TESCREAL
In plain wordsA critical label for a cluster of related belief systems, including transhumanism, effective altruism and longtermism, that its coiners say drive the push to build AGI and share roots with eugenics.
An acronym for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermismlongtermism, n.: The belief that we should care a great deal about how things go for humanity thousands or millions of years from now, since far more people may live then than have ever lived., used by its originators to describe what they see as a single bundle of overlapping ideologies motivating much of the drive to build artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive.. They argue that the bundle descends from twentieth-century Anglo-American eugenics, shares a utopian vision of technologically enhanced posthumans colonizing space, and serves to justify concentrating resources in AI companies while discounting present-day harms. The term spread quickly in AI-ethics and critical commentary. Critics, including philosophers and members of the named communities, call it polemical, argue that it lumps together distinct and often conflicting movements (self-described cosmists are rare, and many rationalists and effective altruists oppose racing to AGI), and say that it works as guilt by association.
She dismissed the lab's mission statement as TESCREAL ideology in corporate language.
Origin
Coined by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres in 2023, first in a draft paper and in Torres's essays, and set out in their article 'The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence' (First Monday, April 2024).
Related
- transhumanismtranshumanism, n.: A movement holding that people should use technology, such as genetic engineering, brain implants or AI, to overcome human limits like aging, disease and death, and become more than human.
- longtermismlongtermism, n.: The belief that we should care a great deal about how things go for humanity thousands or millions of years from now, since far more people may live then than have ever lived.
- effective altruismeffective altruism, n.: A movement that treats charity like a research problem, comparing causes by how much good each dollar or working hour achieves; many of its members came to rank risks from advanced AI as a top priority.
- rationalist communityrationalist community, n.: A loose online community that prizes careful reasoning and spotting one's own biases; gathered around the forum LessWrong, it was one of the first groups to take the dangers of advanced AI seriously.
- technological singularitytechnological singularity, n.: A moment some people expect in the future when technology, usually AI smarter than us, starts changing the world so fast and so deeply that we cannot see past it.
- Timnit GebruTimnit Gebru, prop. n.: An Ethiopian-born American computer scientist who exposed racial and gender bias in AI systems, co-wrote the 'stochastic parrots' paper, and founded an independent AI research institute.
Sources
- Gebru, T. & Torres, É. P. (2024). The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. First Monday 29(4).
Mentioned in
effective altruismeffective altruism, n.: A movement that treats charity like a research problem, comparing causes by how much good each dollar or working hour achieves; many of its members came to rank risks from advanced AI as a top priority., longtermismlongtermism, n.: The belief that we should care a great deal about how things go for humanity thousands or millions of years from now, since far more people may live then than have ever lived., rationalist communityrationalist community, n.: A loose online community that prizes careful reasoning and spotting one's own biases; gathered around the forum LessWrong, it was one of the first groups to take the dangers of advanced AI seriously., Timnit GebruTimnit Gebru, prop. n.: An Ethiopian-born American computer scientist who exposed racial and gender bias in AI systems, co-wrote the 'stochastic parrots' paper, and founded an independent AI research institute., Distributed AI Research InstituteDistributed AI Research Institute, prop. n.: Timnit Gebru set up this institute in 2021, a year after her departure from Google, to research the damage AI can do, especially to marginalized communities, without relying on big-tech money., MolochMoloch, prop. n.: A name, borrowed from an ancient god of sacrifice, for situations where competition forces everyone to act against their shared interests — as when AI companies feel pushed to race ahead despite the risks., rapture of the nerdsrapture of the nerds, phr.: A mocking nickname for the 'technological singularity', comparing the belief that superintelligent AI will transform the world to the religious idea of the Rapture., transhumanismtranshumanism, n.: A movement holding that people should use technology, such as genetic engineering, brain implants or AI, to overcome human limits like aging, disease and death, and become more than human.