I argue that notions like prediction and optimisation work like what religious studies calls cosmograms: supersized, whole-world models for how things relate to each other & how History works. They provide a sense of progress and even teleology. 2/n pic.twitter.com/ZglcVb6XTl
— Sun-ha Hong (@sunhahong) August 29, 2022
Meanwhile, the present and its teething problems are somewhat diluted of reality: there is less need to worry so much about actually existing inequality or inefficiency, the idea goes, since technological breakthroughs will soon render them irrelevant. 4/n pic.twitter.com/OOefXKtmxv
— Sun-ha Hong (@sunhahong) August 29, 2022
So cars that can really drive themselves, facial recognition that can really detect liars - the final proof, the real test of viability, is always deferred to tomorrow. Technological futures are fantasies of coherence wrapped around perpetually broken product. 6/n pic.twitter.com/D6nuCEzw4U
— Sun-ha Hong (@sunhahong) August 29, 2022
The paper talks cosmograms, predictive tech, & even the 10,000 Year Clock (longtermism before it was cool?). And across it all, our technologies insist that we only dream of their future - in which nothing important need really change. /end
— Sun-ha Hong (@sunhahong) August 29, 2022
Open access @https://t.co/j9J5nZUpdn pic.twitter.com/2PGUdT5yTi
Abstract of the linked article:
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.
