TESCREALism
T=Transhumanism
E= Extropianism
S= Singularitarianism
C = Cosmism
R = Rationalism
EA = Effective Altruism
L = Longtermism
Émile Torres, a philosopher and historian who has focused recently on existential threats, developed what they refer to as a ‘bundle’ (we might call it a memeplex) that claims to link the above series of -isms into a sort-of singular force that has been embraced by many of the super-wealthy and influential in the tech world. It is the influence of these tropes on the super-rich and influential that, in Torres’ view, makes them very dangerous.
In an article for Truthdig, Torres writes, “At the heart of TESCREALism is a 'techno-utopian' vision of the future. It anticipates a time when advanced technologies enable humanity to accomplish things like: producing radical abundance, reengineering ourselves, becoming immortal, colonizing the universe and creating a sprawling ‘post-human’ civilization among the stars full of trillions and trillions of people. The most straightforward way to realize this utopia is by building superintelligent AGI."
In the same piece, Torres gets into the wilder projections that I suspect even many techno-enthusiastic transhumanism-oriented Mindplex readers would find fantastic (rooted in brilliant minds taking their fantasies for reality), Torres theorem leans heavily on Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom’s views, writing that he "argues that if there’s a mere 1% chance of 10^52 digital lifetimes existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.’ In other words, if you mitigate existential risk by this minuscule amount, then you’ve done the moral equivalent of saving billions and billions of existing human lives.”
As he explained in his conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, Torres identifies TESCREALism as a philosophical ‘bundle’ that, in a sense, trivializes the lives and sufferings of currently existing humans by finding a greater importance in the possibly trillions of posthumans that could exist in physical and/or virtual space in the future — ‘people’ having experiences that can be valued beyond our imagining. Some of those quoted tend to use statistics to value experience, which is about as alienated from experience as you can get.
I can assume you all know about transhumanism and the singularity. If you’re here, you probably know about Ben Goertzel’s project to build AGI. But are most of you familiar with the eccentricities and extremities that have attached themselves to Rationalism (as defined by LessWrong), Effective Altruism and Longtermism?
In the interview below, I mainly ask Torres to thrash out how real all this is. Do a lot of people buy into the whole philosophical bundle? My own attitude, even as a longtime associate of transhumanism, has always been kind of “are you for real?” when it comes to people taking their shit too seriously, particularly when they’ve deluded themselves into thinking they’re rational.
In a follow up poll, I will ask Mindplex readers and veterans of the transhumanist culture to weigh in on the TESCREAL bundle.
RU Sirius: In your book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation, you went from writing about existential threats as a historical phenomenon to various transhumanist tropes. As I was reading it, it was like suddenly we had gone from science and geology into science fiction. Then I was wondering if there was science fiction in older times. (I suppose there was the Bible and other myths.) How did you get into this?
Émile Torres: Back in the mid-2000s, I encountered transhumanism for the first time. And I was initially really critical of it. The second paper I ever published was a critique of transhumanism. But then, certain considerations led me to believe that transhumanism is a defensible position, and I became a sort of transhumanist.
And one of the main considerations was that the development of these technologies is inevitable. So if you're going to be against transhumanism, then maybe you need to be against the development of certain person-engineering technologies. But since they're inevitable, there's no point in opposing it just to hold back the tide. So the best thing to do is to join the transhumanists and do what you can to ensure that that project is realized in the most optimal way.
The notion of existential risk was tightly bound up with transhumanism from the start: existential risk was initially defined as ‘anything that might prevent us from creating a posthuman civilization’.
RUS: I'm sure there must have been mention of existential risk before that in various intellectual circles… like related to nuclear war and so forth?
ÉT: There was definitely talk of extinction and global catastrophe. But what's new about this idea of existential risk — right there in the definition — is the idea of desirable future development.
There were people, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, arguing that one reason human extinction would be bad is that it would foreclose the realization of all future progress, future happiness, and so on. But that lost-potential argument was never formalized. The focus was really on going extinct. Everybody on earth is going to die. You and me are going to die. Our families will die. That was the foreground. Lost potential was not prominent.
The notion of existential risk, I think, flipped that around and foregrounded the lost potential: the argument became that the worst aspect of human extinction is the lost potential. It's not the 8 billion people who are going to die. That’s very bad, but the badness of all the lost potential is orders of magnitude larger.
RUS: I may be a bit out of touch with the transhumanist culture… to me this is a bizarre iteration of transhumanism. It’s not something I bumped into much when I was interacting with that world in 2007-2010 as editor of h+ magazine. At that time, you’d mostly hear about life extension and other enhancements. Or immortality, if you wanted to get really far out. The notion of uploaded mind children was around, but as something very speculative. But the idea of sacrificing just about everybody to imaginary future people as you’ve discussed in your writings about TESCREAL did not seem to be much in circulation back then.
ÉT: That sounds right to me. I think this notion of potential is really central to longtermism. The initial definition comes from 2002, with Bostrom discussing the transition dynamics from our human to a posthuman civilization, foregrounding the potential of becoming posthuman. This was also bound up with this notion that the creation of posthumanity isn't just valuable because it's a good way for cosmic history to unfold. But also, you and I might benefit, right?
So why is creating a posthuman civilization important (according to Bostrom and people like him)? Well, because if it happens within my lifetime, maybe I get to live forever. Or even if it happens within maybe a thousand years, I still get to live forever because I'll sign up with ALCOR and get resurrected. So I really see this moment where there is a sort of the pivot towards thinking about the far future. I think initially, for the transhumanists, it was bound up with their own fate as individuals.
RUS: I was thinking that maybe – for example – Eliezer Yudkowsky is being selfless when he talks about risking nuclear war and sacrificing most life on the planet to make sure AI doesn’t happen before he thinks we’re ready. Because it seems to me he could have at least a 50:50 chance of being a victim of the nuclear war that he is willing to risk to prevent the development of AI too soon. So I’m thinking he's being selfless but he loves the idea of the blissful future humans so much that he’s willing to sacrifice himself.
ÉT: My understanding of the history is that it was really in the 2000s that people in this community became increasingly aware of just how huge the future could be. With that awareness came a corresponding shift in the moral emphasis.
Yudkowsy wants to live forever. On Lex Fridman's podcast, he said that he grew up believing that he would live forever. And so part of the trauma for him, as he mentioned on that podcast, is being in this situation where AGI is so close, and he’s having to face his own mortality, maybe for the first time. It seems like his thinking exemplifies this pivot throughout the 2000s.
RU: To me it sounds like it's all fantasy. Some of this stuff that you’ve mentioned being part of this bundle – like the theoretical trillions of people, including digital people, having quantifiably great experience — it sounds like dormroom stoned nerd brainstorms that just never ended. They keep elaborating from the original premise, getting more and more isolated from real-world experiences turn by turn. Ideas used to mature – now they just seem to get crankier. I can’t prove it, but it could be the result of the attention economy. To misquote Neils Bohr, “Your idea is crazy but it's not crazy enough to get a following on social media.”
ÉT: With respect to the attention economy, my sense is that longtermists recognize that this vision of the future is kind of nuts. I mean, some of them have used the term ‘crazy town’. Consequently, I think they do their best to avoid mentioning what their actual goals are publicly. Crazy ideas do grab the public’s attention, but in this case, I think they feel that some of these ideas are not good PR.
What About Useful AI?
RUS: Regarding your assertion that AI activity can only be explained by this ideological configuration. I don't know whether you're talking about practical AI for, say, tracking and responding to weather conditions, developing vaccines and other responses to pandemics, developing medicines, etc. Or if you're referring only to AI that is performing what we consider intellectual or creative things.
ÉT: I don't think AI in general is motivated by this ideology. The race to AGI is. And I think there are two factors. One that’s obvious is the profit motive. Microsoft and Google expect to make billions of dollars off of these large language models. But I think the other crucial component of the explanatory picture is TESCREALism.
It's like… why did DeepMind form in the first place? Why did Demis Hassabis – who was at a lot of these transhumanist conferences – found it? And Shane Legg, who received $100,000 from the Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence after completing his PhD thesis, and gave talks at the Singularity Summit conferences.
RUS: If I went to all the boardrooms in Silicon Valley and talked to the owners and the programmers, do you think most of them would embrace this entire TESCREAL idea? My guess is they would tend to be transhumanists, and quite a few might be singularitarians, but they are probably not into the ‘trillions of future people’ aspect of that project. I mean, how ubiquitous are these ideas really?
ÉT: In terms of the ubiquity of TESCREAL beliefs, I think you're right. A lot of them wouldn't even use the word transhumanism. You could ask, “Would you support re-engineering the human organism?” Or ask, “Are you funding projects to try to re-engineer the human organism so we can merge AI into our brains?” I think a lot of them would say yes. And they’d be for aspects of the longtermist worldview like the imperative to colonize space and plunder the cosmos. My strong suspicion is that’s the water that these people swim in.
An article I want to write would be about the different terms and ideas that various authors use to describe the culture of Silicon Valley – using different terms, but ultimately describing the same phenomenon. So what I mean by TESCREALism is the same thing that far-right guy Richard Hanania calls the “tech right.”
There was a Huffington Post article about how he holds white supremacist views. And he said, “I hate the word TESCREALism.” So he called it the ‘tech right’. Douglas Rushkoff calls this 'the mindset' – he says it is everywhere in Silicon Valley among tech billionaires and so on; in talking to them about their views, he found that they all thought: “the future is digital. We're going to upload our minds. We're going to spread throughout space” and so on. What Rushkoff means by ‘the mindset’ is basically what I mean by TESCREALism. Would these people who embody ‘the mindset’ say, “yeah, I'm a longtermist, and I believe that the most morally important thing to do is to conquer space and create all these digital people in the future?” I don't know. But their worldview looks a lot like longtermism.
RUS: Do you think a lack of concern for currently living people is a sort of political manifestation of the longtermist view is driving some of the people of Silicon Valley towards right-wing extremism?
ÉT: I think that’s largely correct. I think some people, like Wil Macaskill, [a figure in ‘effective altruism’] really accept this very abstract philosophical position that what matters is that there are huge numbers of people in the future. And a lot of tech billionaires see this vision as bound up with their fate as individuals. So the thinking is like… “I want to build a bunker to survive the apocalypse so I can get to space, have my mind digitized” and so on. And that definitely can lead to this disregard for most human beings. A wild example of this is the news that broke that Sam Bankman-Fried's brother and somebody else at FTX had discussed the possibility of buying the island nation of Nauru explicitly so that members of the ‘effective altruism’ movement could survive an apocalyptic event that kills up to – as they wrote in the document – 99.9% of human beings.
The Singularity is Probably Not Near
RUS: Ben Goertzel said that I should ask you if you think the Singularity will happen. And if it will happen, will it happen in 2035 or 2050?
ÉT: I guess it depends on what one means by the Singularity. There's the intelligence explosion interpretation… there’s the Kurzweilian idea that just has to do with the rate of change.
RUS: I think of the Singularity as the point where the AIs get smarter than us, and beyond that, you can't predict anything. You can’t predict who we’ll be, or if we’ll be around, or what the world will be like. The science fiction writer Vernor Vinge was the first person to suggest that idea of a Singularity. We would make intelligences that would become as incomprehensible to us as we are to worms.
ÉT: I’m sympathetic with that view of the Singularity. There's just not much we can say beyond it. I'm very skeptical of the intelligence explosion idea. And the rate of change idea from Kurzweil seems to be in direct and significant tension with the fact that a climate catastrophe is almost inevitable unless there's some new technology that, at scale, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
RUS: Kurzweil shows that the inclining line of human technological development survived two World Wars (actually world wars boosted technology development) and Mao and Pol Pot and all kinds of terrible events.
ÉT: I think climate change is different than that.
RUS: Yeah, I think so too.
ÉT: We’re talking about global civilization. Is it gonna survive? I don't know. I mean, there are legit climatologists out there who don't think it will unless there's immediate action to avert catastrophic climate change.
I remember arguing, many years ago, with colleagues in the existential risk field, where I was claiming that climate change is a much bigger deal than they were suspecting. They thought: “We'll invent AGI. And once we have AGI, it’ll…”
RUS: It’ll figure out what to do, yeah.
ÉT: Figure out what to do. But how are we gonna create AGI in a world that's just crumbling and falling apart? How are we gonna host conferences on AI when the weather is so hostile that you can’t get there?
RUS: I guess the question becomes how radical the intervention of weather catastrophes is in the immediate future. People are thinking they might be able to accomplish AGI in the next 10-20 years or so. And we're already dealing with all kinds of crappy weather and deaths and destruction. But to the visible eye, western civilization seems to roll on. People get in their cars and go to the store. Food is still being distributed.
So we do seem to be carrying on, and maybe we will do that for 10 or 20 years. If the people making the AGI and related robotics and so forth are able to manage to get to the lab and do their work, get in their cars and get enough food etc., then maybe they can accomplish what they hope to. I guess that’s the idea.
ÉT: It's just not my area of expertise. But my sense is that, in terms of the LLMs that we have, there's no obvious path from those systems like ChatGPT to genuine AGI or superintelligence.
RUS: A lot of people are saying that ChatGPT and the like are not much to brag about. Michio Kaku, who generally tends to be a hyper-optimistic tech promoter, called it a glorified tape recorder.
ÉT: I think it was Gary Marcus who was laughing about the rise and fall in prestige, if you will, of ChatGPT. It became a joke line during a Republican debate.
RUS: It happens so fast these days.
ÉT: Yeah. So I don't think that Singularity is going to happen, probably. And I would put money on it not happening soon, not happening in 2045 like Kurzweil predicts.
What About the Humane Transhumanists, Singularitarians and AI Enthusiasts?
RUS: Let me ask you about the varying ideologies and ideals within transhumanism and its spin-offs. You’ve mentioned Ben Goertzel — the captain of the ship here at Mindplex — in various places as having a central role in the ‘bundle’ because of his longtime pursuit of AGI. And I know Ben to be a humanist, and more or less a liberal or even better. I know he doesn’t want to exploit or enslave or kill off the current people on earth but wants to try to lift everybody. So I know from experience that there’s a lot of philosophical variation within transhumanism.
I can remember when they asked me to create the magazine for humanity+, I had my own assumptions based on earlier experiences with the Extropians. So I confessed to these guys at a meeting, I said, “I’ve got to tell you right up front that I'm not a libertarian. I’m a leftist with a libertarian streak.” And one of the guys said “Yeah me too.” And the other guy said “I’m not even sure about the libertarian streak.”
Generally, around that time – around 2007 – I learned that a lot of the people engaged with that official transhumanist organization thought of themselves as liberals, sort of conventional mainstream liberals. And there’s a lot of variation within that world.
ÉT: I recognize and affirm that. The notion of TESCREALism is supposed to capture the techno-utopian vision that came out of some of these movements, and to gesture at the worst aspects of that. I think they’re the ones that have become most influential now. So, like the democratic socialist James Hughes — he was somewhat influential. But, compared to someone like Bostrom, his influence is minor. And I absolutely recognize that there are transhumanists who like anti-libertarian. Some of them are Mormons.
RUS: Yeah… the Mormon transhumanists! They're adorable. I think when you had people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk attaching themselves to these ideas, they probably became the main attractors to transhumanism or the ideas of human enhancement associated with it. More people who would be attracted to their ideologies have been pulled in, particularly in the Silicon Valley culture. These ruling class scary monsters and super creeps became sort of the main widely-available public voice for those kinds of views. Then you had the neoreactionary movement and the dark enlightenment. Most of the people talking about those tended to embrace transhumanist tropes. That became the alt-right; it fed into the spread of right wing extremism.
You can see how the idea of the glorious future – stand up straight and tall and shoot yourself up into the glorious future – could attract a certain type of fascist sensibility.
ÉT: That's my impression also. Obviously there's a fascinating history involving futurism and fascism. Maybe it does tend to attract a certain type of person or lends itself to being interpreted or exploited by fascists. TESCREALism captures that aspect.
Is Less Wrong A Cult?
RUS: I remember being at a Singularity Conference and being approached by someone involved in Less Wrong. And it felt something like being approached by a cult. I wonder if you run into any actual cult-like behavior in your studies, like people gathering in communities and getting guns to defend themselves, or worship the leader and that sort of thing.
ÉT: There's definitely that charismatic leader aspect to rationalism. There are these Less Wrong posts that are just lavishing praise on Yudkowsky. I remember seeing a list of one or two sentence statements about Yudkowsky. One of them was something about how “inside Eliezer Yudkowsky’s pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.” “In the history of Western thinkers, there was Plato, Immanuel Kant, Eliezer Yudkowsky.”
(Laughter)
Someone who I won’t name told me that the Bay Area rational scene is a full-grown apocalypse cult.
I think EA (Effective Altruism) is sort of a cult. There was an article published by Carla Cremer recently. She talked about a secret competitive ranking system in which participants get points subtracted if they have IQs of less than 120.
RUS: Oh! I was thinking I might ask people engaged in transhumanism if they even believe in IQ as a legitimate measurement of intelligence.
ÉT: I’d be really curious to know. Because I do think that IQ realism is pretty widespread within this community. Bostrom has written that IQ is good but imperfect. So they sort of lean towards IQ realism.
Does Anyone Call Themselves a TESCREAList?
RU: You noted that Marc Andreessen has identified himself with this bundle that you co-created. Have others directly embraced the term as a positive identity that you're aware of?
ÉT: No, not really. Hanania acknowledges it in arguing that the ‘tech right’ is
a better term. He said we were basically right about what the streams are, what the bundle is, but ‘tech right’ is a better term. I'm not surprised that there aren't more people coming out and saying they identify as TESCREAL.
RUS: Maybe after this runs on Mindplex there'll be a bunch of people deciding that is who they are. Oh dear. Whatever have we wrought?
Eugenics
RUS: Let me try a thorny issue: eugenics. What about intervening at the germline to prevent horrific diseases and stuff like that? Do you think there can be a legitimate use for that sort of thing?
ÉT: Yes. I do think that could be permissible under certain circumstances. I mean, I have worries about the limits of what that technology will be used for. Will it be used just for what we would intuitively call therapeutic purposes? My main concern is that it could easily open the door to an ‘enhancement’ approach. As soon as you're talking about enhancements, there are questions like, "What criteria are you using to judge whether some modification is better?” That’s where you get into the issue of ‘super-classes’ which Bostrom has written about.
A lot of that is probably ableist. What ‘enhancing’ means for somebody like Bostrom might be completely different than what I might mean. Right?
RUS: I must confess I had a knee-jerk reaction the first time I heard the term ableism. People should be able. Generally, we should be in favor of abilities and not get into a place where people are worshiping their broken parts, so to speak. At the same time, people should have the right to choose how they want to be. But I'm uncomfortable with the idea that people would want to maintain what most people would consider a kind of brokenness. And I wonder: where’s the line for that?
ÉT: My sense is that words like ‘broken’ are normative terms. I think disability rights activists or disability scholars have a point when they say, “there's an infinite number of things that I can't do.” I can't fly. The notion of disability, some would argue, is just a social construct. We live in a society that is unaccommodating for somebody who can't do something that a statistical majority of other people can do. That's what a ‘disability’ is. So maybe, you fix society, the disability goes away even if the inability remains.
RUS: How would you think about physical problems that make life more difficult for an individual, or for the people around them?
ÉT: There are two aspects to that. One is the inability and the other is the society one lives in. So you can fix or eliminate disability by improving society. And then there's a good argument that a lot of the inabilities that we classify as disabilities would not be seen as bad. It's just different. There are people of different heights. There are people who can't walk. I find my heart is filled with a lot of empathy for the disability scholars — some of whom are disabled themselves — arguing that they wouldn't want to change. And their view that we shouldn’t aim for a world in which people like them no longer exist.
Techno Gloom
RUS: Do we need to worry about extreme forms of tech negativism? For example, the person who can't walk on their own will rely on good technology to get around
and probably hope for even better technology. And there's a real move towards extreme tech negativism now, clearly provoked partly by the sort of TESCREAList people that you're bringing to the surface. I wonder if you're a little worried that there might be an overreaction, a tech reactionary kind of move that is actually harmful?
ÉT: Not so much because I haven't seen a lot of evidence, at least like my social media feed.
RUS: You don't live near San Francisco…
ÉT: To put it simplistically, a lot of the people in my circle are for good technology, not bad technology. Maybe small-scale technologies, which doesn’t mean low-tech. So you can have advanced technologies that would enable somebody to get around who can't walk. But without the megacorps, and all the control and all the risk that comes with that.