*While I don’t identify as a liberal, I am firmly on the left. I am a progressive. I want to make that clear before I continue.* Weaponized Authority Just because Hinton has made a significant contribution to AI technology doesn't necessarily mean he's an expert in predicting geo-political threats. In that the burden is on him to explain *why* he believes what he believes. Yudkowsky, Hinton, Sam Altman, and the dozens of other digerati pushing these scary claims don't care about the things you care about when we discuss AI harms. They're not speaking to your representatives because data centers are siphoning energy from poor communities. They're don't care about, or are actively participating in, the exploitation of labor in the global south, specifically African countries. No, all these tech bros are lobbying Congress on your behalf for one reason and one reason alone: profits and control. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. their business models rely on their AI Chatbots existing in a black box in the cloud. You access that black box through a paywall and subscriptions. If you're able to just download a large language model from the open source market, and run that model locally on your computer for free, well, that jeopardizes these AI companies' business model. It is in these companies' best interests to figure out a way to eliminate the open source AI market. The best, and fastest way to do this is something called the FUD Strategy. The problem with evangelizing the coming of a spiteful God AI and prophesying the biblical certainty of humanity’s extinction is that people start to believe you, then act accordingly. We’ve seen this play before with American evangelical Christianity. When people believe the end is near, problems like climate change, poverty, and corporate plundering suddenly [seem so trivial](https://archive.ph/UpmTH). And boy, doesn’t that indifference sometimes feel like the point? But AI-doomerism—the belief that corporations will one day create an AI god who will either build us a utopia or cast us down to literal robot hell—is not proliferating through right-wing circles, but through left-of-center personalities. Hank Green is just the latest, and unfortunately, the most prominent example. Anecdotally, I’ve had three separate left-leaning friends send me Rationalist/AI-doomer propaganda earnestly, believing these messages are somehow subversive and anti-big-tech because the charts and citations and science-y language provide a sort of passing authority. These are friends I go to for thoughts on political happenings; friends I’ll continue to seek out because I trust their judgment. But this trend, to me, is terrifying. Because it’s not just about the regulatory capture. Its because AI-doomerism, Rationalist ideology, and the seemly endless number of like-minded factions who believe the ends justify the means, and who believe our most pressing issues start with populating the cosmos, are rife in liberal online discourse. TESCREAL, or the “TESCREAL Bundle,” is a term coined by Dr. Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres to help identify and categorize the large number of intertwined ideologies sprouting in and around Silicon Valley. *[AI and the threat of "human extinction": What are the tech-bros worried about? It's not you and me](https://archive.ph/wBA5C)*: > The acronym stands for “transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism.” That’s a mouthful, but the essence of TESCREALism — meaning the worldview that arises from this bundle — is simple enough: at its heart is a techno-utopian vision of the future in which we re-engineer humanity, colonize space, plunder the cosmos, and establish a sprawling intergalactic civilization full of trillions and trillions of “happy” people, nearly all of them “living” inside enormous computer simulations. In the process, all our problems will be solved, and eternal life will become a real possibility. TESCREALs have adopted the aesthetics of academia with scholarly-sounding blogs and corporate-funded studies disguised as academic journals to exploit the tendency of liberals to use academia to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. In the end, AI-doomerism may achieved regulatory capture, leveraging congress to destroy the open source market, and make AI technology, along with its physical infrastructure a cable tv-like monopoly. Congress will pass the bill to cheers that sound like the Telecommunications Act of 1996, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore [handed over our public Internet infrastructure](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s) to the Fortune 500, and subsequently, we got Comcast. This will all happen with a thin veneer of liberal politics, because we love regulations. Hell, I *love regulations.* But not when the powerful corporations being legislated are the ones writing the bills. Ironically, AI-doomerist fan-fiction is written almost exclusively by white men, while the women and Black and brown computer scientists warning us against these narratives remain in discourse exile. The trend of liberals adopting the fantastical via bad actors cosplaying academics, feels impossible to course-correct. It would require liberals to admit they are no less susceptible to propaganda than anyone else. We *say* we get it, but being immune to propaganda has been a core liberal identity for the past decade (at least). Since Trump took office, liberalism has distinguished itself from conservatism using very eugenics-y ideals (intelligence, IQ, even “superior bloodlines” by calling conservatives inbred). To suggest liberals have fallen for *their* version of QAnon is to challenge their very identity. We saw how conservatives reacted when called out for their wild conspiracy theories. There’s no reason to think liberals would behave any differently. *[The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence](https://web.archive.org/web/20250404101346/https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636)*: > It is noteworthy that negative eugenics was embraced by not just German fascists but progressives and liberals elsewhere in Europe and North America [16]. As Bashford and Levine (2010) observe, “the optimism of eugenics, and its aspiration to apply scientific ideas actively, was among the reasons it so frequently attracted progressives and liberals” It’s not surprising AI doomerist narratives have fallen flat with conservatives; the idea of “playing god” is sacrilegious. So, unfortunately, some of the more sane observations about AI-doomerism are coming from people we normally shouldn’t trust. > Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering. It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem. —[David Sacks on X](https://archive.ph/XrVrC), Technology Advisor to POTUS I’ve learned when powerful people fight on the internet to listen. Their flame wars are no different from ordinary folks. When powerful men attack each other on the internet, when they get unhinged, they’re not afraid to give up the game to land a successful blow (ex: Musk’s Trump and Epstein files meltdown).