Philosopher Emile P. Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru coined the TESCREAL acronym, publishing the full analysis in First Monday (2024), 'The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence'. They argue the seven movements share intellectual roots, overlapping funders and personnel, and a lineage they trace to twentieth-century eugenics-adjacent thinking, culminating in AGI eschatology where present harms are discounted against astronomical future value.
Journalistic treatments, including Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich, describe these ideologies as quasi-religious: salvation through technology, an elect who see it coming, and an apocalypse scheduled for nonbelievers. The religious frame is contested by adherents, who call it pattern-matching by critics, but the frame persists because the movements' internal language, sin as risk, heaven as utopia, keeps supplying it.
The esoteric core, per Torres's earlier work and the bundle's own texts like Bostrom's 'Astronomical Waste' (2003), is a utilitarian heaven: trillions of unborn digital minds whose welfare outweighs any present concern. Structurally it is a salvation doctrine with the supernatural edited out, which is exactly what makes it legible to engineers and invisible to them as religion.
If a worldview predicts its own critics are standing in the way of trillions of future lives, how would you ever talk it down?