The New Artificial Intelligentsia

Ruha Benjamin argues that AI evangelists present themselves as stewards of humanity while advancing projects that concentrate power, privilege technical elites, and normalize harm. She links AGI rhetoric, safety discourse, and future-oriented moral claims to eugenic thinking, especially when present suffering is discounted in favor of hypothetical futures.

Reading notes

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• AI evangelists frame their self-interest as humanistic concern.
• Claims about AGI’s inevitability help push people toward acquiescence.
• Safety language and alignment talk can mask a drive to hoard power and shape the future.
• Benjamin connects the AI world’s language of optimization, enhancement, and efficiency to eugenic logics.
• She argues that intelligence gets quantified and fetishized in ways that echo IQ and meritocratic hierarchy.
• The essay treats TESCREAL, effective altruism, longtermism, transhumanism, and related ideas as part of a broader eugenic worldview.
• It says these views prioritize far-future hypothetical beings over people harmed now by AI systems, data centers, warfare, and extraction.
• Benjamin points to labor exploitation, false arrests, automated fraud accusations, and environmental costs as current harms.
• She contrasts tech evangelists with organizers, artists, writers, workers, and affected communities resisting AI’s use.
• The closing emphasis is on solidarity, ancestral intelligence, and collective choices instead of deference to tech elites.