User:Wu ib/TESCREAL

Article Draft
My proposed edits are bolded.

Lead
TESCREAL is an acronym neologism, proposed by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, standing for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (as espoused by Eliezer Yudkowsky in the LessWrong blog community), Effective Altruism, and longtermism." Gebru and Torres allege that these concepts overlap, especially in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered around artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used by them to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech. Neşe Devenot has used the TESCREAL acronym to also refer to "global tech elites" who promote new uses of psychedelic drugs as mental health treatments, not because they want to help people, but rather so that they can make money on the sale of these new pharmaceuticals, as part of a deliberate plan to increase inequality.

Torres claims that these ideas have previous overlaps; that transhumanism, extropianism and singularitarianism are presented as a coherent set of ideas by Ray Kurzweil, a notable technology evangelist and AI researcher at Google. Torres and Gebru attribute the roots of longtermism, part of the TESCREAL ideology, to eugenics and scientific racism. Dave Troy, a reporter for the The Washington Spectator, attributes Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian rocket scientist and proponent of Cosmism, as an influence on Elon Musk. Sam Bankman-Fried was a member of the Effective Altruism community, collaborating with some frequency with the Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill. Torres says that Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky are "TESCREALists".

Many of the discourses around an existential risk from artificial general intelligence occur among supporters of the TESCREAL ideologies.

TESCREALism
Torres has stated that TESCREALism is a view of the future in which technology empowers humanity to attain feats such as “producing radical abundance, reengineering ourselves, becoming immortal, colonizing the universe and creating a sprawling “post-human” civilization among the stars full of trillions and trillions of people.” They claim that the most direct path to actualizing this vision is through “building superintelligent AGI.”  Torres has also stated that the concept of an existential risks is central to the TESCREAL worldview, events that would prevent humanity from realizing a techno-utopian future. They assert that TESCREALists view "sub-existential risks," catastrophe scenarios that do not interfere with this idea of a techno-utopian future, as unimportant.

Gebru claims that TESCREALism is "the fruit of a very concerted movement that has been happening for more than a decade," '''and that TESCREALists are "pumping" students, professors, journalists, and lobbyists into the field of AI.  She also maintains that part of the TESCREAL ideology is related to sexism and racism.'''

Responses
Sociologist, transhumanist, and bioethicist James J. Hughes (with Eli Sennesh) characterizes this analysis of futurist ideas and people as a conspiracy theory, and states: "These new left conspiracists cast all futurist philosophies together under the acronym of TESCREAL, linked in their minds to eugenics and racism. Again, there is a web of facts underlying their fantasies, just as [Jeffrey] Epstein was confirmatory for QAnon. But the conspiracy style of argumentation is bad intellectual history and bad politics." Torres has rejected the description.