AI and Esoteric Fascism
So, one of my biggest regrets over the past few months is the degree to which I missed the fact that the “mainstream” “AI” movement is a fascist project.
Sorry, let me step back a bit instead of jumping right in.
I underestimated how awful “AI” and adjacent organisations really are #
When I first began to look into Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Model back in 2022, it quickly became obvious that much of the rhetoric around LLMs was… weird.
Or, if we’re being plain-spoken, much of what the executives and engineers at the organisations making these systems were saying was outright weirdo cult shit, much of it horrendously racist and offensive.
- End of the world predictions.
- Prophecies of digital gods and demons.
- Weird religious catechisms such as the Roko’s Baselisk nonsense.
- Horrendous racism and bigotry, with much of it being indistinguishable from eugenics and white supremacy.
After talking it through with the editor who had volunteered to help me out with The Intelligence Illusion I decided to de-emphasise in the book the fact that much of the field of “AI” is utterly detached from reality in ways that are simultaneously disturbing and offensive and focus instead on the ways the technology was risky for business users.
In her words: “these people are so unhinged that if you try to point it out, you’ll come off as an irrational conspiracy theorist. You’ll have more credibility if you don’t mention it.”
Even without mentioning their deluded worldview, I still managed to underestimate just how dysfunctional the tech industry is and just how little regard “AI” vendors have for actual productive outcomes for their software.
I also underestimated the outright dishonesty of many in the management class.
I had thought it would be obvious from the sheer cavalcade of risks presented in the first edition of the book that it was not suitable for use in business, not realising that many people would use it as a guide to sell “AI” to businesses:
They used my list of concrete business risks as a way to look “reasonable” and “realistic” to help sell “AI” to organisations.
This is why I published a second edition of the book. I needed to both correct my underestimation of the risks and dysfunctions of the industry and I needed to make it absolutely clear that deploying these systems in your business will harm it. You can mitigate the harm, but that’s like deliberately taking both the poison and an antidote. The poison has no benefit, so the sensible thing to do would have been to skip both and not poison yourself in the first place.
But the political and religious dimension to “AI” still remained unaddressed – for the most part – simply because it is neither my area of expertise nor the focus of the book. Providing a solid business rationale for avoiding the tech is my contribution, but others have been doing the hard work of outlining the ideological and political dimensions to “AI”.
- Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres have put together an overview and analysis of the bundle of ideologies that dominate “AI” culture: The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. And they have continued to cover these cult-like ideas in other venues.
- Dan McQuillan has been arguing that much of “AI” is an overtly political project that is intended by many of those involved to lead to a form of algorithmic authoritarianism. He outlines some of this in his book Resisting AI.
There are others doing similar work, much of it led by The Distributed AI Research Institute – founded by Timnit Gebru – and its projects.
(Just because I haven’t mentioned others here doesn’t mean I’m not aware of their contributions or importance. Emily M. Bender mentions a few of them in this post.)
These horrendous ideologies #
This picture of the field of “AI” is not a pretty one.
Eugenics and racism #
The “AI” field as a whole has bought into racist ideas on intelligence born out of eugenics:
To make matters worse, “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence” is not the only AI paper to cite Linda Gottfredson’s work. After the news regarding Microsoft’s paper broke, I discovered that Shane Legg, co-founder of DeepMind (now part of Google) also cited her definition of intelligence in the introduction to his 2008 PhD thesis called “Machine Super Intelligence”. In it, he refers to it as “an especially interesting definition as it was given as part of a group statement signed by 52 experts in the field”. The controversy regarding Gottfredson’s racism and those of these “experts” was well established by 2008 as the statement was originally released in defense of Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve. Murray’s book was immediately accused of supporting racist political policies upon its release and these accusations have followed the book into the 21st century… As such, I again have no clue how this oversight managed to get into a released paper.
AGI Researchers Stop Quoting White Supremacists Challenge (Impossible)
Now that US tech is firmly in bed with an authoritarian US administration, I think we do have a clue how this oversight happened. Or, at least, it doesn’t take much for us to imagine how.
Eugenics has always been a constant facet of fascism and Nazism specifically:
Negative eugenics is what justified restrictive immigration and anti-miscegenation laws throughout the twentieth century, as well as the forced sterilization programs implemented in states such as California. California’s eugenics program, which started in 1909, was subsequently adopted by the Nazis as a template for the “racial hygiene” policies that ultimately led to the Holocaust (Black, 2003; Stern, et al., 2017).
And…
In fact, leading figures in the TESCREAL community have approvingly cited, or expressed support for, the work of Charles Murray, known for his scientific racism, and worried about “dysgenic” pressures (the opposite of “eugenic”) (see Torres, 2023a). Bostrom himself identifies “‘dysgenic’ pressures” as one possible existential risk in his 2002 paper, alongside nuclear war and a superintelligence takeover. He wrote: “Currently it seems that there is a negative correlation in some places between intellectual achievement and fertility. If such selection were to operate over a long period of time, we might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species, homo philoprogenitus (‘lover of many offspring’)” (Bostrom, 2002). More recently, Yudkowsky tweeted about IQs apparently dropping in Norway, although he added that the “effect appears within families, so it’s not due to immigration or dysgenic reproduction” — i.e., less intelligent foreigners immigrating to Norway or individuals with lower “intelligence” having more children [59].
The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence
Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism #
These beliefs all focus on the idea that you can “rationally” attain an ideal future outcome for the selected inheritors of humanity by both making horrendous sacrifices in the present and by investing in those who are inherently superior and are destined to inherit.
Coupled with the inherent white supremacy of the eugenics movement, it amounts to accepting mass death in the present to make a better world for white people.
For example, in longtermism this white supremacy seems to be baked into the very foundation:
These theories treat as less urgent those anthropogenic hazards that won’t snuff out humanity altogether, and the theories’ adherents place the currently intensifying human-caused climate crisis squarely in this category, encouraging us to regard as morally less important the suffering and death it is occasioning. The harms in question are falling in dramatically lopsided fashion on racialised and Indigenous groups the world over, groups whose very vulnerability to these harms is a product of long histories of injustice. Such theory-induced callousness to losses and damages visited grossly unequally on racialised people licenses talk of a racist strain in longtermist thinking, and individual longtermists deepen this strain in specific ways. A well-placed young longtermist once argued that inhabitants of rich countries are generally more ‘innovative’ and ‘economically productive’ and that saving their lives is hence substantially more important for humanity’s future than saving lives in poor countries.
Transhumanism, Extropianism, and Singularitarianism #
Another strand of the bundle are ideologies that involve a future escape from the limitations of the physical body and the material world using technology, Singularitarianism being the most popular expression of the idea:
Singularitarianism is just the idea that the “Singularity” — the moment when the pace of technological development exceeds our comprehension, perhaps driven by an “intelligence explosion” of self-improving AI — will play an integral role in bringing about the techno-utopian future mentioned above, plus a state of radical, post-scarcity abundance. In one popular version, the Singularity enables our posthuman digital descendants to colonize and “wake up” the universe. “The ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” writes TESCREAList Ray Kurzweil, a research scientist at Google who was personally hired by Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and an adherent of a version of TESCREALism called “digital utopianism.”
These ideas all offer some form of salvation, either from the limitations of our physical bodies or from the limitations of the material world. These are outright mystical and religious ideas that have no grounding in science or engineering.
Let’s call this what it is #
Separately, the TESCREAL bundle and the algorithmic authoritarianism paint a picture of a divided tech industry, one part taken over by cults, the other by authoritarian oligarchs.
The political side is obvious. They believe that “AI” systems can keep society around them functional in the face of the massive “population losses” that are inevitable if their policies get implemented.
But, if you instead look at them together as a single movement, they bear a striking resemblance to an earlier 20th century political ideology that also mixed together pseudoscience, strange mystical ideas, and horrendous authoritarianism.
The work these researchers have done make it clear that the political authoritarianism and the cult-like religious zealotry are two sides to the same coin.
And it’s a coin with deep historical roots:
Fascism. Or, specifically Esoteric Neo-Nazism.
One of the reasons why the somewhat conflicting ideologies of the TESCREAL bundle and the ongoing fascist project in the US work so well together is that TESCREAL itself is just the latest iteration of of the mysticism-bound Neo-Nazi political movements that survived the fall of Nazi Germany.
- Transhumanism, Extropianism, and Singularitarianism already have Gnostic influences, which was popular in Esoteric Neo-Nazi movements. Specifically both build on the idea that the material world is an illusion (or simulation) and that those superior could be “freed” from the limitations of our physical world.
- Their white supremacy and belief in eugenics echo the same arguments as that of the Nazis themselves.
- The common obsession with Greenland (and Iceland) has a basis in Nazi mythology as a lost Aryan utopia.
- The singularity – which definitely only includes those deemed worthy – isn’t “rapture for nerds” as the joke goes, but, combined with the Gnostic belief that the material reality is a prison, also becomes a form of “Collective Aryan Unconscious” that lets the “superior” escape the material world. Instead of a shared spiritual heritage, it’s a shared spiritual future attainable only by those who fulfil their eugenics-inspired genetic and “intellectual” criteria.
- Even the conflicting representations of the inevitable digital “God” – some of them say it will be benevolent, some that it will be malevolent – has a basis in Gnosticism. One God, the demiurge, is the enslaver of humanity, while the other is poised to save humanity from the prison of the material world.
A common facet to TESCREAL is that they take mystical ideas from the Neo-Nazi movement and flip it from being about a mythical past to a mythical future.
- Instead of a lost Aryan utopia in Greenland, they talk about a future technological utopia.
- Instead of a Gnostic world view that looks at past demiurge and saviour deities, they prophetise future digital demiurges (“basilisk”) and saviour “AI” (superintelligent AI).
These “bonkers” ideologies are integral to the fascist project as a rationale for atrocities and destruction. They are a belief system that promises a bright future to the selected people and provides them with a systemic rationale for letting mass death happen as “AI” will replace the workers.
I believe that the current “AI” bubble is an outright Neo-Nazi project that cannot be separated from the thugs and fascists that seem to be taking over the US and indivisible from the 21st century iteration of Esoteric Neo-Nazi mysticism that is the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies.
If that is true, then there is simply no scope for fair or ethical use of these systems.