Émile P. Torres

Émile P. Torres is a Data & Society affiliate, and a moral philosopher, intellectual historian, and journalist whose work focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies — especially AI — and human extinction. They have published four books, the most recent of which is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation(Routledge 2024). In 2023, with Dr. Timnit Gebru, they coined the acronym “TESCREAL” to denote a constellation of ideologies that have played an integral role in launching, sustaining, and accelerating Silicon Valley’s race to build artificial general intelligence. Émile has published in a wide range of academic journals, including Synthese, Inquiry, Bioethics, Metaphilosophy, y Futures, as well as popular media outlets including The Washington Post, The New Statesman, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, y Aeon. They are a contributing writer at Truthdig and, formerly, Salon.

Émile earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, with honors, from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a MS in neuroscience from Brandeis University. In 2023, they received their PhD in philosophy from Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany, and are currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University.