Watching tech moguls throw caution to the wind in the AI arms race or equivocate on whether humanity ought to continue, it’s natural to wonder whether they care about human lives.
The earnest, in-depth answer to this question is just as bleak as the glib one. As moral philosopher Émile Torres argues, many Silicon Valley leaders embrace a vision of a transhumanist future in which biological humans will be replaced by digital beings endowed with superintelligence. This vision helps explain their obsession with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and sits at the core of what Torres describes as human extinctionist preferences.
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 — that have become highly influential within Silicon Valley. Torres is a philosopher, intellectual historian, and journalist whose work focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies, particularly AI and human extinction.