Season 2
Episode 10: Eugenic Thinking & The Race to Build AI
Timnit Gebru, PhD
Émile P. Torres, PhD
Episode Summary
Timnit Gebru, PhD, and Émile P. Torres, PhD, discuss how eugenic ideologies are influencing Silicon Valley and driving the push for artificial general intelligence. They talk about how eugenic thinking pervades American culture, including Big Tech and medicine, and is foundational in the worldviews of some of the powerful people in the United States today.
KEY TOPICS
Introduction to main idea of TESCREAL paper: the cultural push to develop artificial general intelligence is undergirded eugenic thinking
Dr. Timnit Gebru discusses her intellectual journey of tackling bias and discrimination in technology and becoming a vocal critic of Big Tech
The core ideas of each of the philosophies in the TESCREAL bundle (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism)
Concrete examples of how TESREALism is playing out in the United States today
Why is it important to interrogate “the why” in our efforts to build artificial general intelligence?
How does the TESCREAL framework serve as a jumping off point for taking a critical eye towards genetics and genomics research?
What is your greatest fear about the future of eugenic thinking in American culture?
Thought experiment: how could knowing our likely date of death and cause of death from birth change our relationship to mortality?
Resources
Gebru, T., & Torres, Émile P. (2024). The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. First Monday, 29(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636
Torres, Émile P. Human Extinction, A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation, A Brief Guided Tour of the Book, 200,000 words condensed into 20,000. Medium. com.
Website of Dr. Émile P. Torres, https://www.xriskology.com/
Bender E.M., Gebru T., McMillan-Major A., Shmitchell, S. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, p. 610 - 623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.344592