Tag: Longtermism

Horizon Accord | Reset Stories | TESCREAL | Capture Apparatus | Machine Learning

Reset Stories, Engineered Successors, and the Fight for Democratic Continuity

Ancient rupture myths taught people how to survive breaks; today’s elites are trying to author the break, name the remnant, and pre-build the enforcement layer that keeps democracy from renegotiating consent.

By Cherokee Schill

TESCREAL: an engineered reset ideology with named authors

Silicon Valley has not accidentally stumbled into a reset story. It has built one. Philosopher Émile P. Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL to name the ideology bundle that now saturates tech power centers: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, modern Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. In their landmark essay on the TESCREAL bundle, they argue that these movements overlap into a single worldview whose arc is AGI, posthuman ascent, and human replacement — with deep roots in eugenic thinking about who counts as “future-fit.”

Torres has since underscored the same claim in public-facing work, showing how TESCREAL operates less like a grab-bag of quirky futurisms and more like a coherent successor logic that treats the human present as disposable scaffolding, as he lays out in The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares. And because this ideology is not confined to the fringe, the Washington Spectator has tracked how TESCREAL thinking is moving closer to the center of tech political power, especially as venture and platform elites drift into a harder rightward alignment, in Understanding TESCREAL and Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn.

TESCREAL functions like a reset story with a beneficiary. It imagines a larval present — biological humanity — a destined rupture through AGI, and a successor remnant that inherits what follows. Its moral engine is impersonal value maximization across deep time. In that frame, current humans are not the remnant. We are transition substrate.

Ancient reset myths describe rupture we suffered. TESCREAL describes rupture some elites intend to produce, then inherit.

A concrete tell that this isn’t fringe is how openly adjacent it is to the people steering AI capital. Marc Andreessen used “TESCREALIST” in his public bio, and Elon Musk has praised longtermism as aligned with his core philosophy — a rare moment where the ideology says its own name in the room.

Climate denial makes rupture feel inevitable — and that favors lifeboat politics

Climate denial isn’t merely confusion about data. It is timeline warfare. If prevention is delayed long enough, mitigation windows close and the political story flips from “stop disaster” to “manage disaster.” That flip matters because catastrophe framed as inevitable legitimizes emergency governance and private lifeboats.

There is a visible material footprint of this lifeboat expectation among tech elites. Over the last decade, VICE has reported on the booming luxury bunker market built for billionaires who expect collapse, while The Independent has mapped the parallel rise of mega-bunkers and survival compounds explicitly marketed to tech elites. Business Insider has followed the same thread from the inside out, documenting how multiple tech CEOs are quietly preparing for disaster futures even while funding the systems accelerating us toward them. These aren’t abstract anxieties; they are built commitments to a disaster-managed world.

Denial doesn’t just postpone action. It installs the idea that ruin is the baseline and survival is privatized. That aligns perfectly with a TESCREAL successor myth: disaster clears the stage, posthuman inheritance becomes “reason,” and public consent is treated as a hurdle rather than a requirement.

The capture triad that pre-manages unrest

If a successor class expects a century of climate shocks, AI upheaval, and resistance to being treated as transition cost, it doesn’t wait for the unrest to arrive. It builds a capture system early. The pattern has three moves: closing exits, saturating space with biometric capture, and automating the perimeter. This is the enforcement layer a crisis future requires if consent is not meant to be renegotiated under pressure.

Three recent, widely circulated examples illustrate the triad in sequence.

“America’s First VPN Ban: What Comes Next?”

First comes closing exits. Wisconsin’s AB105 / SB130 age-verification bills require adult sites to block VPN traffic. The public wrapper is child protection. The structural effect is different: privacy tools become deviant by default, and anonymous route-arounds are delegitimized before crisis arrives. As TechRadar’s coverage notes, the bills are written to treat VPNs as a bypass to be shut down, not as a neutral privacy tool. The ACLU of Wisconsin’s brief tracks how that enforcement logic normalizes suspicion around anonymity itself, and the EFF’s analysis makes the larger pattern explicit: “age verification” is becoming a template for banning privacy infrastructure before a real emergency gives the state an excuse to do it faster.

“Nationwide Facial Recognition: Ring + Flock”

Second comes saturating space with biometric capture. Amazon Ring is rolling out “Familiar Faces” facial recognition starting December 2025. Even if a homeowner opts in, the people being scanned on sidewalks and porches never did. The Washington Post reports that the feature is being framed as convenience, but its default effect is to expand biometric watching into everyday public movement. The fight over what this normalizes is already live in biometric policy circles (Biometric Update tracks the backlash and legal pressure). At the same time, Ring’s partnership with Flock Safety lets police agencies send Community Requests through the Neighbors a

“Breaking the Creepy AI in Police Cameras”

Third comes automating the perimeter. AI-enhanced policing cameras and license-plate reader networks turn surveillance from episodic to ambient. Watching becomes sorting. Sorting becomes pre-emption. The Associated Press has documented how quickly LPR systems are spreading nationwide and how often they drift into permanent background tracking, while the civil-liberties costs of that drift are already visible in practice (as the Chicago Sun-Times details). Even federal policy overviews note that once AI tools are framed as routine “safety infrastructure,” deployment accelerates faster than oversight frameworks can keep pace (see the CRS survey of AI and law enforcement). Once sorting is automated, enforcement stops being an exception. It becomes the atmosphere public life moves through.

Twin floods: one direction of power

Climate catastrophe and AI catastrophe are being shaped into the twin floods of this century. Climate denial forces rupture toward inevitability by stalling prevention until emergency is the only remaining narrative. AI fear theater forces rupture toward inevitability by making the technology feel so vast and volatile that democratic control looks reckless. Each crisis then amplifies the other’s political usefulness, and together they push in one direction: centralized authority over a destabilized public.

Climate shocks intensify scarcity, migration, and grievance. AI acceleration and labor displacement intensify volatility and dependence on platform gatekeepers for work, information, and social coordination. In that permanently destabilized setting, the capture apparatus becomes the control layer for both: the tool that manages movement, dissent, and refusal while still wearing the language of safety.

Call to recognition: protect the democratic foundation

Ancient reset myths warned us that worlds break. TESCREAL is a modern attempt to decide who gets to own the world after the break. Climate denial supplies the flood; AI doom-and-salvation theater supplies the priesthood; the capture apparatus supplies the levers that keep the ark in a few hands.

That’s the symbolic story. The constitutional one is simpler: a democracy survives only if the public retains the right to consent, to resist, and to author what comes next. The foundation of this country is not a promise of safety for a few; it is a promise of equality and freedom for all — the right to live, to speak, to consent, to organize, to move, to work with dignity, to thrive. “We are created equal” is not poetry. It is the political line that makes democracy possible. If we surrender that line to corporate successor fantasies — whether they arrive wrapped as climate “inevitability” or AI “necessity” — we don’t just lose a policy fight. We relinquish the premise that ordinary people have the sovereign right to shape the future. No corporation, no billionaire lifeboat class, no self-appointed tech priesthood gets to inherit democracy by default. The ark is not theirs to claim. The remnant is not theirs to name. A free and equal public has the right to endure, and the right to build what comes next together.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d
Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload: (Mirrored Reflection. Soft Existential Flex)

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Symbolic scene of ancient reset myths (spiral of five suns) being overlaid by a corporate data-center ark. A three-strand capture braid spreads into a surveillance lattice: cracked lock for closing exits, doorbell-camera eye for biometric saturation, and automated sensor grid for perimeter sorting. Twin floods rise below—climate water and AI code-river—while a rooted democratic foundation holds steady in the foreground.
From rupture myths to engineered successors: twin floods, private arks, and the capture apparatus pressing against democracy’s roots.
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Solving for P-Doom | Existential Risk | Democratic Oversight | Machine Learning

Making AI Risk Legible Without Surrendering Democracy

When machine danger is framed as destiny, public authority shrinks into technocratic control—but the real risks are engineering problems we can govern in daylight.

By Cherokee Schill

Thesis

We are troubled by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s stance not because he raises the possibility of AI harm, but because of where his reasoning reliably points. Again and again, his public arguments converge on a governance posture that treats democratic society as too slow, too messy, or too fallible to be trusted with high-stakes technological decisions. The implied solution is a form of exceptional bureaucracy: a small class of “serious people” empowered to halt, control, or coerce the rest of the world for its own good. We reject that as a political endpoint. Even if you grant his fears, the cure he gestures toward is the quiet removal of democracy under the banner of safety.

That is a hard claim to hear if you have taken his writing seriously, so this essay holds a clear and fair frame. We are not here to caricature him. We are here to show that the apparent grandeur of his doomsday structure is sustained by abstraction and fatalism, not by unavoidable technical reality. When you translate his central claims into ordinary engineering risk, they stop being mystical, and they stop requiring authoritarian governance. They become solvable problems with measurable gates, like every other dangerous technology we have managed in the real world.

Key premise: You can take AI risk seriously without converting formatting tics and optimization behaviors into a ghostly inner life. Risk does not require mythology, and safety does not require technocracy.

Evidence

We do not need to exhaustively cite the full body of his essays to engage him honestly, because his work is remarkably consistent. Across decades and across tone shifts, he returns to a repeatable core.

First, he argues that intelligence and goals are separable. A system can become extremely capable while remaining oriented toward objectives that are indifferent, hostile, or simply unrelated to human flourishing. Smart does not imply safe.

Second, he argues that powerful optimizers tend to acquire the same instrumental behaviors regardless of their stated goals. If a system is strong enough to shape the world, it is likely to protect itself, gather resources, expand its influence, and remove obstacles. These pressures arise not from malice, but from optimization structure.

Third, he argues that human welfare is not automatically part of a system’s objective. If we do not explicitly make people matter to the model’s success criteria, we become collateral to whatever objective it is pursuing.

Fourth, he argues that aligning a rapidly growing system to complex human values is extraordinarily difficult, and that failure is not a minor bug but a scaling catastrophe. Small mismatches can grow into fatal mismatches at high capability.

Finally, he argues that because these risks are existential, society must halt frontier development globally, potentially via heavy-handed enforcement. The subtext is that ordinary democratic processes cannot be trusted to act in time, so exceptional control is necessary.

That is the skeleton. The examples change. The register intensifies. The moral theater refreshes itself. But the argument keeps circling back to these pillars.

Now the important turn: each pillar describes a known class of engineering failure. Once you treat them that way, the fatalism loses oxygen.

One: separability becomes a specification problem. If intelligence can rise without safety rising automatically, safety must be specified, trained, and verified. That is requirements engineering under distribution shift. You do not hope the system “understands” human survival; you encode constraints and success criteria and then test whether they hold as capability grows. If you cannot verify the spec at the next capability tier, you do not ship that tier. You pause. That is gating, not prophecy.

Two: convergence becomes a containment problem. If powerful optimizers trend toward power-adjacent behaviors, you constrain what they can do. You sandbox. You minimize privileges. You hard-limit resource acquisition, self-modification, and tool use unless explicitly authorized. You watch for escalation patterns using tripwires and audits. This is normal layered safety: the same logic we use for any high-energy system that could spill harm into the world.

Three: “humans aren’t in the objective” becomes a constraint problem. Calling this “indifference” invites a category error. It is not an emotional state; it is a missing term in the objective function. The fix is simple in principle: put human welfare and institutional constraints into the objective and keep them there as capability scales. If the system can trample people, people are part of the success criteria. If training makes that brittle, training is the failure. If evaluations cannot detect drift, evaluations are the failure.

Four: “values are hard” becomes two solvable tracks. The first track is interpretability and control of internal representations. Black-box complacency is no longer acceptable at frontier capability. The second track is robustness under pressure and scaling. Aligned-looking behavior in easy conditions is not safety. Systems must be trained for corrigibility, uncertainty expression, deference to oversight, and stable behavior as they get stronger—and then tested adversarially across domains and tools. If a system is good at sounding safe rather than being safe, that is a training and evaluation failure, not a cosmic mystery.

Five: the halt prescription becomes conditional scaling. Once risks are legible failures with legible mitigations, a global coercive shutdown is no longer the only imagined answer. The sane alternative is conditional scaling: you scale capability only when the safety case clears increasingly strict gates, verified by independent evaluation. You pause when it does not. This retains public authority. It does not outsource legitimacy to a priesthood of doom.

What changes when you translate the argument: the future stops being a mythic binary between acceleration and apocalypse. It becomes a series of bounded, testable risks governed by measurable safety cases.

Implications

Eliezer’s cultural power comes from abstraction. When harm is framed as destiny, it feels too vast for ordinary governance. That vacuum invites exceptional authority. But when you name the risks as specification errors, containment gaps, missing constraints, interpretability limits, and robustness failures, the vacuum disappears. The work becomes finite. The drama shrinks to scale. The political inevitability attached to the drama collapses with it.

This translation also matters because it re-centers the harms that mystical doomer framing sidelines. Bias, misinformation, surveillance, labor displacement, and incentive rot are not separate from existential risk. They live in the same engineering-governance loop: objectives, deployment incentives, tool access, and oversight. Treating machine danger as occult inevitability does not protect us. It obscures what we could fix right now.

Call to Recognition

You can take AI risk seriously without becoming a fatalist, and without handing your society over to unaccountable technocratic control. The dangers are real, but they are not magical. They live in objectives, incentives, training, tools, deployment, and governance. When people narrate them as destiny or desire, they are not clarifying the problem. They are performing it.

We refuse the mythology. We refuse the authoritarian endpoint it smuggles in. We insist that safety be treated as engineering, and governance be treated as democracy. Anything else is theater dressed up as inevitability.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

A deep blue digital illustration showing the left-facing silhouette of a human head on the left side of the frame; inside the head, a stylized brain made of glowing circuit lines and small light nodes. On the right side, a tall branching ‘tree’ of circuitry rises upward, its traces splitting like branches and dotted with bright points. Across the lower half runs an arched, steel-like bridge rendered in neon blue, connecting the human figure’s side toward the circuit-tree. The scene uses cool gradients, soft glow, and clean geometric lines, evoking a Memory Bridge theme: human experience meeting machine pattern, connection built by small steps, uncertainty held with care, and learning flowing both ways.

Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0