The Info Web

#TESCREAL

5 entries

People (2)

  • Émile P. Torres Philosopher and historian of existential-risk thought who wrote a 2017 introduction to existential risks, then attacked longtermism in 2021 and coined the acronym TESCREAL, developed with Timnit Gebru.
  • Timnit Gebru Computer scientist who left Google's Ethical AI team in December 2020 in a dispute over a paper on large language models, founded DAIR in 2021, and developed the TESCREAL critique with Émile P. Torres.

Concepts (3)

  • Eugenics Eugenics is the project of improving the human species through controlled reproduction, named by Francis Galton in 1883, which drove sterilization and immigration laws and the Holocaust, was repackaged after the war as race-and-intelligence research, and is identified by critics as a root of the transhumanist and longtermist worldview.
  • Russian Cosmism Russian Cosmism is the late-19th-century movement originating with the Orthodox mystic Nikolai Fedorov that called for the technological resurrection of all the dead, radical life extension, and the colonization of space, and it supplies the 'C' in the TESCREAL acronym.
  • TESCREAL TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for a bundle of seven overlapping ideologies, transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, that they argue share roots in twentieth-century eugenics and together drive the race to build artificial general intelligence.