Futurists in the 1950s promised automation (technology) would usher in a utopia (politics) of universal prosperity and leisure. And now, for 25 years futurists have promised AI (technology) will end history (politics) so we will arrive in paradise or apocalypse.
Let's be clear: futurological promises of prosperity via automation mostly failed because of successful right-wing anti-labor politics. In the absence of organized labor the benefits of automation abetted plutocratic wealth concentration rather than general prosperity. The 20C futurological failures were not failures of prediction but of a deep misrecognition of political problems for instrumental ones.
Now, let's focus our attention to contemporary politics and futurological discourse. Our 50s automation tech-talkers now blather about AI. There have never been nor are there now any intelligent artifacts in the world. Yet futurological attributions of such AI utterly abound. Futurological discourse about threats or promises of artificial intelligence (imagined and present) misrecognizes intelligence.
The substantial content of such false attributions of intelligence to machines that are not intelligent are threefold: one -- the displacement of responsibility from owners, designers, users of dangerous artifacts onto the artifacts themselves; two -- a false provocation of sympathy for useless, wasteful, dangerous artifacts facilitating fraud, crime & war-crimes; and three -- a denigration of actual intelligence in humans and other living persons undermining recognition of their dignity and rights. Again let's be clear: the substance of rights and of history is political -- and futurology fosters their misrecognition as instrumental.
History is the struggle to solve shared problems; to allocate costs, risks and benefits of change; and testify to hope and suffering. Recognition of intelligence (its needs and the responsibilities it exacts) is an indispensable point of departure for any free politics.
Futurological instrumentalizations of historical struggle, intelligence/consciousness are indeed profound attacks on free political life. It is no accident that corporate-military futurisms achieve prevalence as norms and forms of advertising suffuse of public discourse. Our tech talkers repackage stale crap as novelty, upward failure as innovation, deregulation as disruption, precarity as progress. This is a *reductio ad absurdum* of marketing deception and hyperbole. But at a deeper level they are dismantling free political life: substituting consumption for participation, precarious competitiveness for freedom, status-quo amplification for progress.
Futurology's anti-politics serve reactionary politics. Futurism obliterates open futurity. Every futurism is a retro-futurism. The refusal of corporate-military futurism requires engagement in the politics it would denigrate, deny, and disavow: Intelligence imposes responsibilities. Progress requires collective struggles. Justice isn't shopping. Art isn't an amusement park. Education, agitation, organization, legislation can still distribute gains from automation and digitization for equity-in-diversity.
Futurity is the openness in the present inhering in the ineradicable diversity of stakeholders sharing, making, contesting the world. "The Future" is a lie, a projection, a funhouse mirror, a con, an advertising pitch to foreclose threatening/promising open futurity. Futurological substitutions of futurity for "The Future" are continuous with substitutions of instrumental for political consciousness.
Robots did not deliver us into utopia in the 1950s and AI will not deliver us into either singularity or robocalypse in "The Future." It is crucial to grasp this isn't a matter of competing Future predictions, but refusing the futurological eclipse of political futurity. I invest my hopes for progress not in Future Technologies but in techniques of futurity: education, organization, legislation.
