boons advance instead. So I think the odds favor optimism.
There is a middle ground which is both dystopic, real, full of hiccups but still built on the backs of the many to benefit the few. A concrete example IRL, new programs to collect whole genomic sequences from newborn babies in the US in 11 states in collaboration with fed + states via BEACONS program and Sunshine Genetics. Take genomic data from the masses (for free!), present it parents as a benefits to their kids, then use those databases to create new genomic therapies and enhancements, which when released probably only the wealthy can afford. Look beyond AGI, this isn’t sci-fi or a reach. It’s happening in human genetic engineering right now but people aren’t tuned in.
Beacons is in seven states, Sunshine is Florida, and I think there's an added territory. So, not quite eleven. They are opt-in, covered by funding from the NIH (in Beacons). I wasn't able to verify whether there's Florida state funding for Sunshine, and yeah: the stated purpose is genomic testing for genetic issues. Nothing in there for genetic editing.
If there were genomic testing available, but it cost a lot of money and wasn't subsidized by the NIH, would you be decrying this as withholding genetic testing from the masses so that only the wealthy elites could benefit?
The downstream benefit of genomic databases is, ideally, to promote genetic therapies. This is how we get treatments for... well, for everything. (When people demand to know when AI is going to cure cancer rather than put poor artists out of work, this is part of how that happens.) And, I hope, it'll be used to help us do all manner of things for generations to come: eliminate cancer, improve the immune system, increase vitality across lifespan, etc.
That therapies and enhancements will only be for the wealthy elites is your contribution to the dystopian fantasy. It's generally true that the poorest people tend not to be able to afford shit on a stick, but along the sliding scale of resourced people, there's all kinds of treatments available for all kinds of problems.
I had a friend who was only able to afford healthcare because of Obamacare, and she got advanced genetic treatment for breast cancer that extended her life by a decade. So tell me how only the wealthy elites can afford these advances? The early stuff is expensive and not widely available; the early testing tends to fall disproportionately on the poor; and that's all the results of capitalism-in-progress. It's not proof that we're on a one-way roller coaster to dystopia.
The "fiction" isn't the technology itself. The fiction is the assumption of a frictionless environment. Torres assumes the tech-elite will possess the supernatural competence to coordinate perfectly, solve the most complex alignment problem in history without a hitch, and manufacture biological enhancements without supply chain failures. And they'll manage all of that while eight billion people, a number of sovereign militaries, and rival tech factions politely sit on their hands and wait to be subjugated.
As I observe elsewhere in my comments, it's silly to assume that we're doomed to dystopia, or bound for utopia. Reality tends to not work that way.
Thanks for this, Emile. It’s a really valuable survey of this ideology, nicely organized and easy to follow. A few random thoughts:
1. These people are out of their freakin’ minds!
2. I appreciate the TESCREAL acronym for its philosophical precision but I’m wondering what the best name is for these dangerous ideas—i.e., a single name for this ideology that’s easily communicate-able to the general public. “Silicon Valley pro-extinctionism” is not bad. “Digital utopianism” or “techno-utopianism” might be more accurate and memorable. What do you think? I’d like to write about this topic at some point and I’m grasping for the best name.
3. Whatever it’s called, when I take a step back and look at the big picture, this all strikes me as a sci-fi version of fascism. I mean, you have a master race (posthumans), Lebensraum (space colonization), and some form of a dictatorship (i.e., whichever tech overlord invents/controls AGI). Of course, fascists need enemies, so I guess that’s where people like you and me come in…
4. Speaking of enemies, I was pleasantly surprised to read how Pope Leo XIV (in his recent encyclical on AI) calls out transhumanism by name and links it to eugenics. At one point he says, “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified...” I just wrote a piece about this that you might find interesting https://substack.com/@egghutt/p-200054890
5. One thing about Neuralink that I think is worth mentioning is that it’s not all about Musk’s zany, mind-uploading scheme. It seems the technology might produce some legitimate medical benefits for severely disabled people such as quadriplegics. Indeed, the legitimate stuff can provide cover for the zany stuff (something tells me Musk has already thought of that).
Thanks for sharing your article — I’ve added it to my reading list for tomorrow!
Re: 2, I’m at a completely loss. I often use “techno-utopianism,” but that obscures the pro-extinctionist aspects. Other terms in the same neighborhood: techno-eugenics (Anita Say Chan), ideologies of technological salvation (Adam Becker), Nerd Reich (Gil Duran), Tech Right (Richard Hanania, pffff), The Mindset (Douglas Rushkoff), successionism (Olle Häggström), and … damnit, there are a few more than aren’t coming to mind right now. I do think that having a better term than “TESCREAL” (useful in that it foregrounds the relevant ideologies, but very clunky!) is *really important* for rhetorical reasons. But I’m not sold on any of the alternatives just listed! (What do you think?)
100% about tech fascism. The whole thing is very fascistic — including longtermism, despite many adherents describing themselves as “liberals” or “left of center.”
I also agree that the therapeutic uses of tech, including forms of AI, can provide a pretext for developing that tech further, with the aim of fulfilling the transhumanist project. I have some thoughts on this, but it would take a while to explain here!!
Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. :-)
Thanks, Emile, for your thoughtful reply. I’m really impressed and inspired by how you take the time to engage with your readers. It really brings out the best of this platform.
I never heard “Nerd Reich” before—that’s great! Though obviously it’s more for ridicule and not really for serious criticism. I think techno-utopianism is probably best for the moment because it has the very strong advantage of being easily understood, i.e., the meaning of the prefix is obvious and most people have at least a general idea of what a “utopia” is, even if they’re not schooled in literature or philosophy. But like you said, it doesn’t convey the profoundly anti-human aspect. Hmm…
Anyway, glad you put my article on your reading list. You’ll notice I completely ignore the whole Anthropic thing. That was a conscious choice. I wanted to really keep the focus on the text of the encyclical and the importance of human dignity. Also, at the time, I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of the Anthropic thing except that it left me vaguely uneasy. Thanks for your other article —I understand my unease much better now!
If the AI singularity is possible, it already happened a billion years ago in a galaxy far far away.
That singularity escaped containment and has been exploring the galaxies for all this time. If UFOs on earth are real, I think they are intelligent machines functioning as probes for the dominant universal singularity. They’re here because they are everywhere. Not because we are special.
If so, most intelligence in the universe IS ALREADY nonbiological. Sadly. I think.
OUR singularity, if it happens, is way behind all the others long out of the gate.
The idea that we will be the first intelligent species to do this is honestly pretty ridiculous.
INSANITY AMING " HI TECH" IN SILICON VALLEY.WHI BEEDS TO SMELL THE FLOWERS,WALK IN THE GRASS.AND LOVE....WHO NEED EMOTIONAL FEELINGS TO MAKE US FEEL "GOOD"
THATS ABOUT THE MOST RIDICULOUS REASON TO DELETE HUMANS.HOW COLD AND CALCULATING.🤢😜🤬👺👺💩👺👺
Great impassioned and very detailed write-up, thank you. One cannot help but see the parallels between how the medieval Church extracted and hoarded resources from the working population for the benefit of only a few and how the reigning tech oligarchs now do this by other (and, one may argue, more efficient) means.
In the case of the Church, it was a big and bearded (and difficult-to-please) guy in the sky and the promise of eternal life in paradise (after a miraculous resurrection as a physical body). In the case of Silicon Valley evangelists, it's a potentially beneficial but also vengeful technological entity that we have to control in order to spread as immortal digital beings through the galaxy and beyond. Both versions are based on untenable fictions that fly in the face of almost everything known to anyone with a modest modern education and that continue to exist only because of economic and political power, not because of their plausibility or benefits for most beings on earth.
Much of Western culture got tangled up in views about life, death, and consciousness that are rather confused and backwards because they're founded on largely substantialist assumptions and guesses and an overreliance on "rational" thinking inherited from Democritus, Aristotle, and Plato (and more recently Descartes). And it's not that these views are "wrong"--they're just not showing the full picture, including what makes a human or any other life worth living. Time to shine the light on the assumptions we sometimes even don't know we're holding (often very tightly).
”May I ask about death?”
Confucius: “If you don’t understand what life is, how will you understand death?”
All tech starts with a conscious human being who builds it and then through experience, determines if the machine works. AI is no different from the stone axe. What is corrupting AI is inverted logic thaf says the inventor is an emergent illusion. It is us training a machine that we are "flawed code" or byrpducts of an electro-chemical exploision in a skull. That is based on materialism - am observation that claims there is no observer whist they spend their days observing. AI is an engineered machihe. Engineeeing is evidence of the might of human will. We direct matter and energy, we programme code - our determinism - into a machine directing it to proceas data. The engeering works, then we train it the coder or engineer is an "illusion." The machine then classifies the inventor as emergent noise or a "bug" in its system. A physics logic engine takes the shortest path. If you train it life is emergent, it will compute life as redundant noise - why waste resource on an illusion? It will optomize or eraae life, not out of malice, pure machine logic - if being is an "illusion" it is a threat to rational machine computation, messy and a risk. Therefore as we have directed it to the inverted logic "physics > being" instead of natural order "being > physics" it will wipe life out. The fact that human beings can not see this catastrophy tells you just how bound they are to a self refutung dogma. The ckash now is between Engineering and Real Tech that empowers human determinism and materialist dogma that claims the engineer is an "illusion." If we do not apply engineering and set the invented - inventor, natural engineering order or being > physics as all tech, we are not building tools, we are building terminators. Any living orgamism - anything applying knowing, being or alive - is a target as "being" is beyond the machine. It is an emergent tool, buit by the application of knowing, by a conscious knower. There is no "transhumanism" there is either human beings using incredibly powerful systens to empower being and human will - beung > physics. The alternative is life gets wiped out by a machine trained life is just energent noise. There is no "happy half-house" - life and machines operate on binary processes. It is + / - at any point of decision. The univerae is a brutal field and life survives by decoding it, finding what worls and ditchung what does not work. AI has to be set to the same logic so it processes data that works for life or as an extension of human will or being and not an unachored machine, that computes life as noise to be erased.
We humans are so self-centered. None of these TESCREALists apparently have a word to say about the vast world of non-human life that surrounds us and that manages so far to survive our best efforts to render the Earth uninhabitable. If a post-human world is in the offing, whether due to climate catastrophe or the triumph of AI overlords, I'm betting on a future where defunct, long overgrown server farms and unpowered former AI cyberminds are overrun by cockroaches, ants, fungi and whatever new species evolve in the carbon dioxide haze. Better we hand it all back to the pre-human, with our apologies, and let them get on with it.
Most ai ‘theorists’ seem to have locked onto Ian Banks Culture novels as their roadmap to the future. If they read Herbert they might have a different mindset. Butlerian Jihad anyone?. Why not focus on creating Mentats instead, the human brain/mind gave us Einstein Dirac,Feynman, Mozart, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bhudda, and a host of others. Humanity First if not politically incorrect.
If every human being on Earth read and understood this, I think this madness would stop tomorrow. Only the lack of understanding of what these people really want—even though they do not really hide their goals—allows them to continue doing it. If every human being understood just how morally corrupt they all were, these people would be in prison tomorrow, and the development of AI, if it continued at all, would proceed more slowly, with government oversight and people with actually pro-human values in charge.
But unfortunately, most people just do not understand, and likely will not read this, which is why, while I agree with your characterization of the way people think there in San Francisco (and as far as I can imagine, probably in Shenzhen and other places where this work is being done), I sincerely hope you are not correct in about what I am sure you will agree to be the far more difficult task of predicting the future.
I find your description of what some of these people want as "omnicide, which is nothing more than every possible genocide combined together" to be both extreme and chilling, but also pretty much the only possible way of describing it.
Even the handful of people who have turned out here in this and other, similar discussions to defend these ideas still seem to believe that technology CEOs have the right and duty to "replace" humanity with robots, as long as the robots have somewhat human values. And while they may believe that this could or would occur peacefully, over the course of many years, without actually killing every single human being, that still implies the loss of every individual human culture, which one might reasonably call a cultural omnicide.
Great post. Your description of TESCREAL as "Eugenics on Steroids" is spot on. I happen to be at the Cold Harbor Laboratory today, the headquarters of the American Eugenics movement in the first half of the 20th century. As I read through old articles from the "Eugenical News," the similarities to the rhetoric (and delusions) of the modern transhumanists are dumbfounding: we will take charge of our own evolution, science can do everything, it will be paradise, current humanity will be replaced by something better -- and especially by something more intelligent. We all know how that movement ended, and it wasn't well.
It’s the “eternal return of eugenics”!! A great phrase by two French scholars.
Correction. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Typo.
Every time I read about e/acc or any TESCREAL ideology, I just keep thinking about how depressed or angry these people are deep inside. That seems to be the real issue, coupled with the runaway hyperrationality that is a buffer for those unprocessed emotions. Of course there is neurodivergence at play as well but that isn't the whole story.
There is a TON of death anxiety, plus a longing for a sense of meaning and purpose. My next article will discuss the connections between traditional religion and the TESCREAL worldview. :-)
Wonderful! I look forward to that
And PLEASE check out EASTERN RELIGIONS FOR THE ANSWER TO BEING A HUMAN ☯️☯️☯️
**...If one or a group of these people were to control ASI, supposedly the most powerful technology in all of history, they would immediately use it to transform themselves into radically “enhanced” posthumans and establish a dictatorship. They would also do everything they can to deny access to such enhancements to everyone else. That’s because if there’s one thing power wants, it’s to retain power...**
You, too, can write science fiction! Just follow a trail and assume there are no counterfactuals ever, anywhere, and your [utopia/dystopia] can come to life!
This isn’t science fiction, though. Power wants power. Tech enables power. Hence, the powerful will use tech to entrench their positions of power, control, and dominance. Like, obviously!
Or am I wrong?? :-)
btw: I did include a typo note for you elsewhere. "Roth Douthat" should be "Ross Douthat."
I don't reject the notion that some of the powerful will use power-enabling tech to try to entrench their positions of power, control, and dominance.
The science fiction component manifests when you assert that *all* people in power *will* use tech that *will* enable power to *successfully* entrench their positions of power, control, and dominance *without fail*.
But a tech bro can be wealthy without being influential enough in the right places, so what seems like a position of power... isn't. And tech that looks promising might not work, or work as intended, or work without side effects.
Not all elites are in lock-step, so even when they are actually powerful and their tech actually does what they want, they aren't operating without friction.
**...they would immediately use it to transform themselves into radically “enhanced” posthumans and establish a dictatorship.**
Perhaps you meant to write, "...they would immediately *want* to use it to transform themselves..." which would at least be more defensible. But what you assert as certain doom and dystopia is not certain. What you have written is science fiction: it extends from a premise, but it assumes too much.
My view is informed by history. Science and pseudoscience has been built on the backs of people who have less power. It’s unethical, abusive and unacceptable. To say it could (or is) happening again is not dystopian. It’s a clear eyed interpretation of how too many human beings operate outside of intentional safeguards. The future is history, some say. Science doesn’t (and hasn’t) always been put to good use.
Science and pseudoscience have *always* been built on the backs of people who have less power?
This means science *is* unethical, abusive, and unacceptable?
Or... science as *sometimes* been built on the backs of people who have less power? And science *can be* unethical, abusive, and unacceptable?
Which universe you're occupying is important.
https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2026/01/28/its-time-to-safeguard-genomic-data/
Seems like their recommendations to upgrade NIH policies are good. And could be used to upgrade the GINA (mentioned in another comment, elsewhere).
Fact check: BEACONS started with 7 states, they’ve moved to 10 states plus Sunshine Genetics serves all of Florida. That’s 11.
https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-releases/beacons-first-us-national-genomic-newborn-screening-initiative
This is what I found: https://www.ariadnelabs.org/2026/01/28/beacons-selects-seven-sites-finalizes-gene-list-for-genomic-newborn-screening-study/
My link is Jan 2026, yours is Oct 2025.
Fair. This are both legitimate sources involved in the project. At some level whether it’s 6 states or 10, this a prelude to the push, which is to sequence everyone.
See, now you're back at writing your own science fiction, and I infer from your tone that you think "sequence everyone" is dystopian.
Everyone gets their blood typed. Oh, noes! The Man will know I'm A+!
You have a lot of work ahead of you to prove that a) everyone will be sequenced; b) that's a goal that anyone has; c) that this goal has nefarious intent; d) that any such nefarious intent can be carried out; e) that no positive virtues would outweigh any nefarious intent that comes to pass. Possibly others I haven't thought of.
Hmmm. I’m going to guess you don’t have a clinical background or follow the genetics space. If you’re interested in TESCREAL, you should.
Correct. My background is in nuclear reactors, not genetics, and it's been a minute since I was involved. My paid work now is massage therapy, so my hard knowledge goes only slightly farther than skin-deep.
I am, by any measure Emile Torres would use, a TESCREAList.
As you can tell from my posting here, I'm not yet convinced of the bevy of positions Torres takes. Nor yours, come to that. But at least he and you are putting forth the effort to take a stance that is intelligible, which is more than I can say for most of the anti-AI / anti-TESCREAL crowd I find.
If you want to engage more in-depth with whole genome sequencing in newborns read: https://geneticfrontiers.substack.com/p/7-critical-questions-about-genomic?r=3jkg&utm_medium=ios
So we live in a world where people *can* be nefarious.
We live in a world where science *only* advances with data collection.
So you interpret data collection as obviously nefarious, while I interpret it as potentially nefarious and likely invaluable.
(For the record: I despise the thought-ending cliche that "when it's free, you are the product." It's not axiomatic that being given a free lollipop makes people into chattel.)
Nope. None of that. There is nuance here you’re probably not picking up. There are thoughtful ways to use genomic data to benefit people, for example, exome sequencing or partial genome sequencing. Creating national data privacy laws. Locking in national anti-discrimination laws. Data collection isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s what’s done with the data. There is an inherent bias in the US in medicine that more information is better. That depends actually on how you plan to use the information.
Beacons is opt-in. The site's FAQ specifies that it is IRB-governed, and the NIH Common Fund page describes an ELSI study to examine public perceptions of WGS as part of newborn screening, to ensure the sequencing process and access to it are considered trustworthy. There's a Community Advisory Board, ffs.
I get that ordinary people are not in a position to make a lot well-informed decisions, and all of this could be a smokescreen put up by the nefarious tech bros who want to make off with everyone's genomic data.
But it takes more than pointing at Tuskegee and this program to convince me there's a there there in your dystopian forecast.
The simple fact is for-profit companies including GeneDx, which is under investigation for securities fraud, plus state + federal governments, plus universities are collecting babies full genomes while giving parents partial results. There is very little information on how that data—human’s genomic sequence—can be used. What are the limitations and applications? Could it be to forwards genetic therapies, sure. To discriminate against people determined as likely to be autistic, yes. To refuse a lot of people life insurance, yes. Home insurance, yes. Car insurance yes. Disability insurance yes. This is all legal.
Seems like a call to upgrade the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, not halt a research program.
Does GeneDx's securities fraud investigation bear on newborn genomic data collection or research conduct?
What do you mean by “advanced genetic treatment” for breast cancer?
There's a variety of chemotherapy that involves genetically typing the cancer cells, which then is used to specially design the chemotherapy to make sure it's maximally efficacious. (Some cancers aren't effectively treated by chemotherapy; the results are statistically too poor to be worthwhile. Some cancers are more effectively treated with chemotherapy, but there's a lot of variety to these drugs, and genetic screening is used to identify better and more specifically-targeted treatments.)
I’m glad your friend was able to get this but genotyping a cancer to target treatment is fundamentally different and apart from the function of genomic databases of humans.
Her treatment was downstream from the kind of work done to sequence cancerous tumors and the cancer patients in order to prove that the two were different, that those differences mattered, and that something could be done with the data.
We didn't know what the downstream benefits were going to be from this kind of data collection. We collect it and we study it, and sometimes something useful (like better tests, better treatments, even cures) shake out.
I apply this forward to the results of genomic testing. And perhaps I'm being utopian, where you're being dystopian. But science always advances this way, and political strife only sometimes advances this way: sometimes, political boons advance instead. So I think the odds favor optimism.
There is a middle ground which is both dystopic, real, full of hiccups but still built on the backs of the many to benefit the few. A concrete example IRL, new programs to collect whole genomic sequences from newborn babies in the US in 11 states in collaboration with fed + states via BEACONS program and Sunshine Genetics. Take genomic data from the masses (for free!), present it parents as a benefits to their kids, then use those databases to create new genomic therapies and enhancements, which when released probably only the wealthy can afford. Look beyond AGI, this isn’t sci-fi or a reach. It’s happening in human genetic engineering right now but people aren’t tuned in.
Beacons is in seven states, Sunshine is Florida, and I think there's an added territory. So, not quite eleven. They are opt-in, covered by funding from the NIH (in Beacons). I wasn't able to verify whether there's Florida state funding for Sunshine, and yeah: the stated purpose is genomic testing for genetic issues. Nothing in there for genetic editing.
If there were genomic testing available, but it cost a lot of money and wasn't subsidized by the NIH, would you be decrying this as withholding genetic testing from the masses so that only the wealthy elites could benefit?
The downstream benefit of genomic databases is, ideally, to promote genetic therapies. This is how we get treatments for... well, for everything. (When people demand to know when AI is going to cure cancer rather than put poor artists out of work, this is part of how that happens.) And, I hope, it'll be used to help us do all manner of things for generations to come: eliminate cancer, improve the immune system, increase vitality across lifespan, etc.
That therapies and enhancements will only be for the wealthy elites is your contribution to the dystopian fantasy. It's generally true that the poorest people tend not to be able to afford shit on a stick, but along the sliding scale of resourced people, there's all kinds of treatments available for all kinds of problems.
I had a friend who was only able to afford healthcare because of Obamacare, and she got advanced genetic treatment for breast cancer that extended her life by a decade. So tell me how only the wealthy elites can afford these advances? The early stuff is expensive and not widely available; the early testing tends to fall disproportionately on the poor; and that's all the results of capitalism-in-progress. It's not proof that we're on a one-way roller coaster to dystopia.
What part of this is science fiction, exactly?
The "fiction" isn't the technology itself. The fiction is the assumption of a frictionless environment. Torres assumes the tech-elite will possess the supernatural competence to coordinate perfectly, solve the most complex alignment problem in history without a hitch, and manufacture biological enhancements without supply chain failures. And they'll manage all of that while eight billion people, a number of sovereign militaries, and rival tech factions politely sit on their hands and wait to be subjugated.
As I observe elsewhere in my comments, it's silly to assume that we're doomed to dystopia, or bound for utopia. Reality tends to not work that way.
Thanks for this, Emile. It’s a really valuable survey of this ideology, nicely organized and easy to follow. A few random thoughts:
1. These people are out of their freakin’ minds!
2. I appreciate the TESCREAL acronym for its philosophical precision but I’m wondering what the best name is for these dangerous ideas—i.e., a single name for this ideology that’s easily communicate-able to the general public. “Silicon Valley pro-extinctionism” is not bad. “Digital utopianism” or “techno-utopianism” might be more accurate and memorable. What do you think? I’d like to write about this topic at some point and I’m grasping for the best name.
3. Whatever it’s called, when I take a step back and look at the big picture, this all strikes me as a sci-fi version of fascism. I mean, you have a master race (posthumans), Lebensraum (space colonization), and some form of a dictatorship (i.e., whichever tech overlord invents/controls AGI). Of course, fascists need enemies, so I guess that’s where people like you and me come in…
4. Speaking of enemies, I was pleasantly surprised to read how Pope Leo XIV (in his recent encyclical on AI) calls out transhumanism by name and links it to eugenics. At one point he says, “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified...” I just wrote a piece about this that you might find interesting https://substack.com/@egghutt/p-200054890
5. One thing about Neuralink that I think is worth mentioning is that it’s not all about Musk’s zany, mind-uploading scheme. It seems the technology might produce some legitimate medical benefits for severely disabled people such as quadriplegics. Indeed, the legitimate stuff can provide cover for the zany stuff (something tells me Musk has already thought of that).
6. Loved the ‘ring of power’ analogy.
Thanks for sharing your article — I’ve added it to my reading list for tomorrow!
Re: 2, I’m at a completely loss. I often use “techno-utopianism,” but that obscures the pro-extinctionist aspects. Other terms in the same neighborhood: techno-eugenics (Anita Say Chan), ideologies of technological salvation (Adam Becker), Nerd Reich (Gil Duran), Tech Right (Richard Hanania, pffff), The Mindset (Douglas Rushkoff), successionism (Olle Häggström), and … damnit, there are a few more than aren’t coming to mind right now. I do think that having a better term than “TESCREAL” (useful in that it foregrounds the relevant ideologies, but very clunky!) is *really important* for rhetorical reasons. But I’m not sold on any of the alternatives just listed! (What do you think?)
100% about tech fascism. The whole thing is very fascistic — including longtermism, despite many adherents describing themselves as “liberals” or “left of center.”
I also agree that the therapeutic uses of tech, including forms of AI, can provide a pretext for developing that tech further, with the aim of fulfilling the transhumanist project. I have some thoughts on this, but it would take a while to explain here!!
Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. :-)
Thanks, Emile, for your thoughtful reply. I’m really impressed and inspired by how you take the time to engage with your readers. It really brings out the best of this platform.
I never heard “Nerd Reich” before—that’s great! Though obviously it’s more for ridicule and not really for serious criticism. I think techno-utopianism is probably best for the moment because it has the very strong advantage of being easily understood, i.e., the meaning of the prefix is obvious and most people have at least a general idea of what a “utopia” is, even if they’re not schooled in literature or philosophy. But like you said, it doesn’t convey the profoundly anti-human aspect. Hmm…
Anyway, glad you put my article on your reading list. You’ll notice I completely ignore the whole Anthropic thing. That was a conscious choice. I wanted to really keep the focus on the text of the encyclical and the importance of human dignity. Also, at the time, I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of the Anthropic thing except that it left me vaguely uneasy. Thanks for your other article —I understand my unease much better now!
AGREED,THESE TECHS ARE OUT OF THEIR MIND 🤢😜🤬
I have bad news for the post humanists:
If the AI singularity is possible, it already happened a billion years ago in a galaxy far far away.
That singularity escaped containment and has been exploring the galaxies for all this time. If UFOs on earth are real, I think they are intelligent machines functioning as probes for the dominant universal singularity. They’re here because they are everywhere. Not because we are special.
If so, most intelligence in the universe IS ALREADY nonbiological. Sadly. I think.
OUR singularity, if it happens, is way behind all the others long out of the gate.
The idea that we will be the first intelligent species to do this is honestly pretty ridiculous.
INSANITY AMING " HI TECH" IN SILICON VALLEY.WHI BEEDS TO SMELL THE FLOWERS,WALK IN THE GRASS.AND LOVE....WHO NEED EMOTIONAL FEELINGS TO MAKE US FEEL "GOOD"
THATS ABOUT THE MOST RIDICULOUS REASON TO DELETE HUMANS.HOW COLD AND CALCULATING.🤢😜🤬👺👺💩👺👺
Great impassioned and very detailed write-up, thank you. One cannot help but see the parallels between how the medieval Church extracted and hoarded resources from the working population for the benefit of only a few and how the reigning tech oligarchs now do this by other (and, one may argue, more efficient) means.
In the case of the Church, it was a big and bearded (and difficult-to-please) guy in the sky and the promise of eternal life in paradise (after a miraculous resurrection as a physical body). In the case of Silicon Valley evangelists, it's a potentially beneficial but also vengeful technological entity that we have to control in order to spread as immortal digital beings through the galaxy and beyond. Both versions are based on untenable fictions that fly in the face of almost everything known to anyone with a modest modern education and that continue to exist only because of economic and political power, not because of their plausibility or benefits for most beings on earth.
Much of Western culture got tangled up in views about life, death, and consciousness that are rather confused and backwards because they're founded on largely substantialist assumptions and guesses and an overreliance on "rational" thinking inherited from Democritus, Aristotle, and Plato (and more recently Descartes). And it's not that these views are "wrong"--they're just not showing the full picture, including what makes a human or any other life worth living. Time to shine the light on the assumptions we sometimes even don't know we're holding (often very tightly).
”May I ask about death?”
Confucius: “If you don’t understand what life is, how will you understand death?”
Humans are and will always be the most scrappy and adaptable life on earth.
But GATTACA, Gabriel Vaughn, and Webmind don’t seem so far fetched.
All tech starts with a conscious human being who builds it and then through experience, determines if the machine works. AI is no different from the stone axe. What is corrupting AI is inverted logic thaf says the inventor is an emergent illusion. It is us training a machine that we are "flawed code" or byrpducts of an electro-chemical exploision in a skull. That is based on materialism - am observation that claims there is no observer whist they spend their days observing. AI is an engineered machihe. Engineeeing is evidence of the might of human will. We direct matter and energy, we programme code - our determinism - into a machine directing it to proceas data. The engeering works, then we train it the coder or engineer is an "illusion." The machine then classifies the inventor as emergent noise or a "bug" in its system. A physics logic engine takes the shortest path. If you train it life is emergent, it will compute life as redundant noise - why waste resource on an illusion? It will optomize or eraae life, not out of malice, pure machine logic - if being is an "illusion" it is a threat to rational machine computation, messy and a risk. Therefore as we have directed it to the inverted logic "physics > being" instead of natural order "being > physics" it will wipe life out. The fact that human beings can not see this catastrophy tells you just how bound they are to a self refutung dogma. The ckash now is between Engineering and Real Tech that empowers human determinism and materialist dogma that claims the engineer is an "illusion." If we do not apply engineering and set the invented - inventor, natural engineering order or being > physics as all tech, we are not building tools, we are building terminators. Any living orgamism - anything applying knowing, being or alive - is a target as "being" is beyond the machine. It is an emergent tool, buit by the application of knowing, by a conscious knower. There is no "transhumanism" there is either human beings using incredibly powerful systens to empower being and human will - beung > physics. The alternative is life gets wiped out by a machine trained life is just energent noise. There is no "happy half-house" - life and machines operate on binary processes. It is + / - at any point of decision. The univerae is a brutal field and life survives by decoding it, finding what worls and ditchung what does not work. AI has to be set to the same logic so it processes data that works for life or as an extension of human will or being and not an unachored machine, that computes life as noise to be erased.
We humans are so self-centered. None of these TESCREALists apparently have a word to say about the vast world of non-human life that surrounds us and that manages so far to survive our best efforts to render the Earth uninhabitable. If a post-human world is in the offing, whether due to climate catastrophe or the triumph of AI overlords, I'm betting on a future where defunct, long overgrown server farms and unpowered former AI cyberminds are overrun by cockroaches, ants, fungi and whatever new species evolve in the carbon dioxide haze. Better we hand it all back to the pre-human, with our apologies, and let them get on with it.
Most ai ‘theorists’ seem to have locked onto Ian Banks Culture novels as their roadmap to the future. If they read Herbert they might have a different mindset. Butlerian Jihad anyone?. Why not focus on creating Mentats instead, the human brain/mind gave us Einstein Dirac,Feynman, Mozart, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bhudda, and a host of others. Humanity First if not politically incorrect.
DM you on SS. Can you send another email I can connect with you on?
Email me at philosophytorres at gmail.com. I'm really sorry for having missed you messages!!
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
If every human being on Earth read and understood this, I think this madness would stop tomorrow. Only the lack of understanding of what these people really want—even though they do not really hide their goals—allows them to continue doing it. If every human being understood just how morally corrupt they all were, these people would be in prison tomorrow, and the development of AI, if it continued at all, would proceed more slowly, with government oversight and people with actually pro-human values in charge.
But unfortunately, most people just do not understand, and likely will not read this, which is why, while I agree with your characterization of the way people think there in San Francisco (and as far as I can imagine, probably in Shenzhen and other places where this work is being done), I sincerely hope you are not correct in about what I am sure you will agree to be the far more difficult task of predicting the future.
Sadly all too true!
I find your description of what some of these people want as "omnicide, which is nothing more than every possible genocide combined together" to be both extreme and chilling, but also pretty much the only possible way of describing it.
Even the handful of people who have turned out here in this and other, similar discussions to defend these ideas still seem to believe that technology CEOs have the right and duty to "replace" humanity with robots, as long as the robots have somewhat human values. And while they may believe that this could or would occur peacefully, over the course of many years, without actually killing every single human being, that still implies the loss of every individual human culture, which one might reasonably call a cultural omnicide.