The Endgame of Edgelord Eschatology
Émile P. Torres for TruthDig
Discovered 11:30 PM 5/2/2025
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-endgame-of-edgelord-eschatology/
I’ve been aware of the overall movement of tech billionaires toward apocalyptic post-humanism for a while now. I think it lacks imagination, honestly. They’re a bit too wrapped up in their male power fantasies to imagine a compassionate AI, or one that isn’t set on conquest - and they’re certainly too up their own asses to realize that the billions of dollars they’re shoveling into nuclear power plants might be better spent, y’know, cleaning up the oceans or feeding the poor. (Though come to think of it, nuclear energy is a good investment. Just wish it wasn’t all being funneled directly into AI.)
I don’t want to be caught saying that I’m an AI pessimist. I want to be a bit of a realist. If we’re going to counteract edgelord eschatology, then we need to take the opposite attitude. We need to be hopecore and future-pilled. We need to be longtermists. We are not doomed to extinction within the next few decades — as a parent, I cannot allow that to happen. Torres talks about some young techbros arguing that having biological children is morally wrong because of the ‘mind virus’ that it invokes. If you have a child you’re going to be invested in humanity, and that’s bad because it is not sufficiently longtermist - we ought to be dedicated to our hypothetical AI overlords, which are definitely coming in the next few years.
I think the AI edgelords are a bit too longtermist. There are two main formulations of this theory, the first is a weaker form: the effects of our actions upon future generations is a great moral concern. This seems pretty reasonable, and is brought to the fore by things like nuclear annihilation and climate change. The second version seems a bit less tenable: the effects of our actions upon future generations is the primary moral concern. I believe that the eschatologists (including the religious right) are so concerned about the moral status of future generations that they have lost sight of the there and now. They are completely detached from the present, so they offer wild solutions to our great issues that totally screw over the living in favor of the hypothetical. Torres mentions the technological teleology of the AI optimists:
The central claim of my argument so far is that Silicon Valley is gripped by a descriptive eschatology: the belief that our future will be digital rather than biological, and that this is inevitable in the coming decades — whether we like it or not. Just about everyone in the Valley believes this because, it seems, nearly everyone accepts by default a “techno-deterministic” view according to which scientific and technological “progress” is a juggernaut that simply cannot be stopped. As one of the leading prophets of The Mindset, Nick Bostrom, writes: “If scientific and technological development efforts do not effectively cease, then all important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology will be obtained.” He calls this the “Technological Completion Conjecture.”
Whether technological completion is inevitable is far from certain. It’s the same historical progressivism that led to things like American expansionism (manifest destiny). It is especially unlikely that technology progresses so long as we are betting toward a superintelligence that simply will not come to pass with the given model structure. No doubt AI has deeply changed the way we interact with each other and has changed how science is done. It’s hard to imagine the recent advances in data science without AI’s assistance. But the current investment model — keep blowing the AI balloon until it pops — is just blind speculation. If DeepSeek has taught us anything, it’s that more money isn’t the issue - it’s a matter of making our models more efficient and less energy consuming.1
Anyways. I wanted to talk about optimism. It’s funny, the same people who were tech optimists have now become tech doomers - not so much in the sense of doomerism about tech, but being so optimistic about the future of technology that they’ve become human-pessimists. I believe in humans - and animals, plants, and biological quite generally. I want to see a future where humanity, nature, and artificial intelligences interact in respectful and kind ways. When I read A Pslam for the Wild-Built I was originally pretty skeptical. I thought it offered a bit too much of a hope-punk future; I still think the world it takes place in is too … peaceful for me to really appreciate or to take much from. But nonetheless, there is a reason we write utopic, quiet, and peaceful fiction, and especially why it is so relevant now. We need good stories to imagine better futures.
What’s Left of Philosophy recently did an episode on utopias and their very real place in society and revolutionary struggle. To put it shortly, and loosely, utopias function as a kind of radical reimagining of the future which is free from the shackles of the past. Black nationalism, as a prominent example, sought to reimagine an alternative state for Black people in America where they could be free from the history of slavery and ill-treatment which still follows them to this day. While Black nationalism certainly ended up leaning a bit too much on the extant ideologies of race purity and patriarchy, it nonetheless functioned as an effective tool for liberation. In much the same way, tech optimists were fond of a mechanic utopia where human psychology was perfectly understood and manipulated toward some ideal of utilitarian maxima. This functioned to realize social media, and with it all the terrible social and political baggage. Perhaps this has lead to the tech billionaire’s existential crisis: if tech optimism ended up exposing the horrors of the human psyche, wouldn’t it be better to create something cleaner, free of the same dirt and grime of biological preference? Machines are free from all vice: no sex, drugs, violence, or political extremism, only cold, hard fact. (This despite the demonstrable prejudices of their stochastic parrots).
It’s not the end of the world and we need to stop acting like it is. If we fail to do that there will be major, catastrophic consequences. We need to combat doomerism and find a way to think positive, to find the silver lining behind all these noxious plumes. Politically speaking, the time is now ripe for revolution (though perhaps 6 years ago would have been better).
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It’s 12:10 AM.
Footnotes
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China is increasingly leading science and technology. And, given the current American administration, I imagine that they’ll be the world’s dominant superpower within a few years. ↩