Abstract
Many writers who have discussed the Singularity have treated it not only as the inevitable outcome of advancements in cybernetic technology, but also as natural consequence of broader patterns in the development of human knowledge, or of human history itself. In this paper I examine these claims—as defended by Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, and David Chalmers—in light of Karl Popper’s famous philosophical critique of historicism. I argue that, because the Singularity is regarded as both a product of human ingenuity and a reflection of the permanent limitations of our rational capacities, speculation about its likelihood occupies an interesting border zone between what Popper referred to as “technological prediction” and what he lambasted as “prophecy.” I go on to examine representations of a post-singularity world in the novels of Iain M. Banks, as well as in Bruce Sterling’s short story “The Beautiful and the Sublime.”
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Notes
- 1.
Concerning the broader characteristics of metanarratives, see [1, p. xxiv].
- 2.
If one accepts Popper’s claim from later in the same work that what he calls the “descriptive” and “argumentative” functions of language are irreducible to its “signalling” and “expressive” functions [3, pp. 82–3], it will certainly seem reasonable to draw the weaker conclusion that, to the extent that the historical influence of a scientific theory depends upon its performance of the former pair of functions, not all of its effects could be predicted in the absence of understanding its content.
- 3.
For the classic defence of this view, see [4]. See also [5] for an account of how this view of the explanatory range of lawlike generalizations about human history was prefigured in the work of authors such as Humboldt, Ranke, Rickert, and Simmel. For Donald Davidson’s discussion of the difference between homonomic and heteronomic generalizations, see [6].
- 4.
See, e.g., the discussion in the following section of Ray Kurzweil’s ostensible “law” of “accelerating returns.”
- 5.
For a lively and contentious discussion of the claim, with special reference to the human language faculty, see [10].
- 6.
I.e. “a feeling of pain arising from a want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and estimation of the same formed by reason…which arouses within us the feeling of our supersensible destination, according to which it is purposive and therefore pleasurable to find every standard of sensibility inadequate to the ideas of understanding” [15, pp. 96–7].
- 7.
It is perhaps worth mentioning in this connection that Sterling’s story was first published in 1986, well before the dawn of the smartphone.
- 8.
When asked in an interview why he returned to writing Culture novels after taking a hiatus to compose some mainstream literary novels, Banks replied “[t]hat’s where I want to live, that’s my utopia. It’s what I want to go home in” [18, p. 15].
- 9.
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Silcox, M. (2021). Historicism, Science Fiction, and the Singularity. In: Dainton, B., Slocombe, W., Tanyi, A. (eds) Minding the Future. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64269-3_10
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