Émile P. Torres

Dr. Émile P. Torres.

Wikipedia page about me is here. For my podcast with the comedian Kate Willett, Dystopia Now, go here. For my weekly newsletter, Realtime Techpocalypse, go here. A shorter version of the bio presented below can be found at the bottom of this page.

My work over the past decade and a half has centered around a single theme: eschatology, including religious, secular, and scientific eschatologies. More recently, I have focused specifically on the ethical and evaluative implications of human extinction, as well as the history of thinking about human extinction within the Western tradition—topics that, somewhat surprisingly, have received very little attention from scholars! Probably the best descriptors for what I do would be “eschatologist” or “philosopher of human extinction.”

My journey over the past 20 years has been circuitous. Initially most sympathetic with a philosophy called “anarcho-primitivism,” I became a transhumanist and longtermist—I would now say “TESCREAList”— in the early 2010s, publishing numerous articles in academic journals and popular media outlets about human enhancement, machine superintelligence, and the future of humanity. I used to write for the Future of Life Institute (FLI), and was an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) and research assistant for Ray Kurzweil's 2024 book The Singularity is Nearer.

In 2017, I was a visiting scholar for a few days at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), based in Oxford, where I was invited to give a talk on “agential risks." I later spent several months at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), during which the project that culminated in my most recent book was born.

However, since 2019, I’ve become a vocal critic of the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies, which I believe is both philosophically flawed and potentially quite dangerous. In 2023, I was featured in an article published by The Guardian’s Sunday newspaper, The Observer, though the article gives a very misleading impression of my views within Existential Ethics, as I explain here.

I’ve published nearly 30 academic articles in journals like Synthese, Erkenntnis, Futures, Bioethics, Aggression and Violent Behavior, Foresight, Metaphilosophy, Inquiry, AI & Society, and the South African Journal of Philosophy. A chapter on superintelligence and algocracy was included in Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security.

Popular media articles have appeared in The Washington Post, New Statesman, Aeon, Motherboard, Nautilus, Free Inquiry, Los Angeles Review of Books, Big Think, Ambasz Essays (published by MoMA), Current Affairs, Philosophy Now, The Nation, TIME, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, among many others.

I’m a contributing writer at Truthdig and, formerly, Salon, and have appeared on Al Jazeera TV (for a live debate about lethal autonomous weapons), Al Jazeera English, BBC Radio 4, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (twice), German National Public Radio (twice), NowThis, iHeartRadio, as well as upwards of 50 podcasts such as Tech Won’t Save Us, Ologies, Movement Memos, Dave Troy Presents, Team Human (hosted by the culture critic Douglas Rushkoff), and many more. I have been quoted in a wide range of outlets, and speak with journalists interested in my work on a weekly basis.

I have also appeared in numerous documentaries, including In the Belly of AI, Ghost in the Machine, and Elon Musk Unveiled: The Tesla Experiment.

Conference talks have been delivered at Princeton University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Universität Bielefeld, Swansea University, University of Nottingham, and the University of California, Berkeley, to name just a few.

My CV can be found here.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve helped popularize the acronym “TESCREAL” to denote a constellation of ideologies that have become enormously influential within Silicon Valley. (The Wikipedia page for "TESCREAL" is here.) I coined this term while co-writing a paper on the topic with Dr. Timnit Gebru, one of TIME magazine's 100 most important thinkers.

Education-wise, I earned a BA with Honors in philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2007, and a MS in neuroscience at Brandeis University two years later. spent some time as a “special student” at Harvard University, after which I was an independent scholar for roughly a decade, in support of my then-wife's academic ambitions. In 2023, I received my PhD in philosophy from Leibniz Universität Hannover, in Germany. My dissertation was published by Routledge as part of its “Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine” series. It's titled Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. A comprehensive summary of the book can be found here.

During the 2022-2023 Winter semester at Leibniz, I taught a course titled “The Ethics of Human Extinction,” which I believe was the first ever on Existential Ethics (the field dedicated to studying the ethical and evaluative implications of our extinction). I later started the "Ethics of Human Extinction Reading Group," which you can find out more about here.

Previous books include Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks (2017), which included a foreword from the UK Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, and The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse (2016).

I’m passionate about alleviating global poverty, and have pledged to give away everything I earn over $40,000. In December 2022, I started a fundraiser with Nathan Young, an Effective Altruist, that raised more than $321,000 for the charity Give Directly.

I am also an amateur musician and audio engineer, once being described by a Pitchfork contributor as an "electronics whiz." I released multiple albums under the name Baobab, and sold a batch of songs to MTV, one of which ended up on a GoPro commercial that went viral. Another song was the runner-up in an NPR songwriting competition, and a timelapse video that I made for a Baobab song was among the very first to use photographs taken by the International Space Station. Songs have also appeared in a large number of TV shows, e.g., Queer Eye, along with movie trailers like this one for The Adults (2023), starring Michael Cera. My most recent project is titled WonderLost, which will soon release a 3-volume LP.

I've written about the phenomenon of ghosting here, here, and here.

Feel free to email me at philosophytorres@gmail.com if you’d like to connect! I’m on Twitter @xriskology and on Bluesky here.

Short bio:

Dr. Torres is a moral philosopher, intellectual historian, and journalist whose work focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies, especially AI, and human extinction. They have published four books, the most recent of which is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation (Routledge 2024). In 2023, with Dr. Timnit Gebru, they coined the acronym “TESCREAL” to denote a constellation of ideologies that have become very influential within Silicon Valley. These ideologies have played an integral role in launching, sustaining, and accelerating the current race to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which TESCREAL advocates believe will usher in a utopian world of immortality, endless abundance, and space colonization—that is, unless “God-like AI” annihilates us instead. Torres has published in a wide range of academic journals, including Synthese, Inquiry, Bioethics, Metaphilosophy, and Futures, as well as popular media outlets such as The Washington Post, New Statesman, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Aeon. They are a contributing writer at Truthdig and, formerly, Salon.

Torres received a BA in philosophy (with Honors) at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a MS in neuroscience from Brandeis University. In 2023, they received their PhD in philosophy from Leibniz Universität Hannover, in Germany, and are currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University. They have delivered talks about their work at UNICEF and the UK government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, and spent time as a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. In 2025, they were invited to contribute entries on the TESCREAL ideologies to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society and the Glossary of Techno-Climatic Concepts: Tools for Navigating Uncertainty (in Portuguese).