Chilling in this economy
I am so fascinated how much progress we have made technologically in the last couple of centuries to improve our quality of lives. Ideally we should be chilling more now given the collective progress we have made. We have developed such good technologies to allow us to experience life comfortably, enjoying the fruits of our nature more while being shielded from its harsh sides. I am particularly fascinated by my hiking shoes.
Yes, there's still a lot more to learn and improve in the world around us but with the progress we have made so far, we should be able to pursue them more comfortably and while being at ease. We will see later in the essay what it takes to be comfortable and be at ease.
Despite all the progress, the comfortable life won't be a reality to many of us if all the resources are concentrated for a ultra tiny minority individuals. And they use it for fulfilling their weird ambitions of colonising the outer space and living eternally. This means that we will get exploited for serving those strange ambitions and we can't chill. Even if we don't want to settle in Mars or live an eternal life, but rather live a good/chill life in the earth for a reasonable human lifespan. We will be left to fight among ourselves for the leftover resources available after the ultra wealthys' hobby projects. We see that happening already now with our drive towards AGI. What's more concerning is that it's deeply connected with eugenics.
Timnit Gebru and Torres argues that the rush towards AGI is deeply rooted in this bundle of ideologies termed TESCREAL. (Explain what TESCREAL is). But you may ask what's even wrong with this. Isn't it nice for us to have some extra human capabilities? I am someone who badly wanted to be a Spiderman right from my childhood. Trust me I don't think you want extra human capabilities more than I do. But unfortunately, TESCREAL ideologies are deeply rooted in eugenics. (explain what eugenics is and how every genocide is invariably connected to eugenics. how even Caste can be considered a manifestation of eugenics tendencies.)
When I first learnt about eugenics, I thought it is just a thing from the past. Thing that happened when we humans didn't know better. Like how we thought the earth is the center of the universe and everything revolved around us. But actually that's not the case, eugenics is deeply ingrained in our society and has been a significant part of our scientific endeavours. And no I don't keep coming across these patterns because I tend to read lots of social science. Recently, I came across eugenics where I least expected to find it -- in a book called The Art of Statistics that is primarily written to help one develop statistical thinking. I think the author felt compelled to acknowledge that one of the most widely used and useful construct in statistics -p value - was developed Francis Galton, a big eugenist. (what was Francis Galton responsible for, along with who.) He was a big proponent of rationalism and has been credited for coining the word "scientific". And it is the same rationalism that is part of the TESCREAL bundle where (what Rationalism means in TESCREAL). These are not some obscure ideologies that exist in vacuum but positions that drive people and organizations. (Galton's connection to any current rationalist organizations and its connection to people driving AGI). Similarly
Does it mean that everyone works on AGI is driven by these ideologies? I really don't think so. People are flocking to work in this space because that's where the money is. Even I have applied for at least 10 internships to organizations that are trying to achieve AGI (I am mostly getting rejections though. Referrals welcome :)). I don't really buy the current conception of AGI and find it to be a significantly reductionist view on intelleligence. BUT I do very strongly believe that these are super useful technologies for solving certain very specific and narrow tasks. Tasks that can really support human systems and processes. But unfortunately at the end of the day, every comes to money. Capital owners are super excited about pouring money into the AI investments. Not because people can do their work quicker and have more free time to chill. But to displace wages into more profits and increase the bottom line.
I really do believe that these are And in the current socioeconomic system, we really need money to chill.
The alternative dream sold to us is earn so much money that you could build walled gardens and chill inside that while shielding yourself from the worldly precarities. But again as a ecosystem, we are interconnected organic bodies where concentration of growth is bound to become cancerous for the whole body. Manu joseph is his latest article has shown
that the few AI has potential for improving the world but it will just be used for displacing wealth. So that it gets concentrated more further for the ultra wealthy to purse you there hobby projects under the pretext of improving the quality of lives for the humanity. The recent work by Timnit Gebru and xx shows how the people who are driving the AGI agenda is deeply embedded in the TESCREAL cosmology. TESCREAL is a bundle of interconnected ideologies that has strong ties with eugenics. TESCREAList are people who can't just chill.
%I am REALLY grateful for the life I have. (This part is just me trying to convince you that my life is not that miserable. I hope you are convinced 🤷)
I mainly started write to make sense of the world. To call out things that bother me with a hope that someone will some fix it after reading my thoughtful analysis (/s). Maybe I am just being a quintessential keyboard warrior who does nothing but write. Maybe I lack the skills to actually bring about the change I would like to see in the world. Maybe I just over think. Or maybe what I am experiencing is what Naomi Klein calls the collective struggle. The unsettling feeling that we as human beings experience when we witness hardships.
Include doppelganger's quote
To be honest, I have often thought to myself that instead of complaining about the state of the society I should just chill. I actually want to just chill also. But issue is that I can't just chill in this economy. Most of us can't.
the whole point of public policy is to prevent crazy human beings (or the toxic tendencies in each of us) from gaining too much power and control that it could diminish the well-being of other human beings.
I think we are living in exciting times now with so many technological advancements that has significantly elevated our standard of living. But the problem is that it's not evenly distributed. Yes, you can argue that things can never be eventually distributed and there will always be inequalities. I totally agree with you. But hasn't our visions and arguments been that we are going to collectively improve the lives of the humanity. Isn't that the whole point of global organisations that stemmed after the world war such as UNESCO? Isn't that the whole point of public goods? Isn't that the whole point of public research funding
I wonder if I'll be more at ease if the public spaces are better.
Maybe it's just me complaining. Maybe there truths to my annoyances.
I hope more ideas will come to me for writing that will bring others more joy than turmoil.
I hope writing this will convince myself that it's okay to write critical stuff and I am not a miserable person for doing that.
I hope the we do live in a world is where my criticism and worries are nothing but just exaggerations.
The economy of permenance
We have somehow created this image that we need too much concentration of wealth and resources to be able to build something meaningful. And that's like the prerequisite for progress. That you have to be a narcissist megalomaniac to drive humanity's vision. But the reality is that this megalomaniacs are free riding on the contributions of kind individuals who have been doing things for the love of doing. Chinese have been showing that now. It's possible to do stuff without hero worship.
Maybe this is exactly what I am resisting.
It's kinda hard to live with other humans. But we can't chill if the world around us is burning.
You might say that even writing is art that others enjoy consuming. I agree but I think critical writing brings more turmoil to the readers than joy. It makes one worry about the state of the world, riles up the nerves, makes one feel unrest. If there's an option to exchange whatever meagre writing skills I have, I might trade it for musical talent. At least music brings others joy.
As humans, we are driven by two main set of ideologies - the ideologies of leisure and the ideologies of dominance. We have normalized systems and social structures that overpower the ideologies of dominance decimating leisure without considering how fundamentally human leisure is as opposed to dominance. This could be detrimental to the whole of the humanity itself.
When I was in high school, like every other XII STD kid in India, I was sold one big lie - Work hard only until XII STD Board exams, you can always relax and enjoy life after that. While this lie has given trust issues to my entire generation, there is something deep that this reveals. A deep human desire for relaxation and leisure. A desire to not labour but to enjoy life. We see this in kids as well. All they want to do is to be at leisure.
In fact, I argue that the whole purpose of labor is to be able to be at leisure. By leisure, I don't mean idleness. Leisure is a state of mind that is not bound by the necessity of survival. Necessity of survival is the keyword here. A human is not bound by the necessity of survival when their basic food, shelter, and safety needs are met. It is a state of mind that is free to play, free to explore the curiosities, free to enjoy the beauty of the earth, and free to rest at ease - without worrying about the next meal or being killed/hunted by the elements of the nature. To be at leisure is to be able to sing and dance the heart out. To be able to vibe with the world. To be at leisure is to be at free as a human.
Here my articulation of needs can be seen to be reductionist. Given our complex cognitive faculties, there is a whole range of psychological needs that drive our actions. We want to be valued, loved, and respected. We are competitive and there's a lot more complex emotions that many of us go through on a regular basis. But at the core level even these complex psychological needs that we experience now in our modern lives are the manifestations of the fundamental needs driven by the necessity of survival. In Why Buddhism is true, xx discusses how Buddhist principles make sense when viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology. (Give a summary of idea, ....) Like every animal in the earth, at the core, the human actions are driven by the impulses of necessity of survival and leisure. Every animal spends their time seeking food and water, reproduce to propagate their genes, and spends the rest of the time at leisure. This is applicable for humans too. For the first xx million years of our existence
The fundamental promise of technology for humanity is more leisure. In just a couple of centuries, we figured out electricity, vaccines, plumbing, trains, airplanes, and the internet. We can now look up recipes from other parts of the world in seconds, cure diseases that once wiped out entire cities, and travel distances that would earlier have taken months. In many ways, we’ve done an incredible amount to make life more comfortable and spend more time at leisure.
When we zoom out, this arc makes sense. As several scholars have pointed out, humans developed social groupings to ensure their survival and comfort. Nature was unpredictable, food was scarce, illness was common, and survival was fragile. Cooperation reduced risk. Over time, that same logic scaled up. Small groups became settlements, settlements became states, and states became complex institutions. Governments and companies emerged to coordinate labor, manage resources, and make survival less precarious.
Seen this way, civilization looks less like a grand moral project and more like a practical one. A set of tools we built to make our temporary stay on earth safer and more comfortable. Aristotle argued that the whole point of organizing economic and political life was to free humans from necessity. We work to meet our basic needs so that we don’t have to spend all our time worrying about survival. And once those needs are met, the goal is supposed to be leisure. In that sense, to be able to chill wasn’t meant to be a luxury or an afterthought. It was the point of the whole setup. Of course, there is still a lot more to learn about the world and improve. But given how much knowledge we have gained and the technology we have created, we should be able to keep improving things in the world while also chill. We should be able to work towards a even better future without being constantly exhausted in the present. By any reasonable measure, this should be the golden age of chilling.
And yet, here’s the strange part. Despite all this progress, many of us feel perpetually busy, stressed, and unable to slow down. The comforts we’ve built don’t automatically translate into calm or rest. The reason is often attributed to our economic systems. Tricia Hersey in her book, Rest is Resistance, discusses giving how time to oneself can be a deeply political act in our economic system that has its roots in the exploitation of labor that is often muddled in the language of productivity.
This ideology of leisure stands in contrast with another set of ideologies that have been equally or more pivotal in shaping the history - the ideologies of power and dominance. It is often these ideologies of dominance that provide a moral justification to the grand projects of the humanity. Be it colonizing the outer space, immortality, or creating all powerful artificial super intelligence (ASI). While these projects sound as exciting, fun, and innocuous scientific fantasies, they come at the cost of the well-being of many human beings. They cost leisure. History has shown us that it's exactly these ideologically driven scientific fantasies that there have been used to justify genocides too. This essay is about those ideologies and how they are shaping our world especially in the recent developments of AI.
Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres have coined the term TESCREAL that provides us with an accessible shortform for the bundle of these ideologies. It stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Basically it is a set of interconnected ideologies that is geared towards optimizing and enhancing the human capabilities. It is about creating an all powerful human race with hyperabundance, zero suffering, and infinite access to resources. It is an utopia that the humanity can possibly envision. In this utopia, everything is rational, scientific, and can be measured. In this utopia, everything is optimized towards greatness and efficiency. including the altruistic capacities arising from the heart. In this utopia, humans are at the almost power and controls everything benevolently. There are no diseases.
What's the least amount of money that can most optimally reduce the poverty in the world? Basically questions like this. This might sound like fantasy to most of us. At least it did to me when I learnt about these for the first time. Probably out of touch with the reality of existence of the majority of the humankind. But actually it is a very common discourse in certain circles. The circles where the certain ultra uber wealthy and some people who are the smartest in the world in certain areas hang out. And it is the same people in these circles who are driving the scientific fantasies of our age. People who are running the technological companies that are fundamentally redefining human life. Be it Sam Altman, Elon Musk - basically all the big names they want to elevate humanity to the next level.
But what's wrong in this. Wouldn't it be nice if we have some extra capabilities as human beings? To elevate the humanity to the next level with infinite energy and create the indestructible human race. Personally I have always wanted super powers. So why not?
It turns out that these ideologies that drive the aspirations for upgrading the humanity into humans 2.0 are not new. These ideologies have driven the human explorations for a very very long time. Like some of the current day Bay Area men who are hell-bent on elevating the human race, over a century back another Bay Area man was also obsessed with this vision of elevating the human race. It was Stanford University's founding president. And it had some very harmful and undesirable side effects.
Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist follows the life of David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s founding president. Jordan was an ichthyologist who spent his life cataloguing fishes, carefully sorting them into hierarchies based on their characteristics. But fishes were never really the point. What he was obsessed with was order. The belief that life has an inherent structure, that it can be classified, ranked, and neatly arranged. He started with fishes, but he believed this same logic applied to everything else, including humans.
For Jordan, hierarchy was not just a way to describe the natural world. It was a way to decide what mattered. Some traits, in his view, signaled strength and progress. Others signaled weakness and decay. And if you took that idea seriously, then improving humanity meant amplifying the “good” traits and stopping the “bad” ones from spreading. That is where eugenics enters the picture. Jordan believed that preventing certain people from reproducing was not cruelty but responsibility. Harm in the present was framed as a necessary sacrifice for a better future. A logic that feels uncomfortably close to what we now call longtermism.
This was not a fringe belief. Jordan and many of his powerful contemporaries acted on it. In 1906, he became chair of the eugenics section of the American Breeders Association, the first organization in the U.S. devoted entirely to eugenics. A year later, in 1907, the first compulsory sterilization law was passed in the country, allowing the state to forcibly sterilize people it deemed unfit. Imagine being sterilized because the state decided that being bipolar made you incompatible with humanity’s future.
This legalization of sterilization in the US stating the supposed overall betterment of the human race had much worse repercussions in the other parts of the world too. In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the 1907 judicial provisions in the US provided the legal basis for the Nazis in Germany to legitimize and operationalize the genocide of the jews at an unprecedented scale leading to the holocaust. While holocaust might be now seen as an ideological horror show, it was actually driven by Nazi leaders as a scientific intervention. Similar to the US, in 1933, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was enacted in Nazi Germany that allowed the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who in the opinion of a "Genetic Health Court" suffered from a list of alleged genetic disorders – many of which were not, in fact, genetic. Again the aspiration for this whole exercise is to develop a better human race in a more rational, modern, and evidence-based approach that was scientific.
The ideology of dominance believes it can measure everything and that it can measure correctly.
Speaking of Scientific, the development of Statistics as a field is cornerstone to the current Scientific progress. It is the statistical methods used by the researchers that signals the rigor and the validity of any scientific experimentation. Show me one researcher who uses quantitative methods and is not obsessed with the p-value. Statistics is all about
Ideological bias even in the Statistical methods used https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.adz7173
Another area that I expected eugenics to have the least connection is Statistics. Isn't Statistics the cornerstone of the modern scientific progress with its extensive emphasis on data-driven approaches.
Our inablility to sit with uncertainity and giving a reason.
Speaking of scientific, even the term eugenics, meaning "good stock" from the Greek, was coined by Francis Galton. Probably one of the most important scientific proponents of our times. Galton is considered
Galton thought he had discovered principles that would enhance human life, and he also spoke against what he regarded as “unreasonable” opposition to “the extinction of an inferior race.”
He himself had been born in 1822 into a prominent British family. He was a grandson of Erasmus Darwin, a physician, scientist and prominent abolitionist, and his family included multiple fellows of the Royal Society. His position of privilege likely influenced both his willingness to classify humankind into groups and his sense of what counted as good stock versus what sort of person belonged to an inferior race.
It was Galton who coined the term eugenics, from the Greek for “good stock.” How can incredibly smart people hold certain believes so
While I have always considered the word 'scientific' as the marker for untainted and objective truth, it was disturbingly funny when I learnt that the word itself was coined by
These were the smart people of that era
Connection with the smart people of the current era
Zeitgeist of OpenAI essay
Ideologies don't die. They just manifests into different forms.
The eternal nature of eugenics
Drive for control
Inability to set with uncertainty and randomness
Wanting to make sense of everything
Instagram psychologists exists for a reason
Self help gurus
Physical existence is more tangible than abstract ideas.
It's all about balance. When we push it too much, it's madness.
There is a thin line between greatness and madness.
Everything is a spectrum.
Most of us might not be interested in space colonies or immortality. We just want a decent life on Earth for a normal human amount of time. But when resources are funneled upward, the rest of us are left fighting over what remains. This pattern is already visible in the current rush toward artificial general intelligence.
Researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres describe a bundle of ideologies behind the AGI hype that they call TESCREAL. It stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Basically it is a set of interconnected ideologies that is geared towards upgrading the human capabilities. like optimising and enhancing the human capacities. In TESCREAL, The future matters more than the present. Abstract humanity matters more than actual humans. Optimization matters more than comfort.
At first, this sounds kind of cool. Who would not want humans to be smarter, stronger, and more capable?
Who are the humans?
Many of these ideas are closely tied to eugenics. Eugenics is the belief that some humans are better than others and that society should be organized to favor the so called better ones. Historically, this idea has been used to justify forced sterilization, segregation, genocide, and caste systems. Every genocide depends on the idea that some lives matter less. Eugenics is just that idea wearing a lab coat.
I used to think eugenics was a mistake from the past, like thinking the Earth was the center of the universe. Something we moved on from once we knew better. But eugenics never really disappeared. It quietly embedded itself into science, policy, and institutions, often under the language of efficiency, intelligence, and progress.
I was especially surprised to encounter it while reading a book about statistics. In The Art of Statistics, the author points out that one of the most common tools in modern science, the p value, was developed by Francis Galton. Galton was not just a statistician. Along with people like Karl Pearson, he was one of the founders of eugenics. He believed intelligence was inherited, ranked people accordingly, and thought society should actively encourage the reproduction of the "best" humans.
Statistics is the cornerstone of Scientific thinking. Show me one academic who is not bothered about p value.
show me one academic
Galton was also a strong believer in rationalism. In the TESCREAL world, rationalism means trusting numbers and models more than lived experience. People become data points. Social problems become math problems. If something cannot be easily measured or optimized, it starts to look unimportant. Comfort, care, and rest do not fit nicely into spreadsheets.
These ideas still shape the present. Many communities and organizations involved in AGI research draw from this intellectual tradition, even if unintentionally. This does not mean everyone working on AGI believes in eugenics or wants to escape Earth. Most people are there because that is where the jobs and funding are. I am not immune to this either. I have applied to several AGI focused internships myself, mostly collecting rejections along the way. I am skeptical of current definitions of AGI and find them overly simplistic. Intelligence is more than test scores. Still, these technologies can be genuinely useful for specific tasks.
The real issue is how they are used. Under our current economic system, AI is not primarily about giving people more free time. It is about cutting labor costs and increasing profits. Productivity gains go upward. People do not get to chill. They get replaced or pushed harder. And because money is required for comfort, the ability to rest becomes a privilege.
We are then sold a backup plan. Make enough money to build your own little bubble. A gated community. A private escape hatch. Chill alone while the world struggles outside. But societies are not collections of isolated individuals. They are shared systems. When too much growth and protection concentrate in one place, the whole system suffers.
Writers like Manu Joseph have pointed out how technological elites often talk about saving humanity while remaining disconnected from everyday life. AI really could help with healthcare, education, accessibility, and public services. But under current incentives, it is far more likely to push wealth upward and outward, toward elite projects framed as inevitable progress.
Recent work by Timnit Gebru and others shows that many of the loudest voices driving the AGI agenda are deeply influenced by the TESCREAL worldview. It is a worldview that cannot slow down. It cannot rest. It cannot just chill. It must always optimize, scale, and escape, even if that means recreating old hierarchies with shinier tools.
If progress is real, it should feel calm. It should feel like good shoes on a long walk. It should make ordinary life gentler and more livable. Chilling should not be a luxury reserved for a few people behind walls and buzzwords. It should be the most normal outcome of collective human effort. Otherwise, all this progress is just very advanced running, and we are still too tired to sit down.
Our bodies are just organic matters that need to be taken care of.
We are just organic bodies. How we feel is regulated by the bodily processes. Movement makes us feel good. Physical hugs always feel warm. Our lungs collapse when we inhale toxic air. And I don't think any reasonable person can chill with a collapsing wings.
living ComfOstably as a human being is not really that hard. clean environment, supportive and strong social connections, ability to be active and move, ability to regulate our thoughts. It is no surprise that the people from materially well developed societies search the world seeking exactly this. in the form of Yoga and communal retreats in pristine forests.
And I absolutely realize that these are easier said than done. Each have their own complications and each of us are trying to figure what works best for us. like how do we maintain social connections. In/in it be through my blood family or through a chosen family. How do I regulate my thoughts by meditating or engaging in some activity. How do we negotiate space. Basically there's just a lot to figure out for each person. But these actions are driven by a certain fundamental ideologies of what it takes to lead a good human life.
with a different set of ideologies like the TESCREAL Ones our course of action also changes significantly. And these actions can encroach the well being of others.
the functions and priorities of the society is based on the ideologies that were moral foundations of the society is built upon. personally if i have an option to choose between one hundred million dollars and making make the world more inhabitable in hundred years,i think i would definitely choose the one hundred million dollars. because one i don't know if i'll be alive in hundred years to reap the benefits. but from a societal standpoint it would definitely benefit more if i choose better habitable environment for the earth. Choosing one hundred million is not just a personal decision, it may be a more pragmatic one if i am playing the games of the current day economics right where the comfort and the well being of an individual is market driven and is based on the money they have. this decision sir again influenced by the broader ideologies that drive the market. I see this happening with my peers too. The bestest of talent. The ideologically driven. The ones who wanted to make the world a little better by going against the corporate. They have also resorted to playing the games of the economy to try building individual fortunes in the hope of grow beyond the market and have some breathing space to chill. But unfortunately even for them in the current economy chilling is restricted to the long weekend, and the weeks when the economy decides to take a break. ideologies personally if i have an option i would choose the one hundred million