We discussed a podcast in which we were taken through TESCREAL, an acronym standing for a bundle of elitist concepts: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and Longtermism, coined by several prominent critics of AI doomerism to describe a conspiracy - or to disseminate a conspiracy theory - concerning the dastardly plans and goals that those who own and are developing AI have in mind.  Basically the great and the good are saying: The earth is doomed - there are too many people and it’s overheating.  If AI is developed to try to address this problem, solutions will only accelerate population growth and consume more energy, hastening the end and our extinction.  BUT we can accelerate the development of AI to enable space exploration and the colonisation of other planets... and to develop robots that have the capability to emulate - and surpass - humans in intelligence and resilience to hostile environments.  So even where humans can’t survive, they can be copied into super intelligent robots that can.  And the people to colonise the universe and provide the prototype “souls” of the robots, thus achieving eternal propagation of their genes and personalities - the brightest people clever enough to develop AI and those who are funding this very expensive project - i.e the super-rich.  The meeting discussed - and we came to different conclusions - on the plausibility of this theory and whether it was a conspiracy or no.  And can a machine downloaded with a human mind really emulate a human?  The doomerists are making careers as liberals standing up for oppressed or marginalised minorities (women, non-whites, the poor…), so if their claim is true, they must expose it.  And if false they are at least raising awareness and hopefully pressing for regulation of AI.