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, and 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, and 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.