All Kinds Of Everything

Another good piece by Henry Farrell this week, reflecting on the chronopolitics of the Singularity Bros. Everything in their discourse, and all their policy prescriptions, are determined by the confident assumption that Artificial General Intelligence and machine consciousness, and all that those entail for humanity, are just around the corner and so we must prepare for this inevitable development and its probable consequences; RIP “your next job may be in coding”, hello “you’re going to lose that entry-level position to a sycophantic chatbot”. There Is No Alternative; “instead of a fixed past and an indefinite future, we face a definite future, which directly or indirectly shapes its own past” [i.e. our present]. This isn’t determinism in any usual sense, in which the future becomes predictable through the identification of the underlying fixed rules of historical development (whether through social science, psychology or history). Rather, the advent of a dramatic,…