Beyond AI salvation: why a caring society is the future worth fighting for !
by Eloïse Bodin and Susanne de Jong
Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com
On December 12, leaders from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic gathered with policymakers at the White House to discuss the ambitious future of AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a documentary on the vast infrastructure needed to support the next generation of AI, including 5-gigawatt data centers spread across multiple states—each capable of powering around 300,000 homes. This vision carries a monumental price tag, with Altman estimating that an AI-driven future could require $5 to $7 trillion, about 20 times the cost of the Apollo program.
Altman recently argued that accelerating AI capabilities will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” promising “unimaginable” prosperity and even “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.” This unfounded claim that AI alone can solve climate change reflects a deeper ideology among today’s tech visionaries—one that poses a significant risk to the lives and wellbeing of the less privileged in current and future generations. Not only do we need to acknowledge and criticize this emerging ideology, we should push for an alternative and constructive narrative which places care, not AI, at the heart of our shared future.
What the TESCREAL ideology is
The ideology driving Altman and other tech titans, like Elon Musk and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has recently been coined as “TESCREAL.” Introduced by ex-Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres, TESCREAL represents a spectrum of overlapping ideologies deeply rooted in rationalist, eugenic, and predominantly-white ideals. The acronym refers to Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism—each promoting a vision of a post-human existence.
At the core of TESCREALism lies a “techno-utopian” vision for the future, where advanced technologies promise radical abundance, human reengineering, immortality, and the colonization of the universe, with as the cornerstone the creation of superintelligent AGI, a type of AI that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities in cognitive tasks, as the cornerstone. Proponents dream of sprawling post-human civilizations filled with trillions of simulated beings, believing this will maximize “cumulative civilizational net happiness.”
TESCREAL’s disconnect from planetary care
TESCREAL advocates seem to prioritize theoretical future lives over the welfare of today’s people, casting climate change as almost irrelevant in comparison to their vision of digitized futures. Eric Schmidt, for example, recently suggested that despite AI’s vast energy demands, we should press forward with its development, asserting that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway.” Schmidt’s position echoes the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which champions the idea that relentless innovation will solve our biggest environmental issues.
TESCREALists like Nick Bostrom have made it implicitly clear that they consider climate change a minor issue compared to the goal of maximizing human welfare over vast stretches of time. Their ideas include theories that humanity could exist on Earth for another billion years—or spread across space for up to 1040 years—where future humans might live in “Matrix-like” simulations on planet-sized computers. According to this vision, the greater the number of such future people living in digitized futures, the more happiness there will be and hence the better the universe would become. For AI leaders and some academics who embrace this thinking, prioritizing the welfare of these hypothetical future beings is more important than addressing the needs of today’s generations, causing them to see climate change as a relatively minor issue.
In reality, some proponents of the TESCREAList ideology are in positions to disproportionately influence the climate change agenda. Several articles identify that the CEOs of OpenAI and SpaceX, former CEOs of Google, and other companies and related higher-up managers tend to be amongst the most extreme visionaries and buy-ins of the TESCREAL ideology, while also having the required financial and other resources that are deeply needed to fill the financing and investment gap. According to most recent estimates, EUR 5.7 trillion of climate finance is required annually between now and 2030, and EUR 6.7 trillion by 2050, to deliver Net Zero globally. In parallel, the CEOs of companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others have committed billions into the further investment of AI while their climate neutrality targets are falling out of reach or are abandoned all together.
While technology undoubtedly plays a vital role in addressing climate change, it should not be seen as a panacea. This techno-optimist mindset, rooted in the belief that innovation alone can outpace environmental decline, diverts attention from essential climate action, sidelining human-driven solutions and community-led efforts. While technology and knowledge-sharing are critical, the TESCREAL approach risks promoting passive hope in tech fixes, allowing corporations and policymakers to neglect meaningful emissions reductions.
Similarly, the TESCREAL ideology suggests a desillusion with humanity’s capability to address the problems that it faces and has caused. This perspective undermines the reality that we already possess viable solutions for tackling the climate crisis, such as phasing out fossil fuels and reducing our energy consumption. Instead of relying on artificial intelligence to provide answers, what we truly need is the political will to implement these solutions and commit to meaningful change. By recognizing our own potential and capacity for action, we can challenge the notion that only technology holds the key to a sustainable future.
Finally, if AI enthusiasts often celebrate its potential to transform industries and solve global challenges, they tend to gloss over the very concrete, material cost of this technology. AI systems aren’t just floating in an abstract “cloud” — they rely on physical data centers and hardware powered by critical raw materials (CRMs) like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements. These materials are not unlimited and constitute huge geopolitical and environmental challenges.
Fleeing from reality – creating god to avoid death
Let us dive a little deeper into TESCREAL’s underlying ideas and implications. TESCREAL is grounded in an almost religious veneration of intelligence and rationality as humanity’s highest virtue. Some of its followers dream of creating a “god” in the form of advanced AI, believing that it will solve our biggest challenges. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, stated at the Frontiers Forum Live in Lisbon that unlike all the techniques developed throughout history, AI can create new ideas, suggesting that it could even create a new Bible. Harari noted that all religions claim their sacred books were written by a superhuman intelligence, yet now, he predicted that in a few years, there could be the emergence of religions that would be deemed ‘correct’ from this perspective.
While framed as “intelligence,” this ideology tends to distinguish a specific kind of intelligence that is worth accelerating based on deeply ingrained biases, including racist, misogynistic, and ableist beliefs. For instance, Nick Bostrom, one of the leading TESCREALists, famously wrote an email to his fellow Extropian thinkers claiming that “Blacks are more stupid than whites,” while later only apologizing for using the N-word rather than walking back the essence of the statement itself. TESCREAL has almost exclusively been crafted by affluent white men at elite universities and in Silicon Valley, many of which pursue misogynistic rhetorics like Elon Musk mansplaining how having a child is the most wonderful thing in the world as the argument against abortion and resisting any claims of legitimacy for the LGBTQI+ community as far as casting out his transgender daughter.
The influence of TESCREAL cannot be overstated, although it still seems to fly under the radar of most people. TESCREAL’s loudest apostles are amongst the most powerful people of this planet in terms of financial resources, follower-ship, and political influence. Its influence already reaches into the US election, where Vice President Candidate for Donald Trump, DJ Vance owes his political rise to Peter Thiel, a key sponsor of TESCREAL initiatives. Donald Trump selected JD Vance, a candidate that is similarly committed to the misogynistic Project 2025 and known for his hateful statements against independent women, in the first place after having consulted Thiel and Musk. It is through political influence like this that TESCREALists threaten to convince people that the government has no say in the development and regulation of new technologies and AI. With Donald Trump being re-elected, TESCREALists are in a more powerful position than ever.
TESCREAL’s origin in human-centrism and privilege
While the TESCREAL ideology may seem almost surreal for many people, there are explanations for its potential appeal to many. Mélanie Challenger’s essay, Love and Death, highlights how Western society’s fear of ecological collapse and death fuels irrational ideologies like TESCREAL, which embrace control and technological escape rather than acceptance and care. This ideology, rooted in the denial of interdependence and vulnerability, reflects a cultural urge to flee reality rather than confront it with compassion and resilience. Challenger’s work urges us to recognize that a sustainable response to our deepest fears lies in embracing love, care, and collective responsibility for the world and each other, rather than perpetuating destructive cycles of denial.
This belief system, predictably, is devastating for life on Earth. If only human essence holds value, then our impact on countless other species seems irrelevant. By telling ourselves that only we truly matter, we justify meeting human needs as inherently good—even when it leads to widespread destruction. This belief system justifies the destruction of ecosystems, framing environmental harm as a necessary byproduct of technological progress.
Besides these more theoretical explanations, there is also an obvious angle: For billionaires like Elon Musk and his peers, detachment from the consequences of climate change for today’s and tomorrow’s generations is simple when they can escape to safety in private jets and rockets. Yet, it is this more inclusive application of empathy and the caring perspective that TESCREALists seem to utterly lack, which can provide a much better alternative narrative, in showing which future is worth saving and what issues we should put our energy, resources, and support behind. By focusing on compassion for current generations and our planet’s ecosystems, we can begin to create a future genuinely worth saving.
A care-centered perspective as a solution
Care is “a deep empathy for humans, non-humans and nature encompassing a wide range of activities that contribute to human wellbeing and quality of life, from improving one’s own living conditions through the well-being of a particular group or its members, to caring for the local, regional, national or international community as well as for the well-being of non-humans and the natural world” (Lorek, S., Power, K., and Parker, N. (2023).
The concept of care is not just an ideal; it’s an intrinsic feature of our species. Human beings are uniquely vulnerable at birth, completely dependent on others for survival and development. A newborn cannot survive alone—its very existence relies on the attention, nourishment, and protection provided by caregivers. This need for care is embedded in our biology: since women can potentially conceive every nine months, the support of a nurturing community has been essential to ensure both maternal and infant survival throughout human history.
A care-centric perspective is different from other perspectives that prioritize human well-being. Perspectives that center on human well-being tend to be individualistic, focusing on how the wealth, health, and peace of every person can be enhanced individually, and how they can achieve this from an individual perspective. While there are merits in this, also in empowering people to take stock of their own well-being, care-centric perspectives are different in that they focus more on a relational understanding of well-being, rather than an individualistic understanding. Rooted in evidence, such as the fact that people rated their life satisfaction the highest based on the strength of their relationships, the care-centric perspective posits that it is how we care for our relationships with humans, our environment, and other living beings and how we feel cared for by them, which creates the highest life satisfaction individually, but also creates a more harmonious and equal relationship between human beings and living beings and within the ecosystems of this planet.
Related to climate change, the use of a care-centric lens is immensely valuable and necessary. Climate change will not affect everyone equally, and will especially affect people that depend more on long-term care services, such as the chronically ill, the elderly, and disabled people. Also socio-economic inequality plays a major role in climate policy, where the ecological crisis is considered a multiplier of existing care needs and inequalities in exposure to pollution, climatic impacts, and the loss of livelihoods amongst poorer communities within countries and amongst the poorer countries. Inequality as a fact is an inherently uncaring concept.
Instead of externalizing our responsibility to an AI that we assume knows better than we do—crafted from our own data and coding—we believe in returning to our roots and deepening our connections with ourselves, our communities, and the environment. Caring, for us, to others, to the planet. We can reconnect with the natural world, learning to evolve alongside it rather than trying to dominate it. By prioritizing care over technological shortcuts, we cultivate a deeper understanding of our environment and our place within it.
Embracing a Democratic Dialogue on the Future
The choice between TESCREAL’s vision of a tech-dominated future and a caring, community-centered approach is stark. In Europe, we have an opportunity to foster a democratic conversation about our direction. Rather than adopting the worldview of TESCREAL, which treats nature and humanity as obstacles to be managed, we could for example draw on the ecological wisdom of Indigenous peoples, who model ways of living harmoniously with the Earth.
One example of this ecological wisdom within Europe comes from the Sami people, the Indigenous inhabitants of Sápmi, a region spanning parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. For centuries, the Sami have practiced sustainable reindeer herding, fishing, and gathering, rooted in a deep respect for natural cycles and landscapes. Rather than exploiting resources for short-term gain, they follow principles of reciprocity and stewardship, prioritizing balance with the environment. This approach embodies an ethic of care, valuing the well-being of all life forms as interconnected. By learning from the Sami and other Indigenous ways of knowing, Europe has a powerful opportunity to reimagine progress—not as dominion over nature, but as a shared journey toward harmony with our planet.
Now, AI and other emerging technologies that TESCREALists glorify are not going anywhere. We also recognize that AI and technologies can enhance our knowledge base through more sophisticated modeling and data collection which can allow society to build more caring and equitable policies. But its dangers remain, for its incorporated biases, its infringement on privacy and monetization of personal data, and potential to polarize societies, to just name a few. From this perspective, it remains essential that governments regulate this technological space and ensure that AI and other technological advancements remain within the boundaries of our ethics and contribute to what we want a caring society to look like.
This moment is not merely about resisting high-tech fantasies or avoiding mortality. It is about reasserting our interconnectedness, valuing empathy, and recognizing the fragility of life. By facing our fears with compassion rather than escapism, we can build a caring society that values each life and every relationship that sustains us.
Europe must take the lead in initiating a democratic discussion about our future path. We have the chance to define a sustainable, caring world that places people and the planet at the center, challenging the allure of AI-driven salvation. In doing so, we might just forge a path worth fighting for—a society that honors its bonds, respects the Earth, and chooses a future where all life can thrive.
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