David Culley (@[email protected])

You may have heard the acronym TESCREAL. It bundles seven toxic ideologies. - Trans-humanism - Extropianism - Singularitarianism - Cosmism - Rationalism - Effective Altruism - Longtermism Here are my personal notes¹ on what each ideology means: Transhumanism (T) is the belief in enhancing the human mind and body with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other technologies to eventually evolve to god-like figures (posthumans) as the next step of evolution. Think "Homo Deus". Transhumans—still recognizably human but enhanced—are the transitory path to such posthumans. Extropianism (E) is the belief in the eventual realization of indefinite lifespans through nanotechnology and similar technologies. It's the belief that through mind uploading and future advances in biomedical technology, even immortality will be achieved. It's the belief that in the future, those whose brains and bodies have been preserved through cryonics, will be able to revived. Singularitarianism (S) is the belief that superintelligence will likely be created in the medium future—that event will be what Ray Kurzweil calls a technological singularity—and that this is desirable if guided prudently. Singularitarianism can be understood as the realization of what AI enthusiasts call AGI. Cosmism (C) subsumes the three ideologies transhumanism, extropianism and singularitarianism, and adds to them the belief that humans who left biology behind by merging with technology and uploading their minds, will spread to the stars and roam the universe, and create virtual worlds—synthetic realities—in which posthumans could live. It focuses less on becoming posthuman and instead concerns itself with how such posthumans would transform the universe. ¹ I wildly copied from Wikipedia pages and Timnit Gebru's and Émile P. Torres's paper. I rearranged the copied snippets for my personal notes that I hereby make public. This is not an academic paper. I'm not claiming that I am who came up with this. All credit to the original authors. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 1/3 #TESCREAL #capitalism #fascism