The AI development race is not driven by neutral science but by a specific ideological bundle—TESCREAL—rooted in eugenics, that uses existential risk rhetoric to justify concentrating power and evading accountability.
Overview
The most influential AI futures are not objective assessments but products of a specific ideological tradition. This ideology has been adopted by tech billionaires who use it to justify accumulating power while ignoring present harms.
Classification
- Geographic concentration
- Global academic and activist networks; strongest in US (Bay Area as subject of critique), Europe, Global South
- Tags
- governance
- philosophy
- society
- Scenario type (full)
- Dystopian / Governance scenario (meta-scenario)
- Human position
- Subordinated: the majority of humanity is excluded from decisions about AI's direction
- Time horizon
- Already underway; the critique is about the present
- Discourse status
- Emerging as a critical framework; coined by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres in 2023
Impacts
- Mechanism
- Ideological capture: TESCREAL ideas spread through elite networks, shaping what gets built, funded, and regulated. The language of 'existential risk' provides moral cover for projects that primarily serve elite interests.
- Domain impacts
- Labor & Income TESCREAL-driven AI prioritizes automation and AGI over worker-centered AI; annotation labor exploited in the Global South. Education TESCREAL ideas dominate AI curricula; alternative frameworks are marginalized. Governance & Democracy AI governance is captured by TESCREAL-aligned actors who set the terms of debate. War & Security Existential risk rhetoric is used to justify secrecy and military-adjacent AI development. Inequality & Class TESCREAL ideology benefits a small elite while ignoring present harms on marginalized communities. Culture & Art TESCREAL's cultural dominance crowds out alternative visions of technology's relationship with society. Meaning & Purpose TESCREAL provides meaning through a grand narrative of cosmic significance; critics see secular religion displacing moral accountability. Family & Reproduction TESCREAL ideas about population ethics and longtermism have implications for reproductive ethics. Health & Longevity Speculative longevity research is funded at the expense of accessible healthcare AI. Rights & Agency TESCREAL rhetoric about 'future beings' is used to deprioritize the rights of present people. Environment Energy-intensive AI development is justified through TESCREAL's growth imperative. Existential Survival The critique argues that TESCREAL itself creates existential risk by concentrating power.
Discourse
Notes on critique
Pop culture
Cultural note
Pop-culture references
Acceptance
- Key assumptions
- Assumes the ideologies are genuinely interconnected; assumes the eugenics genealogy is causally relevant; assumes elite capture is the primary dynamic.
- Primary audiences
- AI ethics researchers, decolonial AI scholars, tech accountability advocates, critical theorists, journalists
Personas
- Persona 1
- The Critical AI Researcher – Uses TESCREAL as an analytical tool to examine how ideology shapes AI priorities.
- Persona 2
- The Tech Accountability Journalist – Tracks money, networks, and ideas connecting TESCREAL-aligned actors.
- Hard-believer profile
- Name & Age: Dr. Mariam El-Amin, 42. Occupation: Critical AI studies professor, London. Core Conviction: The AI industry is not neutral. It is driven by TESCREAL—ideologies that emerged from the eugenics movement. When Sam Altman talks about 'benefiting all of humanity,' he is pursuing a specific ideological vision that concentrates power. The first step toward genuine AI governance is naming the ideology and following the money. Biggest Fear: That TESCREAL becomes so normalized its assumptions become invisible. Biggest Hope: That critical scholarship and activism succeed in democratizing AI governance.
References
Notes on canonical texts
Notes on further references
A scene from this future
The Conference
A university auditorium, 2028
Dr. El-Amin watched the audience shift uncomfortably as she clicked to the slide showing the funding flows.
"This is where the money goes," she said. "Eighteen billion dollars in the last five years, flowing from seven billionaires through twelve organizations into research programs that share a single ideological assumption: that the most important thing humanity can do is build artificial superintelligence as fast as possible, and that any cost—any present harm, any displaced worker, any exploited data laborer—is justified by the astronomical scale of the future they're building."
A hand went up. A young man in a rationalist community t-shirt. "But existential risk is real. You can't just dismiss it because you don't like the people working on it."
"I'm not dismissing existential risk," she said. "I'm asking who gets to define it, who profits from that definition, and whose risks are being ignored while we pour billions into speculative futures. There are people being harmed by AI right now—today—and the framework you've adopted tells you their suffering is less important than the suffering of hypothetical beings who don't exist yet."
The room was quiet. She could feel the resistance—not hostile, but deep. She was asking them to see the water they were swimming in.
After the talk, a woman approached. She worked at one of the organizations on the funding slide. "I don't agree with everything you said," she told Mariam. "But I've never seen anyone name it before. I've been swimming in this ideology for ten years and I couldn't see it because it was everywhere."
Mariam nodded. That was always the hardest part—not proving the ideology existed, but making it visible to the people living inside it.
Last updated 22 May 2026