Henri Bergson recognized that it is the future which creates both past and present. Time is retroactive. What does this mean for the future of AI? In contemporary discourses, we often find an eschatological emphasis on the transformative potential of AI technologies. Rather than viewing AI and technological singularity as future potentialities, we argue that the past is always retroactively created by a future that was already here in the form of an absent presence. Following Peter Wolfendale's recent suggestion, we argue that social intelligence was always artificial. The technological singularity was here all along in the form of self-accelerating collective intelligence systems such as language and culture. The technological refinement of machine learning only represents a further development of accelerationist tendencies several millenia in the making.
Project