Бессрочные прогнозы
Журнал «KANT: Social Sciences & Humanities Series» №1(13) 2023 [стр. 18-36]
DOI: 10.24923/2305-8757.2023-13.2
Ключевые слова: будущее; технобудущее; прогноз; современность; ритуал; вера; ИИ; технокультура.
Современность считает священной формулу стремления к открытому будущему: обещание человеческой решимости, которое удваивается как предписание к контролю. Сегодня знамя этого планируемого будущего несут технологии. Якобы безличная, нейтральная и свободная от разочарования в идеологии, вера в технологические изменения пронизывает нынешний горизонт исторического будущего. Тем не менее, именно так сегодняшнее технобудущее устанавливает гегемонию замкнутости и одинаковости. В частности, растущий акцент ИИ на прогнозировании религиозные исследования связывают с космограммами - универсализирующими моделями, которые управляют тем, как факты и ценности соотносятся друг с другом, обеспечивая общую и нормативную точку отсчета. В прогностической парадигме социальные проблемы мыслимы только как объекты расчетливого контроля - контроля, который никогда не может быть осуществлен, но сохраняется как вечно отложенный и повторяющийся горизонт. В результате мы видим, как это технобудущее поддерживается не столько за счет буквально точных предсказаний будущих событий, сколько за счет ритуальных демонстраций предсказания времени.
Литература:
1. Эта статья является продолжением серии исследований, проведенных в рамках гранта Канадского совета по социальным и гуманитарным наукам №430-2019-00078 "Личное установление истины в обществе, управляемом данными". Он также черпает вдохновение в работах Петра Шпунара, Давида Гребера и редакторов серии "Историческое будущее" Золтана Болдишара Симона и Марека Тамма.
2. Reinhart Koselleck, "Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process," in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 35.
3. Zoltаn Boldizsаr Simon and Marek Tamm, "Historical Futures," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021), 3-22.
4. John Tresch, "Cosmogram," in Cosmograms, ed. Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005), 69.
5. Reinhart Koselleck, "Modernity and the Planes of Historicity," in Futures Past, 3-20.
6. Fran?ois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 105.
7. As per Ulrich Beck's, Anthony Giddens's, and others' reflexive modernization thesis. See Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, transl. Mark Ritter (London: SAGE, 1992) and Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
8. Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, "The Emergence of Post-Normal Science," in Science, Politics and Morality: Scientific Uncertainty and Decision Making, ed. Ren? von Schomberg (Dordrecht: Springer-Science+Business Media, 1993), 85-123.
9. For a recent assessment, see Duncan McLaren and Nils Markusson, "The Co-Evolution of Technological Promises, Modelling, Policies and Climate Change Targets," Nature Climate Change 10 (May 2020), 392-97. See also Evander Lewis Price, "Future Monumentality" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2019), 5.
10. David Graeber, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," The Baffler, March 2012, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit.
11. See Andreas Huyssen, "Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia," in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 57-73.
12. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 2.
13. Phil Jones, "Refugees Help Power Machine Learning Advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon," Rest of World, 22 September 2021, https://restofworld.org/2021/ refugees-machine-learning-big-tech/.
14. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xviii.
15. Sun-ha Hong, "Technofutures in Stasis: Smart Machines, Ubiquitous Computing, and the Future That Keeps Coming Back," International Journal of Communication 15 (2021), 1940-60.
16. Reinhart Koselleck, "Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution," in Futures Past, 39-54.
17. Daniel Rosenberg, "An Eighteenth-Century Time Machine: The Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot," in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History, ed. Daniel Gordon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 47.
18. Fred Turner makes this connection between prototype and Puritan teleology in "Prototype," in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information, Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 256-68.
19. Michel Foucault traced this reliance in the history of political economy as governmentality. Here, nature functions as a reliable guarantor for the knowledge production of the economist: "It is not [merely] background, but a permanent correlative," in that "laws of nature" can constantly be described and invoked to derive further economic claims (10 January 1979, in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collеge de France, 1978-79, ed. Michel Senellart, transl. Graham Burchell [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008], 16).
20. Simon and Tamm, "Historical Futures," 8.
21. Fredric Jameson, "Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?" Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (1982), 153.
22. For more, see Sun-ha Hong, Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a DataDriven Society (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 94.
23. Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018).
24. Os Keyes, "The Body Instrumental," Logic, 7 December 2019, https://logicmag.io/ nature/the-body-instrumental/; Shea Swauger, "Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education," Hybrid Pedagogy, 2 April 2020, https://hybridpedagogy.org/ our-bodies-encoded-algorithmic-test-proctoring-in-higher-education/.
25. Fenwick McKelvey and Joshua Neves, "Introduction: Optimization and Its Discontents," Review of Communication 21, no. 2 (2021), 96.
26. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996).
27. Ali Alkhatib, "To Live in Their Utopia: Why Algorithmic Systems Create Absurd Outcomes," in CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2021).
28. For one overview, see Luke Stark and Jesse Hoey, "The Ethics of Emotion in Artificial Intelligence Systems," in FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (New York: ACM, 2021), 782-93.
29. Hong, Technologies of Speculation, 94.
30. See, for example, Boris Jardine and Matthew Drage, "The Total Archive: Data, Subjectivity, Universality," History of the Human Sciences 31, no. 5 (2018), 3-22, and Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
31. For more on this view of Shannon and Hartley, see Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, "How Information Got Re-Invented," Nautilus, 4 August 2017, http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/how-information-got-re_invented
32. Michael Betancourt, "The Demands of Agnotology::Surveillance," CTheory, 17 July 2014, https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14785/5660.
33. Chun, Discriminating Data, 52.
34. Ibid., chapters 1-2. See also Aubrey Clayton, "How Eugenics Shaped Statistics," Nautilus, 27 October 2020, https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-9365/.
35. Jessica Snouwaert, "Elon Musk Predicts People Won't Have to Talk in 10 Years Because They'll Be Able to Use an Alien-Like Mind Language to Communicate without Words," Business Insider, 8 May 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/ elon-musk-prediction-human-to-human-mind-communication-10-years-2020-5.
36. Sun-ha Hong and Piotr M. Szpunar, "The Futures of Anticipatory Reason: Contingency and Speculation in the Sting Operation," Security Dialogue 50, no. 4 (2019), 314.
37. Niklas Luhmann, "The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society," Social Research 43, no. 1 (1976), 140.
38. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011).
39. Sam Hind, "Making Decisions: The Normal Interventions of Nissan 'Mobility Managers,'" Mobilities (2021), 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2021.1988682.
40. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
41. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
42. Bratton spoke at a New York Times conference; see "Cities for Tomorrow 2015 – Data Mining in the Modern City," New York Times Events, uploaded 21 July 2015, YouTube video, 32:21, https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ivGqryVJac.
43. For this theme of rehearsed and simulated futures, see Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
44. Piotr M. Szpunar, "Promnesic Futures: Technology, Climate, Dеjа Vu," Memory Studies 14, no. 4 (2021), 747-61.
45. Tresch, "Cosmogram," 69
46. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
47. Tresch, "Cosmogram," 71.
48. Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," Critical Inquiry 21 (1994), 252-53.
49. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
50. Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
51. Mark Andrejevic, "Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure," Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007), 295-317.
52. Tresch, "Cosmogram," 67.
53. John Tresch, "Cosmopragmatics and Petabytes," in Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge, ed. Simon Schaffer, John Tresch, and Pasquale Gagliardi (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 139. Much here resonates with David E. Nye's classic work on the American technological sublime; Nye defined the sublime as comprised of collective, ritual experiences around grand technological monuments that "ta[p] into fundamental hopes and fears," evoking an "essentially religious feeling" via "the confrontation with impressive objects" (American Technological Sublime [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994], xiii).
54. David Sherfinski and Avi Asher-Schapiro, "U.S. Prisons Mull AI to Analyze Inmate Phone Calls," Reuters, 9 August 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2FA0OO
55. James Wright, "Suspect AI: Vibraimage, Emotion Recognition Technology and Algorithmic Opacity," Science, Technology and Society (2021), 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 09717218211003411.
56. Julia Dressel and Hany Farid, "The Accuracy, Fairness, and Limits of Predicting Recidivism," Science Advances 4, no. 1 (2018), 1-5.
57. Will Douglas Heaven, "Hundreds of AI Tools Have Been Built to Catch COVID. None of Them Helped," MIT Technology Review, 30 July 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic/.
58. John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 72-74.
59. "Chinese Man Caught by Facial Recognition at Pop Concert," BBC News, 13 April 2018, https: //www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43751276.
60. Charles Duhigg, "How Companies Learn Your Secrets," The New York Times Magazine, 16 February 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html.
61. For a critique and history of the use of benchmarks, see Inioluwa Deborah Raji et al., "AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark," in Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks, vol. 1, NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021, ed. J. Vanschoren and S. Yeung (2021), https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/ paper/2021/hash/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7c9-Abstract-round2.html.
62. Alexander Campolo and Kate Crawford, "Enchanted Determinism: Power without Responsibility in Artificial Intelligence," Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020), 1.
63. Indeed, Anduril was partly funded by Peter Thiel, who cofounded Palantir Technologies, which was named after the all-seeing eye in Tolkien's work and which has served counter-terrorism analytics technology to clients such as the US Department of Defense.
64. Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey), "We just raised $450M in Series D Funding for Anduril," Twitter, 17 June 2021, https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1405595273263423490.
65. Jack Poulson, "Easy as PAI," Tech Inquiry, 10 September 2021, https://techinquiry.org/ EasyAsPAI/.
66. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
67. See, for instance, Hong and Szpunar, "The Futures of Anticipatory Reason"; Brian Massumi, "Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption," Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007); Limor Samimian-Darash, "Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty," Current Anthropology 54, no. 1 (2013), 1-22; and Louise Amoore, "Data Derivatives: On the Emergence of a Security Risk Calculus for Our Times," Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011), 24-43.
68. See Aaron Shapiro, Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 69. Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy."
70. Philip E. Agre, "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy," in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 740-60.
71. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), xii.
72. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 13. While the focus here is on technoscientific models, this shift occurred alongside and in resonance with what has been described as the "overwhelming of reason by rationality" in the Cold War era (ibid.)-that is, the gradual separation and prioritization of more rigid, rules-bound (in short, algorithmic) rationality versus the inherited Enlightenment ideal of thinking, feeling reason. See Paul Erickson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
73. Halpern, Beautiful Data, 13.
74. Edwards, The Closed World.
75. Boris Jardine, "Mass-Observation, Surrealist Sociology, and the Bathos of Paperwork," History of the Human Sciences 31, no. 5 (2018), 52-79.
76. Rebecca Lemov, Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
77. Dean Wilson, "Predictive Policing Management: A Brief History of Patrol Automation," New Formations 98 (July 2020), 139-55; Joshua Reeves and Jeremy Packer, "Police Media: The Governance of Territory, Speed, and Communication," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 4 (2013), 359-84.
78. Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (Winter 1986), 3-64.
79. Luke Stark and Jevan Hutson, "Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence," Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal 32, no. 4 (2022), 922-78.
80. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
81. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, transl. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 85.
82. Ibid., 80-87.
83. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
84. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
85. N. Katherine Hayles, "Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions," Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2016), 43.
86. Szpunar, "Promnesic Futures."
87. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 304.
88. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "The New Corporate Space Race: A Colonial Remix," The Revealer, 5 April 2021, https://therevealer.org/the-new-corporate-space-race-a-colonial-remix/. Predictably, this future too is older than it first seems: Stewart Brand had organized a space colonization conference in the 1970s.
89. For similar treatments of the 10,000-Year Clock, see Stefan Skrimshire, "Deep Time and Secular Time: A Critique of the Environmental 'Long View,'" Theory, Culture and Society 36, no. 1 (2018), 63-81; Tamara Kneese, "Spiritual Machines: Transhumanist Temporalities and Startup Culture" (presentation, Humanism and Its Prefixes, Berkeley, CA, 3-4 October 2015); and Price, "Future Monumentality," chapter 4.
90. "The Clock of the Long Now," Long Now Foundation, https://longnow.org/clock/.
91. Kevin Kelly, "The Clock in the Mountain," The Technium, 16 June 2011, https://kk.org/ thetechnium/the-clock-in-th/.
92. Josh Marcus, "Eternity Now! Jeff Bezos's 10,000-Year Plan," The Drift, 6 May 2021, https: //www.thedriftmag.com/eternity-now/.
93. Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
1. Эта статья является продолжением серии исследований, проведенных в рамках гранта Канадского совета по социальным и гуманитарным наукам №430-2019-00078 "Личное установление истины в обществе, управляемом данными". Он также черпает вдохновение в работах Петра Шпунара, Давида Гребера и редакторов серии "Историческое будущее" Золтана Болдишара Симона и Марека Тамма.
2. Reinhart Koselleck, "Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process," in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 35.
3. Zoltаn Boldizsаr Simon and Marek Tamm, "Historical Futures," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021), 3-22.
4. John Tresch, "Cosmogram," in Cosmograms, ed. Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005), 69.
5. Reinhart Koselleck, "Modernity and the Planes of Historicity," in Futures Past, 3-20.
6. Fran?ois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 105.
7. As per Ulrich Beck's, Anthony Giddens's, and others' reflexive modernization thesis. See Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, transl. Mark Ritter (London: SAGE, 1992) and Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
8. Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, "The Emergence of Post-Normal Science," in Science, Politics and Morality: Scientific Uncertainty and Decision Making, ed. Ren? von Schomberg (Dordrecht: Springer-Science+Business Media, 1993), 85-123.
9. For a recent assessment, see Duncan McLaren and Nils Markusson, "The Co-Evolution of Technological Promises, Modelling, Policies and Climate Change Targets," Nature Climate Change 10 (May 2020), 392-97. See also Evander Lewis Price, "Future Monumentality" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2019), 5.
10. David Graeber, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," The Baffler, March 2012, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit.
11. See Andreas Huyssen, "Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia," in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 57-73.
12. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 2.
13. Phil Jones, "Refugees Help Power Machine Learning Advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon," Rest of World, 22 September 2021, https://restofworld.org/2021/ refugees-machine-learning-big-tech/.
14. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xviii.
15. Sun-ha Hong, "Technofutures in Stasis: Smart Machines, Ubiquitous Computing, and the Future That Keeps Coming Back," International Journal of Communication 15 (2021), 1940-60.
16. Reinhart Koselleck, "Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution," in Futures Past, 39-54.
17. Daniel Rosenberg, "An Eighteenth-Century Time Machine: The Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot," in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History, ed. Daniel Gordon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 47.
18. Fred Turner makes this connection between prototype and Puritan teleology in "Prototype," in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information, Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 256-68.
19. Michel Foucault traced this reliance in the history of political economy as governmentality. Here, nature functions as a reliable guarantor for the knowledge production of the economist: "It is not [merely] background, but a permanent correlative," in that "laws of nature" can constantly be described and invoked to derive further economic claims (10 January 1979, in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collеge de France, 1978-79, ed. Michel Senellart, transl. Graham Burchell [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008], 16).
20. Simon and Tamm, "Historical Futures," 8.
21. Fredric Jameson, "Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?" Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (1982), 153.
22. For more, see Sun-ha Hong, Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a DataDriven Society (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 94.
23. Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018).
24. Os Keyes, "The Body Instrumental," Logic, 7 December 2019, https://logicmag.io/ nature/the-body-instrumental/; Shea Swauger, "Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education," Hybrid Pedagogy, 2 April 2020, https://hybridpedagogy.org/ our-bodies-encoded-algorithmic-test-proctoring-in-higher-education/.
25. Fenwick McKelvey and Joshua Neves, "Introduction: Optimization and Its Discontents," Review of Communication 21, no. 2 (2021), 96.
26. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996).
27. Ali Alkhatib, "To Live in Their Utopia: Why Algorithmic Systems Create Absurd Outcomes," in CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2021).
28. For one overview, see Luke Stark and Jesse Hoey, "The Ethics of Emotion in Artificial Intelligence Systems," in FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (New York: ACM, 2021), 782-93.
29. Hong, Technologies of Speculation, 94.
30. See, for example, Boris Jardine and Matthew Drage, "The Total Archive: Data, Subjectivity, Universality," History of the Human Sciences 31, no. 5 (2018), 3-22, and Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
31. For more on this view of Shannon and Hartley, see Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, "How Information Got Re-Invented," Nautilus, 4 August 2017, http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/how-information-got-re_invented
32. Michael Betancourt, "The Demands of Agnotology::Surveillance," CTheory, 17 July 2014, https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14785/5660.
33. Chun, Discriminating Data, 52.
34. Ibid., chapters 1-2. See also Aubrey Clayton, "How Eugenics Shaped Statistics," Nautilus, 27 October 2020, https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-9365/.
35. Jessica Snouwaert, "Elon Musk Predicts People Won't Have to Talk in 10 Years Because They'll Be Able to Use an Alien-Like Mind Language to Communicate without Words," Business Insider, 8 May 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/ elon-musk-prediction-human-to-human-mind-communication-10-years-2020-5.
36. Sun-ha Hong and Piotr M. Szpunar, "The Futures of Anticipatory Reason: Contingency and Speculation in the Sting Operation," Security Dialogue 50, no. 4 (2019), 314.
37. Niklas Luhmann, "The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society," Social Research 43, no. 1 (1976), 140.
38. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011).
39. Sam Hind, "Making Decisions: The Normal Interventions of Nissan 'Mobility Managers,'" Mobilities (2021), 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2021.1988682.
40. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
41. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
42. Bratton spoke at a New York Times conference; see "Cities for Tomorrow 2015 – Data Mining in the Modern City," New York Times Events, uploaded 21 July 2015, YouTube video, 32:21, https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ivGqryVJac.
43. For this theme of rehearsed and simulated futures, see Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
44. Piotr M. Szpunar, "Promnesic Futures: Technology, Climate, Dеjа Vu," Memory Studies 14, no. 4 (2021), 747-61.
45. Tresch, "Cosmogram," 69
46. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
47. Tresch, "Cosmogram," 71.
48. Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," Critical Inquiry 21 (1994), 252-53.
49. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
50. Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
51. Mark Andrejevic, "Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure," Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007), 295-317.
52. Tresch, "Cosmogram," 67.
53. John Tresch, "Cosmopragmatics and Petabytes," in Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge, ed. Simon Schaffer, John Tresch, and Pasquale Gagliardi (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 139. Much here resonates with David E. Nye's classic work on the American technological sublime; Nye defined the sublime as comprised of collective, ritual experiences around grand technological monuments that "ta[p] into fundamental hopes and fears," evoking an "essentially religious feeling" via "the confrontation with impressive objects" (American Technological Sublime [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994], xiii).
54. David Sherfinski and Avi Asher-Schapiro, "U.S. Prisons Mull AI to Analyze Inmate Phone Calls," Reuters, 9 August 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2FA0OO
55. James Wright, "Suspect AI: Vibraimage, Emotion Recognition Technology and Algorithmic Opacity," Science, Technology and Society (2021), 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 09717218211003411.
56. Julia Dressel and Hany Farid, "The Accuracy, Fairness, and Limits of Predicting Recidivism," Science Advances 4, no. 1 (2018), 1-5.
57. Will Douglas Heaven, "Hundreds of AI Tools Have Been Built to Catch COVID. None of Them Helped," MIT Technology Review, 30 July 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic/.
58. John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 72-74.
59. "Chinese Man Caught by Facial Recognition at Pop Concert," BBC News, 13 April 2018, https: //www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43751276.
60. Charles Duhigg, "How Companies Learn Your Secrets," The New York Times Magazine, 16 February 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html.
61. For a critique and history of the use of benchmarks, see Inioluwa Deborah Raji et al., "AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark," in Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks, vol. 1, NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021, ed. J. Vanschoren and S. Yeung (2021), https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/ paper/2021/hash/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7c9-Abstract-round2.html.
62. Alexander Campolo and Kate Crawford, "Enchanted Determinism: Power without Responsibility in Artificial Intelligence," Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020), 1.
63. Indeed, Anduril was partly funded by Peter Thiel, who cofounded Palantir Technologies, which was named after the all-seeing eye in Tolkien's work and which has served counter-terrorism analytics technology to clients such as the US Department of Defense.
64. Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey), "We just raised $450M in Series D Funding for Anduril," Twitter, 17 June 2021, https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1405595273263423490.
65. Jack Poulson, "Easy as PAI," Tech Inquiry, 10 September 2021, https://techinquiry.org/ EasyAsPAI/.
66. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
67. See, for instance, Hong and Szpunar, "The Futures of Anticipatory Reason"; Brian Massumi, "Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption," Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007); Limor Samimian-Darash, "Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty," Current Anthropology 54, no. 1 (2013), 1-22; and Louise Amoore, "Data Derivatives: On the Emergence of a Security Risk Calculus for Our Times," Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011), 24-43.
68. See Aaron Shapiro, Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 69. Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy."
70. Philip E. Agre, "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy," in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 740-60.
71. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), xii.
72. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 13. While the focus here is on technoscientific models, this shift occurred alongside and in resonance with what has been described as the "overwhelming of reason by rationality" in the Cold War era (ibid.)-that is, the gradual separation and prioritization of more rigid, rules-bound (in short, algorithmic) rationality versus the inherited Enlightenment ideal of thinking, feeling reason. See Paul Erickson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
73. Halpern, Beautiful Data, 13.
74. Edwards, The Closed World.
75. Boris Jardine, "Mass-Observation, Surrealist Sociology, and the Bathos of Paperwork," History of the Human Sciences 31, no. 5 (2018), 52-79.
76. Rebecca Lemov, Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
77. Dean Wilson, "Predictive Policing Management: A Brief History of Patrol Automation," New Formations 98 (July 2020), 139-55; Joshua Reeves and Jeremy Packer, "Police Media: The Governance of Territory, Speed, and Communication," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 4 (2013), 359-84.
78. Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (Winter 1986), 3-64.
79. Luke Stark and Jevan Hutson, "Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence," Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal 32, no. 4 (2022), 922-78.
80. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
81. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, transl. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 85.
82. Ibid., 80-87.
83. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
84. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
85. N. Katherine Hayles, "Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions," Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2016), 43.
86. Szpunar, "Promnesic Futures."
87. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 304.
88. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "The New Corporate Space Race: A Colonial Remix," The Revealer, 5 April 2021, https://therevealer.org/the-new-corporate-space-race-a-colonial-remix/. Predictably, this future too is older than it first seems: Stewart Brand had organized a space colonization conference in the 1970s.
89. For similar treatments of the 10,000-Year Clock, see Stefan Skrimshire, "Deep Time and Secular Time: A Critique of the Environmental 'Long View,'" Theory, Culture and Society 36, no. 1 (2018), 63-81; Tamara Kneese, "Spiritual Machines: Transhumanist Temporalities and Startup Culture" (presentation, Humanism and Its Prefixes, Berkeley, CA, 3-4 October 2015); and Price, "Future Monumentality," chapter 4.
90. "The Clock of the Long Now," Long Now Foundation, https://longnow.org/clock/.
91. Kevin Kelly, "The Clock in the Mountain," The Technium, 16 June 2011, https://kk.org/ thetechnium/the-clock-in-th/.
92. Josh Marcus, "Eternity Now! Jeff Bezos's 10,000-Year Plan," The Drift, 6 May 2021, https: //www.thedriftmag.com/eternity-now/.
93. Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
Predictions without futures
Keywords: future; technofuture; prediction; modernity; ritual; belief; AI; technoculture.
Modernity held sacred the aspirational formula of the open future: a promise of human determination that doubles as an injunction to control. Today, the banner of this plannable future is borne by technology. Allegedly impersonal, neutral, and exempt from disillusionment with ideology, belief in technological change saturates the present horizon of historical futures. Yet I argue that this is exactly how today's technofutures enact a hegemony of closure and sameness. In particular, the growing emphasis on prediction as AI's skeleton key to all social problems constitutes what religious studies calls cosmograms: universalizing models that govern how facts and values relate to each other, providing a common and normative point of reference. In a predictive paradigm, social problems are made conceivable only as objects of calculative control - control that can never be fulfilled but that persists as an eternally deferred and recycled horizon. I show how this technofuture is maintained not so much by producing literally accurate predictions of future events but through ritualized demonstrations of predictive time.
* This paper is an accidental byproduct of research conducted through the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant #430-2019-00078, "Personal Truthmaking in the Data-driven Society." It also owes various inspirations to the works of Piotr Szpunar, David Graeber, andthe "Historical Futures" series editors, Zoltаn Boldizsаr Simon and Marek Tamm.
Sun-ha Hong. Predictions without futures // History and Theory. 2022. Vol. 61. no. 3 (September 2022), 371-390.
* This paper is an accidental byproduct of research conducted through the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant #430-2019-00078, "Personal Truthmaking in the Data-driven Society." It also owes various inspirations to the works of Piotr Szpunar, David Graeber, andthe "Historical Futures" series editors, Zoltаn Boldizsаr Simon and Marek Tamm.
Sun-ha Hong. Predictions without futures // History and Theory. 2022. Vol. 61. no. 3 (September 2022), 371-390.