The central problem with Singularity theory is that it is really only attractive to nerds. Vibing with all of humanity across the universe would mean entangling your consciousness with that of every other creep, and if you’re selling that vision and don’t see that as an issue, then it probably means that you’re the creep. Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near is paternalistic and at times downright lecherous; paradise for me would mean being almost anywhere he’s not. The metaverse has two problems with its sales pitch: the first is that it’s useless; the second is that absolutely nobody wants Facebook to represent their version of forever.
Of course, it’s not like Meta (Facebook’s rebranded parent company) is coming right out and saying, “hey we’re building digital heaven!” Techno-utopianism is (only a little bit) more subtle. They don’t come right out and say they’re saving souls. Instead they say they’re benefitting all of humanity. Facebook wants to connect the world. Google wants to put all knowledge of humanity at your fingertips. Ignore their profit motives, they’re being altruistic!
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In recent years, a bizarre philosophy has gained traction among silicon valley’s most fervent insiders: effective altruism. The basic gist is that giving is good (holy) and in order to give more one must first earn more. Therefore, obscene profit, even that which is obtained through fraud, is justifiable because it can lead to immense charity. Plenty of capitalists have made similar arguments through the years. Andrew Carnegie built libraries around the country out of a belief in a bizarre form of social darwinism, that men who emerge from deep poverty will evolve the skills to drive industrialism forward. There’s a tendency for the rich to mistake their luck with skill.
But it was the canon of Singularity theory that brought this prosaic philosophy to a new state of perversion: longtermism. If humanity survives, vastly more humans will live in the future than live today or have ever lived in the past. Therefore, it is our obligation to do everything we can to ensure their future prosperity. All inequalities and offenses in the present pale in comparison to the benefit we can achieve at scale to the humans yet to exist. It is for their benefit that we must drive steadfast to the Singularity. We develop technology not for us but for them. We are the benediction of all of the rest of mankind.
Longtermism’s biggest advocates were, unsurprisingly, the most zealous evangelists of web3. They proselytized with these arguments for years and the numbers of their acolytes grew. And the rest of us saw the naked truth, dumbfounded watching, staring into our black mirrors, darkly.
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Longtermists offered a mind-blowing riposte: who cares about racism today when you’re trying to save billions of lives in the future?
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Humanity’s demise is a scarier idea than, say, labor displacement. It’s not a coincidence that AI advocates are keeping extinction risk as the preëminent “AI safety” topic in regulators’ minds. It’s something they can easily agree to avoid without any negligible impact in the day-to-day operations of their business: we are not close to the creation of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), despite the breathless claims of the Singularity disciples working on the tech. This allows them to distract from and marginalize the real concerns about AI safety: mass unemployment, educational impairment, encoded social injustice, misinformation, and so forth. Singularity theorists get to have it both ways: they can keep moving towards their promised land without interference from those equipped to stop them.
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Effective altruism, longtermism, techno-optimism, fascism, neoreactionaryism, etc are all just variations on a savior mythology. Each of them says, “there is a threat and we are the victim. But we are also the savior. And we alone can defeat the threat.” (Longtermism at least pays lip service to democracy but refuses to engage with the reality that voters will always choose the issues that affect them now.) Every savior myth also must create an event that proves that salvation has arrived. We shouldn’t be surprised that they’ve simply reinvented Revelations. Silicon Valley hasn’t produced a truly new idea in decades.
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Technologists believe they are creating a revolution when in reality they are playing right into the hands of a manipulative, mainstream political force. We saw it in 2016 and we learned nothing from that lesson.
Doomsday cults can never admit when they are wrong. Instead, they double down. We failed to make artificial intelligence so we pivoted to artificial life. We failed to make artificial life so now we’re trying to program the messiah. Two months before the Metaverse went belly-up, McKinsey valued it at up to $5 trillion dollars by 2030. And it was without a hint of irony or self-reflection that they pivoted and valued GenAI at up to $4.4 trillion annually. There’s not even a hint of common sense in this analysis.
In the Egyptian mummification process, all organs were removed and placed in jars, bar the heart. The heart – considered to be the centre of the person’s self, their whole being, their intelligence, their soul – was left in place to be judged by the gods. In the underworld, it was weighed against a feather to see if the person had lived a virtuous life. If it did not make the scales tip, the person was granted entry to the afterlife. If the heart proved heavier than the feather, the goddess Ammit – part lion, part hippopotamus, with the head and teeth of a crocodile – would eat it.
“Good literature is often evocative, using imagery and metaphor to stimulate the imagination rather than prosaic description to satisfy the intellect. This has the great advantage of enabling the reader to enter creatively into the experience of the author, and more than outweighs the resultant imprecision and possible misunderstanding. But of course imagery by its very nature cannot be pressed too far. Old Testament descriptions of death are often imaginative and evocative rather than prosaic and specific. This allows us to understand the ancient Israelites’ attitudes to death more than their beliefs about it. Nevertheless, the imagery and metaphor used inevitably reflect certain beliefs, and it is useful to attempt to trace these.