On Sunday, Dark Markets subscribers got my rundown of new research tracing the connections from Sam Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism to AI Doomers, Transhumanism, Longtermism ...  and the roots of the "TESCREAL bundle" in racist Eugenics.

On Sunday, Dark Markets subscribers got my rundown of new research tracing the connections from Sam Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism to AI Doomers, Transhumanism, Longtermism ...  and the roots of the "TESCREAL bundle" in racist Eugenics.

https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/what-is-tescrealism-mapping-the-cult

👁Dark Markets Newsletter

"SBF and the Tech Utopians," Repeater Books, Fall '25

Crypto OG. X-CoinDesk, Fortune. 
@WestHamgc
. PhD UIowa

'Hardcore' - NYMag

Some highlights from Timnit Gebru and Emille Torres' excellent work: 

- The key connection of AI to eugenics is through the idea of "general intelligence." To reduce human intelligence into machine form, the reductive rubrics conceived to justify ethnic cleansing, such as "IQ," have proved enduringly useful.

- Obviously, the TESCREALists don't care about the here and now. Their beliefs about AGI are essentially a millenarian eschatology in which believers in the machine god will be redeemed with salvation, and unbelievers will be punished by Roko's Basilisk.

This eschatological framework justifies very extreme views. Nick Bostrom, founder of various TESCREAL institutions, is no fan of Black people. But did you know he also thinks "a giant massacre" could be a reasonable tradeoff for progress towards AGI? Meanwhile Yudkowsky has called for terrorist attacks on data centers.

For "rationalists," they sure seem to love violence. And they now have billions of dollars in venture capital to pursue their dark vision.

Please read, subscribe, and share.

For "rationalists," they sure seem to love violence. And they now have billions of dollars in venture capital to pursue their dark vision.

Please read, subscribe, and share.

https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/what-is-tescrealism-mapping-the-cult

- But the quest for Artificial General Intelligence is also "unscoped," in the very literal sense that the people building it can't clearly define their own goals. That appears to be why LLMs have become darlings of the industry - they *feel* closer to intelligence, and feelings is all much of this is really based on.