In a series of works exploring the mobilization of apocalyptic themes and ideas drawn from the Western religious—more specifically, and significantly, Judeo‐Christian—tradition in contemporary discourses addressing the alleged convergence of so‐called GRIN /NBICS technologies in a singularity phenomenon, Robert Geraci (, , ) has drawn attention to various important entanglements of science, technology, and religion which need to be engaged when considering the rhetoric and reality of contemporary concerns about existential risk associated with the phenomenon he refers to as “Apocalyptic AI.” Notwithstanding the importance of such explorations, I want to suggest that they are marked by certain shortcomings which become apparent when one shifts interrogating the phenomenon of Apocalyptic AI from the perspective of religious studies to the perspective of critical religion studies, the latter field of inquiry being underpinned by the understanding that “race and religion are thoroughly entangled, perhaps starting with a shared point of origin in modernity, or in the colonial encounter [such that] religion and race is not just another token of the type ‘religion and,’ not just one approach to the study of religion among many. Rather, [that] every study of religion [and/or race] would need to be a study of religion and race” (Lloyd , 80). Geraci's () approach is anthropological and informed by a commitment to engage with history on a synchronic basis revealing “the web entangling robotics and AI and academic, literary, gaming, legal, governmental, and ethical communities based on various strands of one religious ideology: Apocalyptic AI.” On his view, adopting such a New Historicist line of critique necessitates emphasizing “the organic connections among texts, social structures, gender, sexuality, class hierarchy, ethnicity, family relations, work relations, and so on.” Yet, Geraci goes on to state that he does not engage with most of the aforementioned phenomena, focusing instead on “the connection between scientific work and a number of contemporary religious, political, entertainment, and literary concerns.” For him, “the integration of religion and science in Apocalyptic AI reflects many of our traditionally religious concerns while at the same time recasting those concerns with a techno scientific aura” (5). I want to suggest that bracketing race—Geraci uses the term ethnicity—results in an account of Apocalyptic AI that is Eurocentrically/West‐centrically particular yet presents itself as universal—what Immanuel Wallerstein () refers to as a “Eurocentric universal.” Put simply, I maintain that Geraci's invocation of the inclusive first‐person plural “we” in his reference to “our traditionally religious concerns” needs to be subjected to interrogation in order to make sense of Apocalyptic AI from a critical race theoretical and/or decolonial perspective—that is, in terms of the implications of Apocalyptic AI for “the Rest” (that is, non‐Europeans, nonwhite people, those located in the periphery of the world system, “the Wretched of the Earth,” and so on).

Building on earlier work exploring reflexive relations between race and information (Ali ), information and Orientalism (Ali ), and more recent work exploring race—more specifically, whiteness—and/as transhumanism in connection with the phenomenon of “white crisis” (Ali ), and the entanglement of various strands of apocalypticism in information society discourse (Ali ), in what follows I propose to explore the theme of existential risk associated with Apocalyptic AI in relation to the phenomenon of white crisis which I suggest should be understood as a modern racial phenomenon with premodern religious origins. By apocalypticism, I refer to the originally religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation of God's will, but which now tends to refer to the belief that the world will come to an end very soon, even within one's own lifetime. Significantly, this belief is usually accompanied by the idea that civilization will come to a tumultuous end due to some sort of catastrophic global event such as might be associated with nuclear war, biotechnology, climate change, and/or AI (Future of Life Institute ). In this connection, I want to explore the possibility that Apocalyptic AI, along with the attendant discourse of existential risk, is a strategy, albeit possibly one that is merely rhetorical, for maintaining white hegemony under mounting nonwhite contestation. I further suggest that this claim can be shown to be supported by the disclosure of continuity through change in the long‐durée entanglement of race and religion associated with the establishment, maintenance, expansion, and refinement of the modern/colonial world system if and when such changes are understood as iterations in what might be described as a programmatic trajectory of domination, the continuity or historical essence of which might be framed as “algorithmic racism.”

“THE WORLD,” WHITENESS, AND WHITE CRISIS

In order to motivate my argument, I need to begin by setting out my understanding of three terms: the world, whiteness, and White Crisis.

By “the world” I mean the world system which emerged in the long durée of the sixteenth century following the so‐called Columbian voyages of discovery to the New World commencing in 1492 CE, a global hierarchical system whose dominant core lies in the West and whose subaltern periphery is constituted by the Rest (Hall ). Although the modern world system is often characterized as capitalist in orientation, I suggest that this framing is at best incomplete and at worst a mischaracterization insofar as it obscures what decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo () refers to as “the dark underside” of modernity: the fact that it was forged through violence as an imperial‐colonial undertaking with religious cum racial foundations, and that the structuring logics (ontological, epistemological, cultural, political, economic, and so on) of this project—what is referred to as coloniality—persist in the postcolonial era notwithstanding the formal end of colonialism with the national independence movements of the 1960s. Yet, while centering 1492 CE and race in relation to the formation of the world system—where race should be understood as involving processes of exclusion, taxonomization, reproduction, and naturalization—it is necessary to emphasize the contribution of antecedent historical phenomena that informed this enterprise, and whose structuring logics were embedded in the constitution of this system (Ali ). In this connection, the anti‐Islamic(ate) foundation of the Crusades commencing in 1095 CE stands out as of perhaps decisive significance vis‐à‐vis its role in Christian polity formation—that is, the emergence of Christendom cum Europe cum the West—and as providing a template for later imperial‐colonial ventures (Mastnak , , , , , ). In addition, recent scholarship in critical medieval studies suggests that racialization processes were operative in the European Middle Ages, while others have attempted to make the case for the presence of “proto‐racism” in Ancient Greece and Rome (Isaac ; McCoskey ), both of which point to the need to think beyond the historical‐geographical horizon of sixteenth‐century Atlantic‐centrism when thinking about the entanglement of race and religion.

Regarding the matter of “whiteness,” here I draw upon the sociological account of the phenomenon presented by sociologist Steve Garner (, ) amended by way of insights drawn from the work of geographer Alastair Bonnett (). According to Garner (), use of the term “white” to describe people has sixteenth‐century New World origins, functioning in that context as merely “one of a range of labels, and not the one most frequently used.” On his view, “religion [more specifically, terms such as ‘Christian’ and ‘heathen’], nation, social class were all deployed more than color” (64). Bonnett () presents a slightly different view, referring to the arising of a triple conflation “White = European = Christian that imparted moral, cultural and territorial content to whiteness” (1039), thereby pointing to the entangled nexus of race and religion in the colonial setting; furthermore, and crucially, he insists that “modern European white identity is historically unique” (1043) on account of its naturalization and centralization of whiteness. Broadly concurring with Bonnett, yet drawing on what was stated earlier regarding the history of Western polity formation, I suggest that the triple conflation—White = Christian = European—should be complemented with an understanding that these terms have also been deployed chronologically as a sequence of “master signifiers”: Christian → European → White, and latterly → Western, the shift from White to Western being explored by Frank Füredi () and Bonnett (, , ) among others. What remains somewhat obscured here is a long legacy of conflation of the aforementioned terms with the category of the human, which, I suggest, becomes highly significant when attempting to think through the implications of transhuman and posthuman shifts in relation to Apocalyptic AI.

Finally, by “White Crisis” I refer to a situation in which a hegemonic whiteness is subjected to increasing contestation by the nonwhite “other,” engendering a heightened sense of anxiety and threat among those raced as white expressed through various discursive formulations, and prompting a variety of responses. In this connection, it is suggested that the recent election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the Brexit phenomenon in the United Kingdom, and the continued rise of Far/Alt‐Right politics in the United States and Europe can—and should—be seen together as one response to the re‐emergence of the phenomenon of White Crisis, almost fifty years on from the antiracist struggles of the 1960s, and almost a century on from when White Crisis was first being discussed in the West (specifically, Britain and North America). According to Bonnett (), “whiteness and the West … are both projects with an in‐built tendency to crisis. From the early years of the last century … through the mid‐century … and into the present day … we have been told that the West is doomed” (25); examples of such periodically manifesting White Crisis discourse include Lothrop Stoddard's alarmist The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy (1920), Ronald Segal's more ambivalent The Race War (1966), and in the contemporary “post‐racial” era Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017). Commenting on the emergence of White Crisis literature in late nineteenth – and early twentieth‐century Britain, Bonnett () maintains that “the period when ‘the white race’ was represented as undergoing a grave crisis was … also the period when white supremacism was most fully and boldly incorporated within public discourse [emphasis added].” Crucially, according to Bonnett, “this relationship is unsurprising, for the one is the flip‐side of the other” (322).

In drawing attention to what appears to be a recurrent—and ambivalent—phenomenon, I want to suggest that it might be useful to think about White Crisis in terms of its providing a lens or frame through which to see—and thereby disclose—race as Janus‐faced, informing both premodern manifestations of Western Christian apocalypticism in the medieval period and contemporary secular apocalypticism; or, more specifically, the phenomenon of existential risk entangled with Apocalyptic AI. In this connection, I suggest that we think about apocalyptic end of world scenarios in relation to my earlier discussion of “the world”—that is, the modern/colonial world system of global white supremacy—notwithstanding the ways in which existential risks are presented in mainstream discourse. Yet, if there is a parallel between apocalypticism and White Crisis, what of the latter's flip side, white supremacy? In offering an answer to that question, and following the lead of other commentators such as James Hughes (, 73, 84), I want to draw attention to millenarianism and/or millennialism—that is, the expectation that while the end of the world is near, a new earthly paradise is at hand—and suggest that, while presented as a potential existential risk, AI (and related technologies) are simultaneously framed in millenialist terms (Davis , 301–02)—for example, as ushering in a fourth industrial revolution promising super‐intelligence and super‐abundance (Carrico ).

THE ENTANGLED APOCALYPTICISM OF APOCALYPTIC AI (AAI)

While Geraci has usefully explored premodern religious experiences of alienation and threat in terms of their contingent relation to early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism and related strands of thought such as Christian millennialism/millenarianism, and the persistence of these concerns in Apocalyptic AI, I want to suggest that his exploration is problematic on at least two counts.

First, Geraci has rightly drawn attention to the positing of a mind/body dualism in the context of setting out a series of binary oppositions underpinning the Apocalyptic AI worldview; as he states, Apocalyptic AI “resolves a dualistic conflict between the mundane physical and the transcendental virtual in a cyberspace future inhabited by disembodied super minds” (Geraci , 24). This eschatological scenario is framed in terms of what is considered good (knowledge, machine, mind, virtual) and bad (ignorance, biology, body, physical) by proponents. Notwithstanding the significance and correctness of this line of argument, Geraci's near nonengagement with race and its entanglement with religion arguably results in tacit invocation of a Eurocentrically universal, “de‐raced” or race‐less conceptualization of the “purified” body, thereby forestalling disclosure of the racial underpinnings of Apocalyptic AI as a modern/colonial phenomenon. Consider, for example, Geraci's () characterization of Euro‐American Apocalyptic AI as working with a “misembodied” sense of information pointing to what he describes as “the odd nature of embodiment in AI. [On this view,] the immortal salvation of the future requires a kind of embodiment (some computer housing for the informational self) but the human body, itself, becomes irrelevant. In particular, a virtual body becomes more significant than a human body. Misembodiment refers to the move toward a purified body; purified, in this case, of its humanness” (241). He goes on to state, “the body counts for nothing in the Apocalyptic AI community [being] irrelevant to considerations of what it really means to be human; only the mind counts” (242). Granted, yet to what extent can the human body be understood as a human body absent the epidermal layer (or skin) that marks the boundary of the body, and which constitutes one preeminent marker of race (Ali )? In this connection, mention must be made of the important work of Dilan Mahendran () exploring mind‐body dualism in terms of the modern/colonial opposition of race (as embodied) and computation (as rational), the former correlated with subhumanity, the latter with humanity.

Adopting a decolonial perspective wherein considerations of body‐politics and geopolitics of knowledge—that is, who gets to construct knowledge, from where in the modern/colonial world system and according to what frameworks—are foregrounded readily discloses the racialized nature of Apocalyptic AI because, notwithstanding the international nature of its movements and institutions, and granted the need to take seriously the hybrid nature of endeavors involving the contributions of various ethnicities, genders, and nationalities, it is empirically demonstrable on demographic grounds, both quantitative and qualitative, that the Apocalyptic AI community is hegemonically white, male, and Western (that is, Euro‐American) (Carrico , ; Ali , forthcoming). Furthermore, it is a project whose trajectory is arguably traceable, genealogically, to a specific historical and geographical experience: that of Western Judeo‐Christianity and the European Enlightenment as informed by various rationalistic, but also esoteric and/or occult currents (Zimmerman ; , 70, 76). On this basis, and in terms of its entanglement with race, I want to suggest that Apocalyptic AI should be identified and understood as a Eurocentric/West‐centric modern/colonial racial phenomenon. In this connection, it is interesting to note that while careful not to generalize “to all of Euro‐American culture,” Geraci () insists that “there is no question as to whether … apocalyptic trends are common to researchers in both the US and Europe” (241). Yet, while drawing attention to this shared apocalyptic orientation among Euro‐American researchers, Geraci fails to identify the overwhelming whiteness of this community.

Second, Geraci's nonengagement with the long‐durée role of the Islamicate “other” in Western identity formation—that is, the formation of Christendom (cum Europe cum the West) against the backdrop of the perceived/constructed “existential threat” posed by the Islamicate polity—results in a bracketing (occlusion, silencing, erasure, and so on) that has implications for how to think about the significance of historical transformations within Western apocalypticism including its more recent incarnation as Apocalyptic AI. Although Geraci () does engage with the Islamicate, I suggest his engagement is unfortunately rather superficial, purely historical, and in terms of the latter as a source of ideas—specifically, those of the homunculus (or artificial humanoid) and alchemy—which are held to inform the genealogy of Apocalyptic AI. Nowhere is the Islamicate engaged as a historically persistent relationally constitutive antagonistic political “other,” or as a contemporary site to be interrogated vis‐à‐vis positions on Apocalyptic AI. While it might be argued that this has to do with the near absence of Islamicate meditations on Apocalyptic AI phenomena (Farzad Mahootian [] and Hamid Mavani [] constituting notable exceptions in this regard), I suggest the need to consider other reasons for the relatively lightweight treatment of the Islamicate, especially since it contrasts somewhat with Geraci's engagement with “other” non‐European, non‐Judeo Christian traditions such as Japanese Buddhism and Shinto (Geraci ), and his more recent engagement with Hinduism (Geraci , ). Reference to the Islamicate “other” in relation to the matter of Christian (cum European cum Western) polity formation should not be taken to preclude consideration of other “others” including those that are “internal”—for example, the Jews—and those that are “external”—for example, the indigenous of the Americas and Africans—to the polity; however, insofar as the Islamicate polity was distinct in being perceived as posing a military threat to the Christian (cum European cum Western) polity, and insofar as Apocalyptic AI is arguably at least partly driven by a militaristic/war logic, I would suggest that the threat posed by the Islamicate, irrespective of whether real or rhetorical, has a unique significance vis‐à‐vis how to think decolonially about both Apocalyptic AI and the attendant discourse of existential risk. Regarding the implications of bracketing (occluding, silencing, erasing, and so on) the role of the Islamicate vis‐à‐vis thinking about the latter in relation to transformations within Western apocalypticism, consider the following. Although Geraci () cites David Noble's () reference to the role of technology in the war against the Antichrist, and the Antichrist is an apocalyptic figure within Christian tradition, the Antichrist remains unidentified in Geraci's oeuvre. This omission is somewhat puzzling given that Noble refers explicitly to Cistercian monk Joachim of Fiore's (c.1135–1202 CE) apocalyptic and millenarian identification of Saladin as an Antichrist figure (Daniel , 211–18; Conklin Akbari , 299; Boyer , 320), a view informed by Joachim's embrace of a Crusader worldview, as well as to later identifications of the Antichrist – for example, by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther – with the Catholic papacy. Joachimite apocalypticism and millennialism and its entanglement with anti‐Islamic crusading takes on added significance once it is appreciated that Christopher Columbus, who launched the so‐called New World voyages of discovery (actually conquest), thereby ushering in the modern/colonial racial world system, held Joachimite views, styling himself as a messianic figure committed to liberating Jerusalem from the infidels (Noble , 33; Delaney , 271). In short, there is an entanglement of race, religion, war, and the apocalyptic around the figure of Joachim of Fiore (Nájera ; Cardinal and Mégret ), which seems to imply one in the movements that historically trace from his millenarianism, including Apocalyptic AI.

Geraci's nonengagement with Joachim of Fiore is further significant insofar as the latter has been identified by Noble (), Erik Davis (), John Gray (2007), and others as a figure of abiding importance in the genealogy of Western apocalypticism, including Apocalyptic AI, on the basis of his projection of the Christian Trinity onto the stage of history via his “Theory of the Three Ages.” The last of his three ages, “the age of The Son,” points to a spiritual—and, in contemporary Apocalyptic AI terms, informational—mode of existence, leading futurist Kevin Kelly () to assert that “when you hear people talk about information, they could be talking about the Holy Spirit” (391).

Returning to the entanglement of race, religion, war, and the apocalyptic, if crusader anti‐Islamism indeed characterizes the contingent yet historically sedimented long‐durée dispositional background structuring logic (ontological, epistemological, and so on) informing Western perceptions of Islam (and Muslims)—including those operative within the horizon of the post‐Christian West (Daniel , 302, 306–07; Ali )—and if this background includes apocalyptic perceptions/constructions of Islam wherein the latter is understood as a heresy—the Prophet Muhammad seen, on occasion, as herald or manifestation of Antichrist, and Muslims (Saracens, Moors, Turks, and so on) as the hordes of the Antichrist (Daniel ; Almond ; Arjana ) and a perennial, threatening enemy “other” (Conklin Akbari , 297–98)—what might this mean in terms of the entanglement of race, religion, and war in the contemporary moment of White Crisis, arguably generating a variety of apocalyptic responses from whiteness including conservative/reactionary Alt‐Right populism (nativism, fascism, and so on) with its attendant Islamophobia, but possibly also Apocalyptic AI in the form of proactive trans‐/post‐humanism? While Geraci () maintains that “military funding played no role in the development of Apocalyptic AI” (166), in an earlier work he draws attention to Cold War anxieties about nuclear proliferation informing the worldview of Apocalyptic AI proponents (Geraci ). While conceding the latter point, I want to suggest that the facts are somewhat more overdetermined than as presented by Geraci in that there is a contextual dark underside of coloniality that needs to be considered in relation to such late modern technological developments ostensibly triggered by Cold War concerns, not to mention the relatively transitory nature of Soviet Communism as an Orientalized “other” emerging within Europe when compared to the long‐durée Oriental “other” represented by the Islamicate both preceding and succeeding “the Red Menace” (Boyer , 326–28). Furthermore, and again, these developments are entangled with the modern phenomenon of White Crisis—that is, perceived threat posed by the nonwhite “other”—which has a premodern precursor in theo‐political anxieties: a perceived threat posed primarily by the Islamicate “other.”

In arguing along such lines, my position should be differentiated from the “clash thesis” as articulated by contemporary neo‐Medievalists such as Orientalist Bernard Lewis, and international relations theorist Samuel Huntington. Numerous attempts have been made to debunk this thesis by pointing to a complex long‐durée history of interaction and engagement between Western Christian and Muslim polities that has taken various forms, some of them hostile and others marked by more conciliatory if not convivial relations (Blanks and Frassetto ; Adib‐Moghaddem ; Quinn ; Tolan ). The clash thesis, in crude, transhistorical form pointing to a metaphysical condition—what some have referred to as a “cosmic war”—is a naturalizing/de‐politicizing position founded on an erasure of historical realities in pursuit of a political agenda. However, drawing on the seminal work of Norman Daniel (), Tomaz Mastnak (, , , , , ), Luna Nájera (), Pierre‐Alexandre Cardinal and Frédéric Mégret (), and others, I want to suggest that the thesis, reinterpreted as shorthand for a contingent yet historically sedimented long‐durée dispositional bias manifesting structurally and systemically is, in fact, well‐founded, and that anti‐Islam(ism), as an ontological background horizon, remains operative, periodically erupting under certain conditions—for example, nineteenth‐century Orientalism and contemporary Islamophobia (Feldman and Medevoi , 1; Ali ). Crucially, according to Arshin Adib‐Moghaddem (), this clash is arguably a “competition over history and temporal sequences of humanity” (220), an issue of fundamental relevance to Apocalyptic AI in terms of its fundamentally futurist orientation.

Returning to the issue of White Crisis and its entanglement with apocalypticism and anti‐Islamism, Cardinal and Mégret () point out that war with Islam was motivated by “salvation of souls and millenarian Christian‐centric universalism” (1). In this connection, it is interesting to note that according to Michael Zimmerman (), “post‐humanist discourse, including Ray Kurzweil's, represents at least in some respects the Western salvation narrative” (356), a view with which Geraci appears to concur (Geraci , 234–35). Crucially, Cardinal and Mégret maintain that salvation, in its political form, has its origins in medieval crusading as an activity with a religious institutional basis (Cardinal and Mégret ). In this connection, one might question the secularized “sacerdotal” power of those scientists, philosophers, futurists, and other proponents of Apocalyptic AI advancing what is arguably a rhetorical disciplinary narrative of salvation—a narrative overwhelmingly shaped by “white saviors” self‐tasked with finding solutions to the apocalyptic problem of existential risk, a problem arguably of their own making.

ALGORITHMIC RACISM

Granted the above entanglements of race, religion, war, and the apocalyptic/millennial, how can—should—sense be made of such entanglements with the phenomenon of Apocalyptic AI? In this connection, I suggest recourse to the idea of algorithmic racism, a methodological framework for conceptualizing the relationship between processes of racial formation (or racialization) within Western historical experience in relation to its (various) “other(s)” (Ali , , , forthcoming). Although algorithmic racism can be—and has been—understood as referring to algorithms as sites for embedding, and means for expressing, racial bias, it should be understood here as invoking the figure of the algorithm as a metaphor for thinking coherently about the relationship between different discursive formations—religious, philosophical, scientific, cultural, and so on—as race is paradigmatically articulated at different periods within the history of colonial modernity; in fact, such transformations should be seen as constituting re‐articulations or “re‐iterations” of the difference between the European (white, Western) and the non‐European (nonwhite, non‐Western) along what decolonial scholars have referred to as the “line of the human.” While it is common among proponents of Apocalyptic AI—more specifically, transhumanists and technological posthumanists—to historically (and geographically) frame the category of the human with reference to European Renaissance and Enlightenment humanist thought (Hughes , 757; Ferrando 2013, 27; Bostrom , 1), I suggest that this move tends to obscure the origins of the human as a Eurocentric religious‐racial category forged through a process of hierarchical negative dialectics on the basis of an antagonistic relation with the non‐European “other” as the subhuman during the long durée of the sixteenth century, if not earlier (Wynter ; Mills ).

Against this backdrop, concerns about the existential risk posed by Apocalyptic AI should be understood as entangled with a shift from the distinction between subhuman (non‐European, nonwhite) and human (European, white) to that between human (non‐European, nonwhite) and transhuman (European, white), such shift being intended to maintain the relational and hierarchical binary between the European and non‐European, and prompted, at least partly, by certain kinds of critical and decolonial posthumanist contestation of Eurocentric conceptions of the human; furthermore, that such a shift is occurring against the broader background or horizon of a resurfacing of the phenomenon of White Crisis. I want to suggest that it is the very apocalyptic nature of the phenomenon of White Crisis—that is, perceived threat to white supremacy under mounting contestation from the nonwhite “other”—that contributes to engendering the “algorithmic” transformation of humanism into technological posthumanism via transhumanism as an iterative shift within the historically sedimented onto‐logic of Eurocentric racialization. By framing the issue in terms of contribution rather than causation, I recognize that the transhumanist/posthumanist project is overdetermined in terms of its historical motivations and causes (Zimmerman , 68–69). I further suggest that such techno‐millenialist currents fed into the emerging technology of race at the onset of colonial modernity which commenced with the Columbian voyages in 1492 CE. In short, insofar as ideas of leveraging technology to achieve utopian and/or apocalyptic purposes have a long history, I am not suggesting that the transhumanist project is driven solely by a postracial crisis of whiteness; rather, I argue that, under contemporary conditions of White Crisis, the transhumanist project gains a sense of urgency as a techno‐scientific resolution—or “fix”—to such an anxiety‐ridden state of affairs and that it is prudent from a critical race theoretical and decolonial perspective to think about the discourse of existential risk in this way. To briefly recapitulate: humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism should be understood as iterations within the structural—that is, relational—logic of algorithmic racism, and of Apocalyptic AI, in both its transitional form (transhumanism) and final form (posthumanism). It should be understood in relation to the project of maintaining structurally asymmetric power relations between the (formerly) human (white, Western, male, and so on) and its subaltern “other,” even as the latter contests the Eurocentric terrain of the human. In this connection, it is interesting to note that Geraci () cites historian of religions David Chidester's definition of religion as “the negotiation of what it means to be human with respect to the superhuman and the subhuman” (1011), yet fails to explore this in terms of iterative positional shifts around the racial figure of the human as (European) “Man.” I argue that this reading is supported by Zimmerman's () highly perceptive observation that “posthumanists often regard humans as relay runners about to pass the baton to oncoming others, who in turn will race toward a summit that surpasses all ordinary human understanding [emphasis added]” (363). Perhaps most provocatively, I suggest such shifts along the line of the human and their entanglement with White Crisis and/as existential risk should be understood in terms of the idea of “race war” (Zimmerman , 366), and that this decolonial reading of the phenomenon holds true irrespective of whether Apocalyptic AI is framed in a liberal democratic techno‐progressive register or in more elitist libertarian terms.

CONCLUSION

In closing, I should like to offer some brief reflections on the question of the rhetorical versus existential nature posed by the existential risk of Apocalyptic AI. For some, such as critical theorist and rhetorician Dale Carrico (, ), Apocalyptic AI is a distractor from the real challenges afforded by futurist technologies (Carrico , 50–52), a position shared by philosopher Luciano Floridi () in the latter's criticism of what he refers to as the proponents of “AItheism.” While sympathetic to their argument that Apocalyptic AI is a distraction, their shared characterization of the modern/colonial world system as capitalist rather than racial (capitalist) in orientation, resulting in a failure to adequately foreground racial concerns, forecloses the possibility of analyzing the issue in terms of the framework of algorithmic racism set out herein. In this connection, trans‐/post‐humanism can—and from a critical theoretical and/or decolonial perspective should—be viewed as a response to the phenomenon of White Crisis, one that is techno‐scientific and occurs in parallel with, albeit somewhat obscured by, the more overt phenomenon of conservative “White Backlash” (Ali ). On this view, Apocalyptic AI should at least be seen as a rhetorical strategy for maintaining hegemony under contestation, and the lens through which to think about the (im)possibility/ (im)plausibility of this phenomenon is political—more specifically, racial‐religious political economy—and not philosophical, theological, or scientific, notwithstanding the entanglement of these other ways of viewing the issue; further, that the real threat might be less one of Apocalyptic AI and more one of Apocalyptic IA (that is, intelligence augmentation) in the sense of deployment of so‐called smart technologies in pursuit of a more subtle and diffuse cyborgian/transhumanist agenda than the one presented by techno‐Evangelical Extropians and Singularitarians.

NOTES