Meet TESCREAL, Silicon Valley’s New Faith

Have you ever wondered why AI leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei seem so, well, weird? Why do they work relentlessly to build advanced AI models while also warning that their creations could spell the end of the world?

In a word, TESCREAL.

You’ve probably never heard of it. It looks like a typo or some kind of gibberish, but TESCREAL represents a growing movement—a movement I’d call a religion and an ape of Catholicism—that’s gaining influence and could shape the future of this country and the world. This might sound hyperbolic, but if anything, I might be understating its potential impact.

TESCREAL (pronounced “Tes-kree-all”) is an admittedly clunky acronym, and it stands for:

• Transhumanism
• Extropianism
• Singularitarianism
• Cosmism
• Rationalism
• Effective Altruism
• Longtermism

Coined by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres, it denotes a constellation of the beliefs that drive many of the Silicon Valley elite, particularly those involved in the field of artificial intelligence. Most of the people tagged as TESCREAL adherents dispute the label and consider it polemical, but when you look into their statements and actions, the label fits.

So what exactly is TESCREAL? I’m not going to get into every aspect of the movement/religion, but instead I’ll focus on its most dangerous aspects and ways it apes Catholicism.

TESCREAL is primarily focused on the future (i.e., the “longtermism” part). On some level, all religions think about the future, but they are typically focused on the afterlife—our life after we die. But most leading adherents of TESCREAL are materialists and don’t believe in an afterlife. So they want to make this world a heavenly utopia, made in their image. Specifically, this utopian future is one in which technology plays the role of savior.

This vision of the future also involves an evolutionary leap for humanity, in which man and machine are combined in some form (the transhumanist piece). Whether that combination involves man becoming more machine-like, or machines becoming more “human” is debated among the Silicon Valley elites, but either way it’s a future that’s not fully man-centered.

For TESCREAL believers, the great enemy is entropy, the tendency of everything to decay into disorder. By constant technological advancement, humanity can combat entropy. The term coined for this piece is extropianism, i.e., the opposite of entropy.

This vision of the future ties in nicely with Effective Altruism, in which adherents make an almost mathematical calculation as to what actions will benefit the most people, particularly future generations. And because future people far outnumber people alive today, even tiny reductions in long-term risk outweigh large present goods. For a strict longtermist, there’s no moral difference between the baby crawling in front of you and a potential person 1,000 years in the future.

Another key piece of the TESCREAL puzzle is its understanding of what it means to be human. For most people—and just about every mainstream religion—what makes a human is pretty obvious. But for the TESCREAL crowd, the definition of human is a bit more, well, flexible. This is where transhumanism comes in again. While we all accept certain modifications to the body without believing those changes make the person into something nonhuman (someone with a pacemaker is still human), transhumanists are willing to go much, much further. Its proponents advocate for any and all “enhancements” to the human body, and also are willing to entertain enhancements to the human mind. Want to put a human brain in a robot? Or transfer a human’s consciousness to the internet? Everything is on the table, and in fact, most of these options are seen as unqualified goods.

TESCREAL goes even further. Perhaps machines themselves should be considered life-forms, equal to or even superior to humankind. That’s what’s driving the debates about AI consciousness, and Anthropic’s recent decision to not allow “abusive and cruel” treatment of its LLMs. Humanity might itself evolve into a new life-form of man and machine, or maybe machines themselves will just become a life-form that one day replaces humanity.

This is important to remember when you hear from the AI doomer crowd, exemplified by people like Eliezer Yudkowsky. It might seem as if they are all anti-TESCREAL, but in fact they too are often adherents. They don’t oppose a machine-dominated, transhumanist future; they worry about a future where humanity gets eliminated before machines have a chance to take over. This explains the apparent contradiction with some of AI’s biggest boosters and developers also sounding like AI doomers. The path to a tech-utopia is debated among TESCREAL adherents, but not the final goal.

At its core, TESCREAL is an ape of Catholicism. Its desire for a permanent happy existence, where all our desires are fulfilled and we have no faults or failures, is something embedded in our souls. It’s a desire that only Catholicism can fulfill. TESCREAL, on the other hand, inverts these natural desires into purely earthly goals.

Whereas in Catholicism, God makes man, in TESCREAL, man makes god (technology). Catholicism looks forward to the parousia—Christ’s final judgment, and a new heavens and a new earth. TESCREAL looks forward to the Singularity, when machine intelligence surpasses our own and remakes the world in its image. Catholicism teaches that God will divinize us, transforming us into His perfect image and likeness; TESCREAL preaches man’s self-transformation into a merger of man and machine.

Instead of a resurrection of the body, TESCREAL points to an uploading of the mind into a computer or robotic body. It has its prophets such as Kurzweil, Yudkowsky, Bostrom, and its missionaries such as Altman and Amodei. Most importantly, instead of emphasizing the inherent and great dignity of each human person, TESCREAL clumps all humans into a generic “humanity,” redefines it to potentially include non-human machines, and promotes the importance of safeguarding the group, not the individuals within.

Artificial intelligence is the obvious battleground in this religious war between Catholicism and TESCREAL. Because of the serious problems with TESCREAL, many Catholics have become reflexively anti-AI. But this is not the way forward, nor is it the approach Pope Leo is promoting. To reject AI completely is the same as rejecting moviemaking because Hollywood is so degenerate. The false religion of TESCREAL wants to use AI to create a machine-dominated utopia, but the Church sees AI as one more tool we can use to help and advance human dignity, while warning of ways it can degrade or transform that dignity into something less than human. We can use AI, but we should use it intentionally, insisting that it advances humanity rather than attempt to replace us (these are themes I dive into deeply in my upcoming book The Catholic Guide to Artificial Intelligence: Preserving the Distinction Between Man and Machine).

As Catholics, we need to fight against the forces of TESCREAL while advocating for the proper use of artificial intelligence. If we simply reject AI’s use, TESCREAL wins. But if we use our influence to ensure that AI is used in ways that protect and advance human dignity, then Catholicism, rather than the false religion of TESCREAL, can be dominant again.