--- alias: - TESCREALism - TESCREAL bundle category: Ideology created: 2026-06-20 location: United States summary: TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for a bundle of seven overlapping ideologies, transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, that they argue share roots in twentieth-century eugenics and together drive the race to build artificial general intelligence. tags: - Concept - TESCREAL - Transhumanism - EffectiveAltruism - Longtermism - Eugenics - ArtificialIntelligence updated: 2026-06-20 --- TESCREAL is an acronym for a bundle of seven interconnected ideologies: [transhumanism](/concepts/transhumanism/), [extropianism](/concepts/extropianism/), [singularitarianism](/concepts/singularitarianism/), [cosmism](/concepts/russian-cosmism/), [rationalism](/concepts/rationalist-community/), [effective altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/), and longtermism. The term was coined by the philosopher Émile P. Torres and developed with the computer scientist Timnit Gebru, who argue that the seven movements form a single overlapping worldview with shared intellectual progenitors in the Anglo-American [eugenics](/concepts/eugenics/) tradition, and that this worldview supplies the motivating vision behind the corporate race to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). Torres and Gebru set out the argument in the paper "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence," published in *First Monday* in April 2024.[^1][^2] ### The Seven Components The bundle's letters trace a rough chronology. Transhumanism is the umbrella commitment to using technology to transcend human biological limits; extropianism is its 1990s libertarian strand built by [Max More](/people/max-more/); singularitarianism is the belief, associated with Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, that accelerating technology will produce a superintelligence; cosmism, in its modern form, extends the program to the colonization of space and the creation of vast numbers of digital minds. Rationalism is the [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/people/eliezer-yudkowsky/) and LessWrong movement organized around Bayesian reasoning and AI risk; effective altruism is the maximizing-good movement that emerged from Oxford philosophy and the rationalist community; and longtermism is the view that positively shaping the far future, above all by preventing extinction and enabling a posthuman civilization, is a paramount moral priority.[^1][^3] Torres and Gebru treat the bundle as a unit because its components share personnel, funding, and core texts. The same figures recur across the movements, the same organizations, including the [Future of Humanity Institute](/organizations/future-of-humanity-institute/), the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/), and the effective-altruism funders, support several of them at once, and a small set of authors, principally [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/), supplies the foundational arguments for more than one. Torres, a former longtermist who turned into one of the movement's sharpest critics, and Gebru, who was forced out of Google's AI ethics team in 2020 after coauthoring a paper critical of large language models and went on to found the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), developed the acronym to name what they saw as a coherent ideology operating behind the AGI industry.[^2][^4] ### The Eugenics Argument The central claim of the *First Monday* paper is that the bundle descends from twentieth-century eugenics and reproduces its logic. The authors trace shared progenitors including [Francis Galton](/people/francis-galton/), who coined the word "eugenics," and [Julian Huxley](/people/julian-huxley/), the biologist who coined the modern usage of "transhumanism" in 1957 and served as the first president of the British Eugenics Society. They argue that the movements inherit a project of improving and ranking human cognitive capacity, and that this inheritance surfaces in the recurring appearance of racial-intelligence and [human-biodiversity](/concepts/human-biodiversity/) claims among prominent figures, including the 1996 email in which Bostrom asserted that black people are less intelligent than white people, and the research network funded by the [Pioneer Fund](/organizations/pioneer-fund/).[^1][^5] In the paper's account, the utopian framing of the bundle, the promise that AGI will unlock a future of astronomical value, colonizing the galaxy and supporting enormous populations of future people, functions to justify present risk and harm. If the potential future is large enough, the argument runs, then almost any present cost can be outweighed by a small reduction in the chance of extinction, a reasoning the authors say licenses the reckless development of AGI and the dismissal of its documented near-term harms. Bostrom's concept of "astronomical waste," which holds that any delay in colonizing the universe forfeits an immense number of possible lives, is the formalization they cite.[^1][^6] ### The TESCREALists Torres and Gebru apply the label "TESCREALists" to the technologists and funders advancing the AGI program, among them [Sam Altman](/people/sam-altman/) of [OpenAI](/organizations/openai/), [Elon Musk](/people/elon-musk/), the venture capitalist [Marc Andreessen](/people/marc-andreessen/), and the effective-altruism financier [Sam Bankman-Fried](/people/sam-bankman-fried/), alongside the movement's theorists Bostrom and Yudkowsky. The framework places the safety-focused and acceleration-focused wings of the AI industry, the [Anthropic](/organizations/anthropic/) and OpenAI founders on one side and the [effective accelerationists](/concepts/effective-accelerationism/) on the other, within the same ideological family despite their public disagreements over the pace of development.[^2][^4] The acronym has been adopted by critics of the AI industry and contested by figures within the bundle, who reject the grouping as a conflation of distinct positions and the eugenics charge as guilt by association. The term circulates in the debate over AI governance as a shorthand for the worldview that critics say connects [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/)-funded AI-risk philanthropy, the Oxford and Bay Area longtermist institutions, and the frontier-AI companies.[^2][^7] [^1]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." *First Monday* 29, no. 4, April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 [^2]: "The TESCREAL Bundle," Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) project page. https://dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/ [^3]: Torres, Émile P. "The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares," *Truthdig,* June 2023, on the components of the bundle. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/ [^4]: "Research Paper Exposes Dark Echoes of Eugenics in Artificial Intelligence Pursuit," on the TESCREALists and the bundle's shared personnel. https://blackgoldencommunications.com/research-paper-exposes-dark-echoes-of-eugenics-in-artificial-intelligence-pursuit/ [^5]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023, on the Bostrom email. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/ [^6]: Bostrom, Nick. "Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development." *Utilitas* 15, no. 3, 2003. [^7]: "Why Silicon Valley's most powerful people are so obsessed with TESCREAL," contemporaneous press coverage of the term's reception and the disputes over it, 2023 to 2024.