Contra Emile Torres Contra Me Contra Torres Contra The So-Called 'TESCREALists'

I'm so meta even this acronym

PREVIOUSLY ON: Philosopher Emile Torres has written assorted articles critiquing so-called TESCREALism, i.e. transhumanism, singulatarianism, the rationalist community, effective altruism, and longtermism. I critiqued their arguments against TESCREALism. They responded to my critique.

I.

Torres and I have, I think, established some common ground in our discussion. Many people in tech¹ share an ideology, which we will call TESCREALism because Torres seems to have rejected my proposal to rename it REALEST. Common beliefs among TESCREALists include:

• The future is going to look super weird and science-fictional.

• It is good for people to have a lot of control over the universe, potentially ranging from “people should be able to live indefinitely” to “we should transform all the matter in the universe into computers running extremely happy minds that are incomprehensible to baseline humans.”

• One of the most important things in the world is making this super weird science fiction future be a good super weird science fiction future instead of a bad one.

• The best ways of finding out information are science (including empirical social science, especially economics) and analytic philosophy (possibly done by amateurs at home).

We seem to agree on what I wrote in my original article:

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Marc Andreessen — two influential thinkers Torres and Gebru have identified as TESCREAList — don’t agree on much. Eliezer Yudkowsky believes that with our current understanding of AI we’re unable to program an artificial general intelligence that won’t wipe out humanity; therefore, he argues, we should pause AI research indefinitely. Marc Andreessen believes that artificial intelligence will be the most beneficial invention in human history: People who push for delay have the blood of the starving people and sick children whom AI could have helped on their hands. But their very disagreement depends on a number of common assumptions…

As an analogy, Republicans and Democrats don’t seem to agree about much. But if you were explaining American politics to a medieval peasant, the peasant would notice a number of commonalities: that citizens should choose their political leaders through voting, that people have a right to criticize those in charge, that the same laws ought to apply to everyone. To explain what was going on, you’d call this “liberal democracy.” Similarly, many people in Silicon Valley share a worldview that is unspoken and, all too often, invisible to them. When you mostly talk to people who share your perspective, it’s easy to not notice the controversial assumptions behind it. We learn about liberal democracy in school, but the philosophical underpinnings beneath some common debates in Silicon Valley can be unclear. It’s easy to stumble across Andreesen’s or Yudkowsky’s writing without knowing anything about transhumanism. The TESCREALism concept can clarify what’s going on for confused outsiders.

Torres and I also agree that it’s a mistake to assume any member of any particular letter (transhumanists, effective altruists, rationalists, etc.) necessarily endorses any other particular letter.

II.

Emile Torres identifies the primary flaw of TESCREALism as its “utopianism.” They write:

Yes, because I think that utopian ideologies can be enormously dangerous. This is not hyperbole: there are endless examples throughout history of such ideologies “justifying” extreme actions for the sake of bringing about some imagined future paradise. In many cases, these utopian movements that became violent started off being explicitly peaceful, as in the case of the Anabaptists and Aum Shinrikyo…

Let me quote an EA favorite, Steven Pinker, on this point:

Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.

I was baffled by the inclusion of the Anabaptists, a group that includes the Amish and the Mennonites. After several hours wracking Wikipedia to find the Amish-perpetrated genocide I had forgotten about, all I could turn up was the Munster rebellion. Now, the Anabaptists did not commit the worst atrocities in sixteenth century Europe, which was a nonstop orgy of rape, torture, and murder in the name of God. For that matter, they did not commit the worst atrocities in Germany in the years 1534 and 1535. It is honestly unclear whether they committed the worst atrocities in the Munster rebellion.

The Anabaptists weren’t violent because of their utopian ideology; they were violent because people were constantly torturing and murdering them. If no one persecutes them, they don’t commit violence—as one would expect from pacifists. Even when they’re horrifically persecuted, they are significantly more peaceful than the replacement ideology.

Anyway, Torres in no way explained what incident they were talking about and I’m not confident that I didn’t miss a secret Amish genocide somewhere. So don’t take this too seriously. Nevertheless, we can gather that “utopianism” means something like the Anabaptists or Aum Shrinikyo.

This is useful, because Torres nowhere defines “utopianism,” and what they mean by it is… mystifying. Elsewhere in the piece, they write:

Then maybe—and I bet you could get some EV figures to support this—the best thing to do would be to oppose capitalism, which also happens to be a root cause of the climate crisis and the AGI race that so many doomers are currently freaking out about.”

To be clear, I think that (a) the enterprise of technological development almost certainly can’t be stopped, and (b) that if this enterprise continues, the result will be an unprecedented global catastrophe. This is precisely why I’m so pessimistic about the future—it’s a major reason why I don’t, and won’t, have children! I think we’re in a really bad situation that we probably can’t escape.

Torres then describes their ideal society—a complete return to hunter-gatherer society, which was nearly perfect:

No—famine was not something that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ever really encountered. It is a consequence of large sedentary communities plus agriculture.

But we had more free time ~10,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers probably “worked” less than we do, w—and for the very same reason that we now have “all human knowledge available at [our] fingertips,” most of us end up working constantly, leading some scholars to introduce the word “weisure” time (a portmanteau of “work” and “leisure”) to describe our lifestyles these days. It’s brutal—we almost certainly live in the most stressed-out, loneliest, etc. societies in all of human history. Most of us don’t appreciate this fact because we don’t have good points of reference to see just how pathological modern life is.

There are “disease of civilization” that have been cured—but without civilization, we wouldn’t have needed a cure in the first place. We invented braces to straighten out our teeth, but people in the past almost always had straight teeth! Even cancer might be “a modern, man-made disease caused by environmental factors such as pollution and diet.” Again, so much of this is making a mess, cleaning it up, and then declaring: “Progress!!”

Now, you may be worried about the many people who need technology to survive:

These are cases where I very much do advocate for technology. Though I don’t have a completely worked-out view on the matter, I would argue that the sort of “megatechnics” that define our current era aren’t necessary for technologies that help, e.g., individuals with disabilities. There could be “small-scale” technological systems that enable all people to thrive without risking the collapse of every society around the world.

I hope you feel very reassured.

Now, if I try to say anything about the well-being of hunter-gatherers, I am sure to make a fool of myself.² But apparently the definition of “utopianism” we’re working with here is one in which it isn’t utopian to say:

• We should completely reshape the fundamental nature of our entire society

• Which is a dystopian hellscape leading us to inevitable devastation and the destruction of all that is good in the world

• In order to achieve a glorious and wonderful future

• One where the details haven’t quite been worked out, but look, it’s so glorious and wonderful!³

Torres clarifies that they’re not utopian, they’re (“perhaps”) protopian. I read the Protopian Manifesto,⁴ which defines “utopianism” as:

Even today, the majority of “mainstream” figures in the foresight field position Utopias as antidotes to Dystopias. Yet this approach tends to be deeply exclusionary, perpetuating the gaze and the experience of privilege, even if with a “green” twist. It must be said here that “environmental utopias” that do not address racial, Indigenous, gender, and disability justice are at best greenwashing, and, at worst, eco-fascism.

Utopian Futures are generally envisaged as so “perfect” that they can only exist by prodigiously leapfrogging all of the most urgent inequities of the present. Consequently, they are mostly closed to critical inquiry. Utopian imaginings pertain to communicating a peaceful and magically post-austerity world, yet somehow the peace of such a future is always peace without justice.

A non-whitewashed history tells us a horror story of 20th century top-down dreams of the “perfect society” morphing into eugenic, genocidal nightmares. We must remember that the Third Reich’s extermination of Jewish, Roma, Queer, and Disabled people was seen as a means to achieve an “Aryan Utopia”…

And yet, even with all of this becoming public record, the best that many Futurist “thought leaders” seem to propose for the 22nd century is the absurdity of endless economic growth based on “exponential technology”.

Dystopias/Utopias are monologues moored in the gaze of privilege, inevitably tied to boundaries of thought established via patriarchal settler colonialism. Protopia is a continuous dialogue, more a verb than a noun, a process rather than a destination, never finite, always iterative, meant to be questioned, adjusted, and expanded. Our goal is always to center the previously marginalized perspectives, especially those at the intersection of Indigeneity, Queerness, and Disability. Above all, Protopia explores visions of embodied HOPE, futures wherein we have come together, as imperfect as our condition is.

As far as I can tell from this manifesto, the difference between utopians and protopians are:

• Utopians want bad things, like economic growth, capitalism, and the existence of our people and a future for white children. Conversely, protopians want good things, like diversity and wokeness and all technology being made of living things for some reason.⁵

  • And, uh, “lean[ing] into” viruses and “honor[ing] these unsung heroes holding together the biological realm of this planet”? Concerning.

• Utopians are dreamers with no plans for how their goals are to be achieved, while protopians are practical and engage with the problems of the present moment.

It’s true! If you define “utopian” as “person whom Emile Torres doesn’t agree with,” then Torres isn’t a utopian! Checkmate, TESCREALists.

The second part of the definition isn’t even true of Anabaptists or effective altruists. Anabaptists believe they are already members of the kingdom of God,⁶ and see following God’s commands as a way of expanding the kingdom of God on Earth. And effective altruists have a mania for trying to make plans that affect the future.

III.

So. How many people is Torres willing to kill for their grand and glorious future?

Even under conservative estimates, governments trying to overthrow capitalism have killed tens of millions of people. Isn’t anticapitalism a very worrying utopian belief? It’s certainly one of the ones Steven Pinker was thinking about when he wrote about utopian ideologies inviting genocide. Looking at the Holodomor and the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the gulags, it’s difficult to see Torres’s suggestion that effective altruism should overthrow capitalism as anything but a suggestion that effective altruism isn’t utopianly genocidal enough.

But perhaps that’s unfair. Real, Torres-approved anticapitalism has never been tried. Let’s look at Torres’s actual beliefs.

Torres correctly recognizes that we can’t support eight billion people as hunter-gatherers. They suggest that we should all refrain from having children. But trying to reduce overpopulation by reducing births has caused numerous atrocities. Consider the Emergency Period in India:

In 1976, men across India were drastically changing their behaviour. Some were abandoning the beds inside their homes to sleep in fields; others were skipping major festivals and public gatherings. Those who in the past had taken the train freely, without a ticket, were finding alternative routes. They were all trying to avoid government officials. On trains, inspectors were suddenly cracking down on ticketless passengers with heavy fines, but they would give fare dodgers a break on one condition: that they agreed to be sterilised.

Government workers, from train inspectors up to the top brass, were working to sterilise as many men as possible. Some even had monthly quotas for how many men they had to convince to get vasectomies. In turn, poor men in rural villages were doing everything they could to avoid government officials, because any such encounter might end with the villager on a dingy operating table where his genitals would be cut—whether or not he wanted the operation, whether or not he already had children.

The term “motivation” was applied to a variety of incentives and disincentives intended to convince citizens to get sterilised or bring others to do so, from offering plots of land in return for sterilisation to threatening fare fines or the loss of a government job for those who refused the procedure. While both men and women could be “motivated,” the medical system was equipped to do many more vasectomies than tubectomies (though neither procedure was performed in the safest of conditions). Men were also easier targets for threats like job loss or fines, since they were were more likely to be employed outside the home, to take public transportation, and to go out and pick up government food rations.

In addition to the approximately 2,000 men who died in botched procedures, some particularly aggressive government officials were killed by protesting villagers—and even more civilians died during police retaliations.

These tragedies occurred with the approval and explicit encouragement of anti-population-growth advocates in the developed world. And this isn’t an isolated incident—reading about the Chinese One-Child Policy is very instructive.

Sure, Torres says they’re opposed to forcible sterilization now, but as they said themself, even a peaceful utopian ideology can become violent. The criticisms they apply to TESCREALists—who have yet to kill anyone—apply far more to their own ideology.

Oh, but we’re worried about effective altruists? Why again?

Or consider an AI Safety workshop that was held in late 2022, organized by people who’ve worked at MIRI and Open Philanthropy. In the meeting minutes, someone suggested the following strategy for preventing the AGI apocalypse: “Solution: be Ted Kaczynski.” Later on, another person proposed the “strategy” of “start building bombs from your cabin in Montana,” where Kaczynski conducted his campaign of domestic terrorism, “and mail them to DeepMind and OpenAI lol.” This was followed a few sentences later by, “Strategy: We kill all AI researchers.”

Torres might support an ideology that lead to the forcible sterilizations of literal millions of people, but sometimes effective altruists are juvenile edgelords. Basically the same thing!

IV.

I tried to avoid it but Torres leaves me no choice—let’s talk philosophy.

A number of my disagreements with Torres hinge on a particular subtype of ethics called “population ethics.” Population ethics is the philosophical study of issues related to which and how many people we create. It presents a notoriously difficult set of philosophical problems.⁷ For the purpose of this essay, the particular difficulty we’re interested in is that, if you think it’s possible for creating people to be good or bad, you have to accept one of:

• A world with a very large number of people whose lives are barely worth living can be better than a world with a smaller number of completely fulfilled people (the “Repugnant Conclusion”).

  • This is associated with the “Total View,” the idea that we measure how good the world is by adding together how happy every individual in the world is.

• You can sometimes make the world better by keeping the level of happiness constant, but redistributing it so some people are more blissful and some people more miserable.

• It is sometimes better to create a small number of people whose lives aren’t worth living than to create a large number of people whose lives are worth living.

  • Also, for average utilitarians (who make up most people who accept this viewpoint), whether it’s morally acceptable to have a baby depends on whether undiscovered alien planets are nice.

Many effective altruists accept the Repugnant Conclusion, which Torres—who is opposed to population growth—finds, well, repugnant. Reasonable enough. I too dislike the idea that we should be aiming for an enormous number of barely not suicidal people.

But Torres has a Repugnant Conclusion of their own:

There’s also an irony here that no one, except me and Rupert Read, have pointed out: longtermists don’t actually care about the long-term future as such. Imagine two worlds: in World A, the human population falls to 10 million people per century, and we survive for another 10,000 centuries (1 million years). That results in a total of 100 billion future people. In World B, the human population grows to 50 billion per century, but we go extinct after only 100 centuries. That results in a total of 5 trillion people. In a forced-choice situation, which world should one pick—the the longer or shorter future? Given the Total View, we should pick the shorter future (World B), all other things being equal.

Either Torres is willing to trade off well-being with the longevity of human civilization or they aren’t. If they aren’t, then why are we talking about this? They’re not going to have to choose between two civilizations that are identical except that one of them lasts longer; all choices that affect the long-term future affect how happy people are.

If they are, then Torres faces their own Repugnant Conclusion. If faced with a choice between:

• A species that has 100 million members, all blissfully happy, over the course of a thousand years

• A species that has 100 million members who live lives barely worth living, one at a time—perhaps they’re parthenogenic and bear a single child near the end of their natural lifespan—such that the species is spread across eight billion years.

Torres ought to prefer the latter.

And they gain approximately nothing from biting their bullet. Most people have some intuition that a world of 100 million happy people is better than a world of 100 happy people. No one thinks we gain by spreading the 100 million people across a greater number of years. I care about happy people having interesting experiences. I cannot comprehend why I would care about species duration.

In conclusion, Torres’s viewpoints are profoundly utopian in any reasonable sense of the word “utopian,” and their population ethics are, if anything, more dystopian than Will MacAskill’s. I believe they should resolve their own philosophical difficulties before complaining about the effective altruists’.

1. Not the majority by any means, although the ideology is disproportionately represented among the powerful.

2. Although in reality hunter-gatherers generally work 45-55 hour weeks, and their lives are pervaded by “weisure”—what else would you call sitting around the fire talking while you chip stones?

3. I asked a friend who is a former nurse whether you could have a NICU without modern supply chains and she burst out laughing.

4. If your ideas are thousands of years old, how come everyone you cite as an influence was born in the past century or so?

5. I don’t think our technology being made of living things has worked out very well for broiler chickens or dairy cows.

6. This is why many Anabaptists, like the Amish, withdraw from society and live in separate communities: they believe the subjects of the kingdom of God should live apart from the kingdoms of the world.

7. Although philosophers only started exploring population ethics in the 1980s, so I’m tentatively optimistic about future progress.