Predictions Without Futures*

Abstract

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.

An urban ‘age of timber’? Tensions and contradictions in the low-carbon imaginary of the bioeconomic city

“…As such, the bioeconomy appears to be characterised by several important technofuturist characteristics. Firstly, scholarship on technofuturism has highlighted how technofuturist visions centre innovation and visions of linear progress (Moore et al, 2022;Hong, 2022). Secondly, there is the identification of concentrations of political power and profit, and the fostering of capital accumulation based on technology and commodities (Chandrashekeran and Sadowski, 2022;Moore et al, 2022).…”

“…While Alphabet cancelled the Sidewalk Project in 2020 (Keil, 2020) and Katerra went bankrupt in 2021—not unusual for (over)ambitious high-tech projects—these novel collaborations serve both as a means of cultivating expectations for what technoscience should look like (Hong, 2022) enabling them to being advanced in other modular prefabrication initiatives.…”

Social Forms Beyond Value: Public Wealth and Its Contradictions

“…If anything, the fantasies of technological solutionism have reached new heights in the latest proliferation of beliefs that developments of artificial intelligence will bring social transformation unmatched since the time of industrial revolution. In our present time, discourses about potential of technology come with a certain paradox shrewdly captured by Sun-ha Hong (2022):…”

“…If anything, the fantasies of technological solutionism have reached new heights in the latest proliferation of beliefs that developments of artificial intelligence will bring social transformation unmatched since the time of industrial revolution. In our present time, discourses about potential of technology come with a certain paradox shrewdly captured by Sun-ha Hong (2022): Technofutures preach revolutionary change while practicing the politics of inertia. They involve not only the deceleration of technical advancement in certain domains but also entrenchment of the same old visions of future societies, of power relations and ways of living.…”