The techno-utopian ideology gets its fuel, in part, from scientific racism.
Sometime last year, I happened to come across an email from 1996, written by a 23-year-old graduate student at the London School of Economics named “Niklas Bostrom.” Upon reading it, my jaw dropped to the floor, where it stayed for the rest of the day.
Here’s part of what Bostrom, now known as “Nick Bostrom,” an Oxford University philosopher who’s been profiled by The New Yorker and become highly influential in Silicon Valley, sent to the listserv of “Extropians”:
Blacks are more stupid than whites.
I like that sentence and think it is true. But recently I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that. They would think that I were [sic] a “racist”: that I disliked black people and thought that it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t. It’s just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by “smart” and stupid” [sic]. I may be wrong about the facts, but that is what the sentence means for me. For most people, however, the sentence seems to be synonymous with:
I hate those bloody [the N-word, included in Bostrom’s original email, has been redacted]!!!!
My point is that while speaking with the provocativness [sic] of unabashed objectivity would be appreciated by me and many other persons on this list, it may be a less effective strategy in communicating with some of the people “out there”.
Although shocking, I honestly can’t say I was surprised. I wasn’t. In fact, I’d been working on a series of articles for Truthdig exploring the deep connections between longtermism, a bizarre, techno-utopian ideology that Bostrom helped establish, and eugenics, a pseudoscientific movement that inspired some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.1 The fact is that, as the artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru, one of TIME’s “100 most influential people of 2022,” has repeatedly pointed out on Twitter, longtermism is “rooted in eugenics” or even “eugenics under a different name.”
This is not hyperbole; it’s not an exaggeration. If anything, Gebru’s statement doesn’t go far enough: longtermism, which emerged out of the effective altruism (EA) movement over the past few years, is eugenics on steroids. On the one hand, many of the same racist, xenophobic, classist and ableist attitudes that animated 20th-century eugenics are found all over the longtermist literature and community. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that if the longtermist program were actually implemented by powerful actors in high-income countries, the result would be more or less indistinguishable from what the eugenicists of old hoped to bring about. Societies would homogenize, liberty would be seriously undermined, global inequality would worsen and white supremacy — famously described by Charles Mills as the “unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” — would become even more entrenched than it currently is. The aim of this article is to explore the first issue above; the second will be our focus in the next article of this series for Truthdig.
So, back to Bostrom. My first thought after reading his email was: Is this authentic? Has it been tampered with? How can I know if he really wrote this? I thus contacted everyone who participated in the email thread, and someone replied to confirm that Bostrom did indeed write those words. However, I also contacted Anders Sandberg, a long-time collaborator of Bostrom’s with whom I’d been acquainted for many years through conferences on “existential risk” — the most important concept of longtermist ideology. (Until 2019 or so, I identified as a longtermist myself, a fact that I deeply regret. But this has, at least, given me an intimate understanding of what I would now describe as a profoundly dangerous ideology.)
In response, Sandberg suggested to me that the email is probably authentic (we now know it is), and then, apparently, alerted Bostrom of the fact that I’m aware of his remarks. This prompted Bostrom to release a perfunctory, sloppily-written “apology” full of typos and grammatical errors that didn’t bother to redact the N-word and, if anything, has done more to alert the general public of this noxious ideology than anything I might have published about Bostrom’s email two weeks ago.
“I have caught wind,” Bostrom writes, “that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people.” He continues, writing as if he’s the victim: “I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.” It appears that he believes his “apology” is about public relations rather than morality; it’s about “cleaning out his closet” rather than making things right. He goes on to say that he thinks “the invocation of a racial slur was repulsive” and has donated to organizations like GiveDirectly and Black Health Alliance, though he leaves wide-open the possibility that there really might be genetically based cognitive differences between groups of people (there’s no evidence of this). “It is not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question,” he writes with a shrug. “I would leave to others [sic], who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role.”
Sandberg then casually posted this “apology” on Twitter, writing that Bostrom’s words do “not represent his views and behavior as I have seen them over the 25 years I have known him.” He further warns that “the email has become significantly more offensive in the current cultural context: levels of offensiveness change as cultural attitudes change (sometimes increasing, often decreasing). This causes problems when old writings are interpreted by current standards.” Sandberg seems to be suggesting that Bostrom’s statements weren’t that big a deal when they were written in 1996, at least compared to how our “woke” world of “overly sensitive” “social justice warriors” always on the hunt to “cancel” the next “beleaguered” white man will see them (my scare quotes).
This, of course, triggered an avalanche of protest from academics and onlookers, with one person replying, “I am the same age as Nick Bostrom and participated in many free-wheeling philosophical discussions. I never wrote anything like this, and it would have been shockingly racist at any point in my life.” Another said, “I was a student in the UK in the mid-90s and it was just as offensive then as it is now.” Still others took issue with the fact that Bostrom “never even backed down from the assertion that black people are intellectually inferior and instead went on to assert ‘it’s just not his area of expertise.’” Many simply dismissed it as “a study in a non-apology,” given that Bostrom “says he repudiates the horrific comments” he made, but “then goes right back into them.” As Gebru summarized the whole ignominious affair:
I don’t know what’s worse. The initial email, Bostrom’s “statement” about it, or [Sandberg’s Twitter] thread. I’m gonna go with the latter 2 because that’s what they came up with in preparation for publicity. Their audacity never ceases to amaze me no matter how many times I see it.
In fact, the glaring similarities between the new and the old are no coincidence. As Toby Ord writes in his book “The Precipice,” which could be seen as the prequel to MacAskill’s “What We Owe the Future,” the ultimate task for humanity is to “fulfill our long-term potential” in the universe. What exactly is this supposed “potential”? Ord isn’t really sure, but he’s quite clear that it will almost certainly involve realizing the transhumanist project. “Forever preserving humanity as it now is may also squander our legacy, relinquishing the greater part of our potential,” he declares, adding that “rising to our full potential for flourishing would likely involve us being transformed into something beyond the humanity of today.” Now consider the fact that the idea of transhumanism was literally developed by some of the most prominent eugenicists of the 20th century, most notably Julian Huxley, who was president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. Using almost the exact same words as Ord, Huxley wrote in 1950 — after the horrors of World War II, one should note — that if enough people come to “believe in transhumanism,” then “the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence … It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.” In fact, as philosophers will affirm, transhumanism is classified as a form of so-called “liberal eugenics.” (The term “liberal,” and why it’s misleading, is the focus of the next article of this series.)
While Huxley, upon witnessing the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany, came to believe that eugenicists should reject racism, it’s not hard to find such attitudes among members of the first organized transhumanist movement: the Extropians, which formed in the early 1990s and established the listserv to which Bostrom sent his now-infamous email. Indeed, Bostrom wasn’t the only one on the listserv making racist remarks. One participant going by “Den Otter” ended an email with the line, “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races” (although some did object to this, just as some opposed Bostrom’s overt racism). Meanwhile, one year after Bostrom’s email, the MIT Extropians wrote on their website, which they also included in a “pamphlet that they sent out to freshmen,” the following:
These ideas were common then, and they’re common now. So while everyone should be appalled by Bostrom’s email, no one should be surprised. The long termist movement that Bostrom helped found is, I would argue, just another iteration of what some scholars have called the “eternal return of eugenics.”
Likewise, no one should be surprised that so many long termists couldn’t care less about the scientific racism of Sam Harris, Scott Alexander and Charles Murray, or the “kill disabled infants” view of Singer. No one should be surprised to find Sandberg citing Murray’s data about IQ and poverty, criminality, welfare and out-of-wedlock births. No one should be surprised by Bostrom’s repeated claims about “intelligence” or “IQ” being inversely correlated with fertility rates. No one should be surprised that the EA community has for many years wooed Steven Pinker, who believes that Ashkenazi Jews are intellectually superior because of rapid genetic evolution from around 800 AD to 1650 — an idea that some have called the “smiling face of race science.” No one should be surprised to stumble upon, say, references to “elite ethnicities” in Robin Hanson’s work, by which Hanson means the Jewish people, since — he writes — “Jews comprise a disproportionate fraction of extreme elites such as billionaires, and winners of prizes such as the Pulitzer, Oscar and Nobel prizes.”6
And no one should be surprised that all of this is wrapped up in the same language of “science,” “evidence,” “reason” and “rationality” that pervades the eugenics literature of the last century. Throughout history, white men in power have used “science,” “evidence,” “reason” and “rationality” as deadly bludgeons to beat down marginalized peoples. Effective altruism, according to the movement’s official website, “is the use of evidence and reason in search of the best ways of doing good.” But we’ve heard this story before: the 20th-century eugenicists were also interested in doing the most good. They wanted to improve the overall health of society, to eliminate disease and promote the best qualities of humanity, all for the greater social good. Indeed, many couched their aims in explicitly utilitarian terms, and utilitarianism is, according to Toby Ord, one of the three main inspirations behind EA. Yet scratch the surface, or take a look around the community with unbiased glasses, and suddenly the same prejudices show up everywhere.
I should be clear that not every EA or longtermist holds these views. I know that some don’t. My point is that you don’t just find them on the periphery of the movement. They’re not merely espoused by those at the fringe. They’re positions expressed, promoted or at least tolerated by some of the most influential and respected members of the community. The main focus of longtermism is ensuring that the long-run future of humanity goes as well as possible. Who, though, would want to live in the “Utopia” they envision?
Endnotes
[1] Many people were puzzled about why Bostrom would bring up eugenics in an apology about racist remarks. This is why.
[2] By “wrong,” I don’t just mean morally wrong, which it obviously is. Morality matters. But there’s also a huge scientific literature on why such claims are simply not backed up by the evidence. For discussion, I’d recommend this article in The Guardian.
[3]Nor is Sandberg a particularly reliable source when he says that Bostrom “actually does not represent his views and behavior as I have seen them over the 25 years I have known him,” given that Sandberg has approvingly cited the work of Charles Murray.
[4]Incidentally, Häggström hosted a two-month-long workshop in Sweden on existential risk back in 2017, which I participated in for a month. One day at lunch, a professor who is Swedish, and who teaches at a university in Sweden, sat down next to me and launched into a 30-minute rant about why Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. He called this view — the one he accepted — the “racist view,” and repeatedly cited Sam Harris’ podcast discussion with Charles Murray. The core argument was that the only way white people in the Global North can muster up enough sympathy to motivate helping, through charitable donations, people in the Global South is to recognize that “they can’t help it,” “they were born that way” and “they are, by no fault of their own, genetically inferior.” Only once you realize this can you justify, to yourself, transferring money to help them. I still think, with absolute horror, about this conversation frequently. It’s a profoundly disturbing reminder that donating to help people in the Global South doesn’t for a moment mean that one’s not a horrible racist.
[5]Harris adds that “there is no argument for treating any person as anything other than an individual that needs to be assessed on his own merits. There is no argument for discrimination.” But this in no way mitigates his racist view that some groups are more innately intelligent than others. It’s like a transphobe saying that “trans women aren’t women, although obviously everyone should be treated with respect.” That’s still transphobic.
[6]As it happens, Hanson is the same guy who literally once argued that “’the main problem’ with the Holocaust was that there weren’t enough Nazis! After all, if there had been 6 trillion Nazis willing to pay $1 each to make the Holocaust happen, and a mere 6 million Jews willing to pay $100,000 each to prevent it, the Holocaust would have generated $5.4 trillion worth of consumers surplus.”