A Tale of Two Extinctions

Last month, a young man named Guy Edward Bartkus drove to a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, and detonated a homemade bomb that ripped apart the clinic and shattered the windows of buildings in the vicinity. The powerful blast killed Bartkus instantly; four others were injured but are expected to recover. 

The FBI labeled the attack “an intentional act of terrorism” driven by “antinatalist beliefs” — apparently the very first use of the word “antinatalist” in an official FBI crime report. Antinatalism is the view that procreation is morally wrong given “the harms that await any newborn child — pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief and death,” to quote the most famous antinatalist, David Benatar.

Most antinatalists, including Benatar, explicitly reject the use of violence in opposing the generation of new human life. They believe that not having children must be a voluntary choice and aim to persuade people of their view through rational argumentation rather than force or aggression. Making sense of Bartkus’ attack thus requires understanding how some antinatalists embrace an additional idea called “pro-mortalism,” which holds that suicide and — on one interpretation — murder can be justified to obviate the suffering that people would otherwise experience if they continue existing. If this smaller movement wasn’t on the FBI’s radar before Bartkus, it is now. 

Consider a conversation between two pro-mortalists recently posted on YouTube:

Person 1: In a sense, I don’t see murder … like, if you kill me, I’m happy.

Person 2: Likewise!

Person 1: I don’t see that much of a bad thing. … Murder is not bad to me.

Person 2: [Laughing] Especially if it’s an instantaneous one.

Person 1: Because, as for me, the end justifies the means in this whole dying thing. Because there are ways you can die painlessly, but the bottom line is we are all going to die.

Person 2: Yes, we should accept the fate. That’s our fate. [Edited for clarity.]

In other words, we’re all going to die someday, and the sooner we perish, the less suffering we will have experienced. Ideally, the best death would be instantaneous, as might happen from the blast of a homemade bomb.

The combination of antinatalism and pro-mortalism yields efilism — “life” spelled backward — an ideology that is ferociously opposed to life. The person who apparently named the movement, Gary Inmendham, says he liked it because “it sounds a little bit like ‘evil,’” which is how he sees his pro-existence opponents. Bartkus was more than an antinatalist: He was an efilist who, as such, subscribed to the pro-mortalist creed.

Underlying efilism is yet another dangerous idea called “negative utilitarianism.” This “ethical” theory claims that our only moral obligation in the world is to minimize suffering. The less suffering there is, the better the world becomes, and the best world is one in which no suffering exists at all. Since the only way to completely eliminate suffering is to eliminate all living creatures, negative utilitarianism instructs its adherents to become “world-exploders” who obliterate the whole planet or — even better — somehow annihilate the entire universe. 

Efilists are explicitly pro-extinctionist. If they had access to a “big red button” enabling them to unilaterally erase the world, they would push it without hesitation. As one leading advocate says:

If you could end suffering tomorrow, probably anything is justifiable; inflicting just about anything is probably justifiable … by any means necessary. If I found out tomorrow that the only way that sentient extinction could possibly happen was skinning all the living things alive slowly, I’d hate it, but I would say that it’s what we have to do. [Edited for clarity.]

Fortunately, efilism is a fringe ideology — there are perhaps a few hundred adherents in total — but that doesn’t mean that very few people are pro-extinctionists. To the contrary, pro-extinctionism has become immensely influential over the past few decades, though in a slightly different form than that promoted by the efilists. It has been, so to speak, hiding in plain sight, given how it’s bound up with popular Silicon Valley ideologies like transhumanism, longtermism and accelerationism, which the computer scientist Timnit Gebru and I bundle under the umbrella of “TESCREALism.” This is an especially pernicious form of pro-extinctionism, because many advocates of these ideologies would vehemently reject the “pro-extinctionist” label. In fact, they claim to care deeply about avoiding “human extinction.” But a closer look reveals that they are no less set on eliminating our species, Homo sapiens, than the efilists and negative utilitarians.

To understand this, consider that the term “extinction” is not as straightforward as you might think. In my 2024 book “Human Extinction,” which explores the history of thinking about extinction and the ethics of dying out, I count at least six extinction types. Two of these — “terminal” and “final” extinction — are relevant here. Terminal extinction would occur if our species were to disappear entirely and forever. The concept of final extinction builds on this by introducing an additional condition of disappearing entirely and forever without leaving behind any successors, such as genetically modified humanoids or superintelligent AIs — often called “posthumans.” We can thus make a parallel distinction between two kinds of pro-extinctionism: the first specifically aims to bring about final human extinction, while the second aims to bring about terminal extinction without final extinction

Efilists, negative utilitarians and environmentally motivated groups like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) advocate for the first kind of pro-extinctionism. They want our species to die out without leaving behind any successors. If your goal is to eliminate suffering entirely, you’ll need to eliminate not just all present beings but all future beings that might exist as well. And if you believe that creatures like us are programmed to destroy the biosphere, as VHEMT does, then bequeathing the world to posthumans won’t do the trick — we’ll need to die out without handing things over to “intelligent” successors who might continue our systematic destruction of the natural world. This is the first group of pro-extinctionists who specifically want final extinction.

The second group advocates for our species to be replaced by posthumans. On this account, dying out without leaving behind any successors — i.e., undergoing final extinction — would constitute a profound tragedy. Some TESCREALists contend that it would be a tragedy of quite literally cosmic proportions because it means we would have no descendants to colonize the universe and spread the “light of consciousness” to other galaxies. In this way, they disagree with the first group of pro-extinctionists.

If, however, our species were to die out after creating worthy posthumans to supplant us — genetically modified humanoids, superintelligent AIs, etc. — that would be perfectly fine. Indeed, it would be desirable, since if our species were to stick around, it would suck up resources that our posthuman descendants could more “efficiently” use to create “astronomical value.” In other words, we must avoid final extinction, but terminal extinction would be good, assuming it happens once posthumanity makes its debut.

I have catalogued myriad examples of this idea in previous articles. Consider Derek Shiller’s argument that “we should engineer our extinction so that our planet’s resources can be devoted to making artificial creatures with better lives.” Google co-founder Larry Page holds a similarly radical view, declaring that “digital life is the natural and desirable next step in … cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.” More recently, the computer scientist Jaron Lanier told a Vox reporter that lots of AI researchers in Palo Alto now “believe that it would be good to wipe out people and that the AI future would be a better one, and that we should wear a disposable temporary container for the birth of AI.”

This is pro-extinctionism of the second sort, which endorses terminal but not final extinction, in contrast to the efilist’s preference for final extinction. Since final extinction entails terminal extinction, both groups are aligned in seeing no place for Homo sapiens in their preferred futures. (Efilists would add that there’s no place for life of any sort.) This is the common denominator that qualifies them as pro-extinctionist. The only difference in opinion pertains to what should happen after we are gone: should the world fall silent after us or burst into the cacophony of a new posthuman civilization that supersedes all current societies?

The TESCREAL ideologies — transhumanism, longtermism, accelerationism, etc. — are wildly popular in Silicon Valley. As noted earlier, many advocates are outspoken about the importance of averting “human extinction.” But don’t be fooled: what they mean by “human extinction” is final human extinction. They couldn’t care less about the terminal extinction of our species, so long as this happens after our posthuman progeny takes over the world. The survival of our species matters only insofar as it’s necessary to give birth to our successors. Otherwise, our species is as disposable as a placenta.

This is a particularly insidious form of pro-extinctionism, I would argue, because it exploits the ambiguity of “human extinction” in a sneaky and misleading way. Many people will naturally assume that “human extinction” means terminal extinction — the end of our species. They may thus find themselves nodding along when they hear TESCREALists proclaiming that human extinction must be avoided at all costs.

In reality, these ideologues are actually pushing for a world in which our species is usurped and discarded, which I suspect most people would — and I believe should — strongly oppose. But unlike the efilists, negative utilitarians and radical environmentalists, the pro-extinctionists in Silicon Valley have enormous power to shape the future and realize their catastrophically dangerous visions of the future. That makes them a far greater threat than lone wolves like Bartkus.

We should note here that not all TESCREALists explicitly support terminal extinction the way Shiller does. Some are merely indifferent to our survival once posthumanity arrives. As the influential transhumanist Ben Goertzel suggests, there could be “legacy humans” who persist into the posthuman era. Perhaps they will be kept in pens, like gorillas in the zoo, or as pets watched after and fed daily by their posthuman owners. But it doesn’t much matter whether this happens or we disappear entirely — our survival in the world of posthumans will be irrelevant, in the same way that the survival of the white rhino is irrelevant to our current economic, political and technological systems.

I call this view “extinction neutralism,” and argue that nearly all TESCREALists fall somewhere on the spectrum between extinction neutralism and outright pro-extinctionism. The longtermist Toby Ord provides an example. He writes that “rising to our full potential for flourishing would likely involve us being transformed into something beyond the humanity of today.” Nowhere does he explicitly declare: “And then our species should expire.”

But what should we expect to happen once posthumanity takes control? Extinction neutralism is essentially indistinguishable from pro-extinctionism in practice. As Shiller highlights, there would be no point to keeping us around if we were to drain valuable resources that our successors could put to much “better” use. Surely, we will become both superfluous and burdensome, which would give our posthuman overlords good reason to euthanize us. Even those, like Ord, who don’t explicitly endorse terminal extinction are nonetheless pushing a worldview in which we would almost certainly die out.

All of this points to a perplexing question: What is it about our current moment that’s made pro-extinctionism so appealing? Why are we witnessing such a widespread “revolt against humanity,” to quote the scholar Adam Kirsch? There have been some pro-extinctionists in the past, such as the German pessimists Philipp Mainländer and Eduard von Hartmann, who lived during the 19th century. The latter anticipated efilism in arguing that we should eliminate not just all life on Earth, but all living creatures in the entire universe. He didn’t know how we would do that, but predicted that an effective mechanism of cosmic annihilation would someday come into view.

Examples like these are historically rare. Today, they are not. From the efilists, negative utilitarians and radical environmentalists to the transhumanists, longtermists and accelerationists, a large number of people with quite different perspectives on the world, ethical commitments and eschatological visions of the future have all converged on the same conclusion that our species should soon bow out. If you, like me, value our species and believe that, despite our many profound flaws, we should survive and flourish, the sudden rise in pro-extinctionist sentiments should unsettle you.

Perhaps someday the history books will tell tales of how the efilists and TESCREALists tried to end our species and failed. One way to ensure that they fail is to understand the difference between terminal and final extinction, recognize the sneaky language games that Silicon Valley ideologues like to play and oppose pro-extinctionism in all its forms.