Torres is defining an acronym, coined with a collaborator, for a cluster of seven ideologies said to lie behind the race to build superintelligent AI. Transhumanism is the first letter and the backbone. Torres says these ideas would strike most people on the street as bizarre, yet are close to universal among the people running the big technology companies.
Thanks for inviting me. Great to be here.
I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. I think both your story and your research is being too overlooked in our current moment. I think it is very relevant to a lot of issues that people care about or are worried about or don't understand about the current AI situation. And so I'm excited to really get into both the meat of your work as well as the origin story, which I think is very important. But I thought we should start briefly with definitions just so that everyone is on the same page when we're talking about these various movements. So can you explain what the acronym Tescriel means?
Yes, I can. So this was coined by myself during a collaboration with the computer scientist Timmy Gebrew, which we initiated in, I think, late 2022 or so. And we were specifically interested in the underlying ideological drivers behind the current race to build ASI or artificial superintelligence. So Tescriel is a clunky, kind of unsightly term, but it does a lot of important explanatory work. So one way to think about the acronym is it's basically just a name for the dominant orthodox worldview within Silicon Valley that simultaneously highlights a certain intellectual history that is relevant to understanding that worldview. So it explains what the worldview is, where it came from, what shaped it, how it evolved, and so on. And so the acronym itself stands, it represents seven different ideologies. And the letters appear in roughly the same order as the ideologies emerged chronologically over the past almost 40 years. So the T stands for transhumanism, E for extropianism, then singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and long terms. A bunch of like really big, clunky, polysyllabic terms. But these ideologies are really fringe within American society. And I think, you know, if you were to go and talk to the average person on the street, they would find them to be so bizarre that they consider the grand cosmic vision behind these ideologies as basically a non-starter. Nonetheless, they are massively influential within Silicon Valley. Like basically everybody, you know, from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg to Sam Altman to Dario Amade are transhumanists. And many people in Silicon Valley don't even call themselves transhumanists. But that's for the same reason that I've never publicly stated I'm a round earther, right? It's just like, what else would I be? Obviously, I'm that. So transhumanism really is the water that people in Silicon Valley swim in. It's the air that they breathe. And it's also the backbone of the whole Tescreal worldview. And so once you understand transhumanism, then all of the other ideologies, some of which are just variants of transhumanism, are sort of. Of easy to grasp.
Well, I want to ask you a history question here because some of this is new to me. The history of this that I best understand starts with the E. So the history I've been writing or talking about sort of starts with extropism becoming a pretty big utopian futurist movement, I guess, like the 80s and 90s. From there, you get rationalism, sort of simultaneously, effective altruism, which starts with a bunch of different goals, embraces ideas from rationalism and long-termism, and becomes more focused on a sort of more of a long-termism, transhuman utopian, anti-AI type of orientation. All right. So, what pieces am I missing in that really simplified history?
No, that's a pretty good overview. So, when Gabru and I are talking about transhumanism, we primarily mean modern transhumanism in its libertarian form. That libertarian form, like the first organized libertarian transhumanist movement was the extropians, right? And so, this is a movement that, like you said, emerged in the late 1980s, early 1990s. There was somewhat famously an extropian mailing list that brought together transhumanists from all around the world. It's where people like Elios Yutkowski, one of the leading AI Doomer out there, was able to exchange ideas with people like Nick Bostrom, who's another very important figure in the formation and development of the Tescural worldview. So, you're absolutely right. And then, you know, the other ideologies right after E in the acronym like singularitarianism, this is basically just transhumanism, libertarian transhumanism with a focus on the singularity. And at this point, I feel like most people listening probably know what the singularity is, right? That wasn't the case like five years ago. So, you know, a very quick definition. It actually has several definitions, but the most common one these days is an intelligence explosion, right? Triggered by recursive self-improvement. So, you get an AI system that's just clever enough or smart enough to develop the next generation of AI systems, and you get this positive feedback loop. And suddenly, through some kind of exponential or hyperbolic explosion of capabilities, you end up with a super intelligence. And then, beyond that, you go out and colonize the entire universe, plunder the vast resources of the cosmos, and create this sprawling, multi-galactic utopia among the stars. And cosmism, the next letter, is just transhumanism that emphasizes the aspect of this worldview that I just articulated, which is it's basically the idea of like, well, why stop at just radically re-engineering the human organism, which is the central goal of transhumanism, to create a new post-human species? Let's go out and create technologies that enable us to re-engineer the entire universe, you know, whole galaxies maybe intervening on the fundamental fabric of space-time to manipulate the world in ways that we find desirable. So, it's kind of just like transhumanism with this like broader cosmic vision. And then, rationalism was founded by Yitkowski, who was a transhumanist extropian singularitarian who hired the leading modern cosmist namely Ben Goertzel, who worked at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is originally the Singularity Institute founded by Yitkowski. So, rationalism emerged directly out of this movement. And basically, the idea was: okay, if we're going to establish a cosmic post-human utopia at some point, we're going to need to develop these advanced technologies. There's no other way around that, especially superintelligence. But to develop them in the right way, such that these technologies do not destroy us, but rather enable us to establish this sprawling utopia, heaven among the literal heavens, we're going to need to optimize our rationality. So, that is essentially the main thrust behind rationalism. And effective altruism, as you mentioned, I mean, it emerged basically from rationalist blocks like overcoming bias and less wrong. And the focus there is not so much optimizing our rationality, but rather optimizing our morality. And although the story that effective altruists like to tell is that initially they were focused primarily on global poverty and then animal welfare, and then this other cause area called long-termism came into the picture later on. Really, the effective altruist from the very origins of this movement were focused on long-termism, right? So, long-termism is basically just cosmism, except it has a more explicit ethical foundation to it. And that ethical foundation, I know there are a lot of isms that I've mentioned so far, but that ethical foundation is utilitarianism, specifically total or totalist utilitarianism. And that just says that we have an obligation to increase the total amount. Value in the universe across cosmic space and time. How do we do that? Well, one way is if you have a fixed population, it's to increase the well-being or welfare of the entities that exist in that population. The other possibility is to just increase the population, right? So if you double the population and everything else is the same, you know, caterous parabus, then you've doubled the amount of value. So from the long-termist view, you know, cosmism basically, like one way to think about it is it's just like, wouldn't it be really cool if we as transhumanists radically re-engineered ourselves, became post-human, you know, uploaded our minds to the cloud, went out and colonized the universe. Wouldn't that just be like a really awesome thing to do? Long-termism goes a step further and says, actually, no, we have a kind of ethical obligation to do this. As Will McCaskill says in his 2022 book, What We Owe the Future, the upshot is a moral case for space settlement, right? And so you could maybe see why Elon Musk has called long-termism, quote, a close match for my philosophy. So that's in a little bit more detail, just fleshing out some of the details of your very good first pass history.
So it sounds like the tricky part, but both the simple part about understanding this bundle, to use the term that you and Tim Net often use, is there's these little differences, which can be confusing to people, where the Yakowski and the rationalists would be, they were dismissive of a Kurzweil style singularitarianism because it was too optimistic and he was more negative. And the effective altruist are they're doing more like these explicit utilitarian expected value computations where the rational, you know, so there's these little differences and they don't, they're not all the same group, and yet they're really knit together by fundamental ideas about transhumanist utopia avoiding extinction and technology being delivered. But what I could never figure out, and maybe you know, what were the cultural technical forces that really made the transhumanist foundation emerge in the 70s and 80s and give birth to this movement that ended up essentially taking over Silicon Valley?
