Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Francis Galton was a Victorian statistician and polymath who, after Darwin, systematized hereditarian thinking into the modern eugenics movement, arguing that human abilities were primarily inherited traits that could be scientifically managed. The course readings invoke Galton to trace how eugenic logic—from his 1869 work through twentieth-century progressives and into contemporary AI ethics—establishes a genealogy of scientific racism embedded in claims about measurable human difference. His framework persists today in arguments about IQ, employability, and genetic determinism that resurface in AI development discourse and the "TESCREAL" bundle's utopian eschatologies.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres

The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence

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These are instances of what could be called “proto-eugenics.” The modern eugenics movement, in contrast, originated in the post-Darwinian work of Francis Galton (1869), who defended the “hereditarian” thesis that “a man’s natural abilities …It is noteworthy that negative eugenics was embraced by not just German fascists but progressives and liberals elsewhere in Europe and North America [16]. As Bashford and Levine (2010) observe, “the optimism of eugenics, and its aspiration …Eschatology. The TESCREAL bundle shares certain “eschatological” (relating to “last things”) convictions. As with religions like Christianity, these take two forms: utopian and apocalyptic, which are inextricably bound up together. For exam…

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