In 2023, Torres and his colleague Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL to describe a constellation of ideologies — Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism.
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All of these people also embody the same kind of discriminatory attitudes that animated the eugenics movement of the twentieth century. Elon Musk has warned about global population decline, but if you look closely at some of his tweets, it seems that he’s more explicitly worried about white populations declining. Several months ago, someone tweeted that the white demographic globally is about eight percent of the world population, and Musk’s reply to this was something to the effect of “and declining fast.” There is very much a racial component to his anxiety about not just immigration, but population decline. Musk basically thinks that white people are superior, and hence it would be very bad for the future of humanity and post-humanity if the white population were to decline.
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There are two essential things for people to understand about what’s happening in Silicon Valley. One is that the TESCREAL worldview is ubiquitous. It’s the water these people swim in and the air they breathe. So you just cannot understand what’s going on in Silicon Valley, especially with respect to the race to build AGI, without some understanding of transhumanism, longtermism, and all of these TESCREAL ideologies.
The second really important thing for people to understand is that a key component of the utopian vision at the heart of TESCREALism is a pro-extinctionist stance. Utopia looks like a world in which post-humans, not humans, are the ones who rule the world. When Peter Thiel hesitated, he was just channeling this pro-extinctionist component of the TESCREAL worldview. It’s not humanity, it’s post-humanity that is going to ultimately go out and colonize space, that’s going to run the show.
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The rationalist community is very influential in Silicon Valley, and what the rationalist community basically tells its members is that once you’ve mastered this or that theory within the field of decision theory, once you’ve mastered the patterns of thought that are optimally rational, you then have direct access to fundamental truths about what the future ought to look like. And because rationality provides a universal and objective perspective on the world, you don’t need anyone else’s perspective. That is exactly how these billionaires in Silicon Valley are thinking about our collective future.
See !sneerclub@awful.systems for regular roasting of these idiots