Reification & Consciousness of the Tech Bro

Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi begin their new paper, “AI as Social Technology,” by noting that “debates about ‘AI’ grow out of 1990s science fiction”—specifically, that of Vernor Vinge, the mathematician and novelist whose writings birthed the version of the “Singularity” that still haunts our collective imagination. The “sweeping visions of how information technology will completely transform society, economy, politics, or all three” that dominate public discourse are to a large degree derived from texts that, as Farrell and Shalizi point out, predate the rise of the currently prevalent technology of AI (Large Language Models) by decades.