TESCREAL

Summary

DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies are racing to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). What is motivating this race? Who founded these companies, and why? In a 2024 paper, Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres argue that the AGI race emerged out of the TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism) movement. This movement dates back to the early 1990s, although it has roots in 20th-century eugenics and 19th-century Russian Cosmism. Since about 2015, TESCREALism has become enormously influential within Silicon Valley and embraced and promoted by some of the most powerful figures in the tech world. At its core is a techno-utopian philosophy according to which advanced technologies will enable the creation of a new species of “posthumans” who spread beyond Earth to colonize the accessible universe. AGI is integral to realizing this grand eschatological vision: once AGI becomes superintelligent, humanity could delegate it the task of “paradise-engineering,” to quote a leading figure of the movement, Nick Bostrom. Without AGI, utopia will likely be impossible, and hence humanity must build AGI as quickly as possible while ensuring that it can be controlled by those who build it. The AGI race thus emerged to fulfill the cosmic mission of realizing utopia.

There are many ways for critics to approach the topic of AGI. Some have focused on the environmental impact of large language models, which power systems like ChatGPT, seen by most TESCREALists as the stepping stones to AGI. Others point to phenomena like intellectual property theft, worker exploitation, and AI-generated deepfakes and disinformation. However, a growing number of scholars are beginning to examine the underlying techno-utopian ideologies that have inspired, launched, sustained, and accelerated this race. The TESCREAL framework provides a powerful new way of understanding and critiquing the AGI race, focusing not on its societal consequences but on its root causes. Critics of TESCREALism thus may argue that this framework provides an indispensable tool for addressing the harms of AI and hence that understanding the TESCREAL ideologies is crucial for combating the ongoing rush to build machines far more “intelligent” than all of humanity combined.