Altman and Amodei’s dream of merging with AI leads to the same outcome as replacing humans with machines, philosopher Émile Torres argues
Altman and Amodei’s dream of merging with AI leads to the same outcome as replacing humans with machines, philosopher Émile Torres argues
On October 6, philosopher Émile Torres published an essay distinguishing “AI successionism”, the direct replacement of humans by autonomous AI, from a broader Silicon Valley movement that seeks to transform humans through merging with machines and uploading minds. Torres includes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in this movement, although both publicly reject the idea of AI replacing humans.
The term “AI successionism” has become common in AI debates in recent weeks. It describes the belief that artificial intelligence, as the next step in evolution, is entitled to inherit the world and that humans should simply hand over control, even if this means their extinction. On October 5, Elon Musk endorsed the same position, calling humanity a “biological bootloader” for superintelligence. Torres has long criticized TESCREAL, an acronym for a group of techno-optimistic movements associated with Silicon Valley and a posthuman future. The following day, Torres responded with an essay arguing that successionism is just one small part of a broader problem.
Most TESCREAL advocates want to transform humans themselves: to merge with machines, upload their minds to computers, and become “posthumans”, digital beings that travel through the universe powered by Dyson swarms, hypothetical structures built around a star to collect its energy. They have little interest in humanity being replaced by an alien artificial intelligence built from scratch.
Torres frames the issue as a choice between coexistence and replacement. Advocates of coexistence envisage biological humans surviving alongside more advanced posthumans. Torres argues that self-sufficient posthumans would refuse to tolerate “useless” humans consuming finite resources. In practice, coexistence would therefore lead to the same replacement, achieved through transformation rather than direct displacement.
Torres thus identifies OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as advocates of transformation, although neither calls himself a successionist. Altman has said for years that the only way for humans to “survive” the emergence of superintelligence is to “merge” with machines, and he signed up for Nectome: “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud.” In his January essay “The Adolescence of Technology”, Amodei writes about the chance to greatly extend human lifespans and the prospect of “whole-brain uploading” as a way to overcome the body’s limitations. Amodei presents this prospect as a troubling risk rather than a goal, but Torres treats that concern as merely an obstacle on the way to the same destination.
The essay concludes by dividing everyone in the debate into “team human” and “team posthuman”. The latter includes anyone who ultimately accepts the replacement of the biological species, from explicit successionists to those who promote transformation as salvation. Torres concludes:
“The central and most important distinction is between those on team human and those on team posthuman. […] They are enemies, and even that word is not strong enough.”
This framing spread immediately. Forty minutes later, transhumanist Giulio Prisco replied directly to Torres’s tweet:
“I am on team human, and I consider posthumans part of that team.”
Merging with AI and uploading minds have long been promoted, alongside cryonics, as ways to escape death. A technology that allows a person to continue existing and one that replaces that person can look identical from the outside, even presenting the same face. What happens to the person, however, differs. The question is whether the person has survived death or whether someone else with their memories has taken their place.