No Shame

There was a time when Elon Musk was positioned as some sort of tech genius, appearing in the second Iron Man movie with a cameo that implied that he was some sort of a real-world Tony Stark. There were those who questioned the image (and not only because Stark is a problematic superhero as a weapons manufacturer, not to mention weapon himself). If nothing else, the tech companies that Musk had become famous for, including Tesla and SpaceX, weren't actually making products that he'd built or designed. There were plenty of questions about how well he was running these businesses -- labor violations galore -- along with a whole host of concerns about his personal life -- the bankruptcies, the messy divorces, the drug use, the strange shit-posting (well before he bought Twitter). He's unraveled more and more in recent years, no doubt, so I'm not sure anyone was surprised to see the very public fallout between he and Donald Trump this past week.

Since Musk joined the Trump campaign and administration, there has been more reporting on not just his persona but on his politics -- reporting on his eugenicist thinking, in particular, and how this connects to his pro-natalism and fathering of at least fourteen children.

But there are some facets of this that remain under-examined, I'd argue: how these eugenicist beliefs are intertwined with his interest in artificial intelligence, and more importantly, how mainstream these beliefs have become in the tech industry.

Researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres coined the acronym TESCREAL to describe the "bundle" of beliefs surrounding the recent quest to build AGI, tracing these through transhumanism -- which despite its name is a profoundly anti-human, pro-eugenics ideology. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarisnism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. These ideas share "a genealogy of interconnected and overlapping ideologies," Gebru and Torres argue, that can be traced to "first-wave" eugenics movements; and the harms perpetuated by the latter continue to be perpetuated by contemporary TESCREAL adherents and the technologies and the futures they are building. And while many of their ideas for the future are wildly outlandish and scientifically impossible, these ideas have become mainstream in certain circles, particularly surrounding AI development. And unfortunately, because of the political and economic power of this small group of men, we all have to deal with this racist futurism. As Dave Karpf has put it, we have to take these deeply unserious ideas seriously.