The Singularities That Live Among Us
Ever heard of “singularity”? Or “The Singularity”? Maybe? Probably not? It’s a concept almost singularly familiar only to futurists, artificial intelligence mavens, and astronomers and physicists steeped in the study of “black holes.” But not to most of us.
Among the more visible “singularitarians” is futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose most recent book, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI (2024), is sequel to his earlier treatise on the subject, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005). Kurzweil’s focus is technological singularity – the competitive race between machine intelligence (computers) and human intelligence. In his estimation, machines, thanks to exponential technological advances, will equal human intelligence by around 2029 and surpass it by 2045, the presumed point of transcendent singularity, where technology and biology will merge into humanoid Oneness. At least implicitly, it’s inevitable.
But it isn’t all that clear what singularity actually means. That no doubt is as its formulators and champions want it. In this sense, it’s very much akin to the obscurantism, obfuscation, and ambiguity existentialist philosophers bequeathed to us with their nebulous school of thought. To this day, it remains unclear exactly what existential means: That which merely exists (artificial intelligence, for example) or, as in most unreflective popular parlance, that which threatens existence (artificial intelligence, for example)?
As science fiction writer Philip K. Dick famously observed: “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” That’s what happens when someone introduces a term such as “wokeness” or “deep state” or “lawfare” or “influencer” or “useful idiot.” It’s how things work with gimmicky, catch-phrase pop culture concepts like James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis or Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point thesis or Buckminster Fuller’s “synergetics” or “tensegrity.” First-users or early-users of a term or concept basically own its meaning and thereby control those who traffic in its subsequent use.
Far be it for the millions of us technologically challenged layfolk to think we have anything of value to contribute to discussions ahead concerning the likelihood, impacts, or implications of the particular singularity posited by Kurzweil and those of like mind. The vast majority of Americans (90%) say they’ve heard at least a little about artificial intelligence; but only one-in-three say they’ve heard a lot about it. And, simply by virtue of the fact that roughly 17% of the U.S. population today are 65 or older, it’s not unreasonable to expect that something like 50 million of us now on this side of the dirt, including Kurzweil, won’t be around to see if his fantastical speculations come to pass.
Rather than dwell fruitlessly, then, on the specifics of Kurzweil’s technological postulations, let’s take advantage of singularity’s intrinsic conceptual attractiveness as metaphor or analogy to expose some other key facets of our lives where conditions approximating singularity – non-technological singularity – arguably may have taken root. The singularitarian scheme of things seems to suggest that there are two conjoined or closely associated domains of activity or existence – pick any two – that exist in some form of tacit competition with one another. At a singular point or period – in time or space – one of these domains converges with, displaces, subsumes, predominates over, or supersedes the other, a takeover that thereby crosses or even erases the boundary or line of demarcation that previously separated them. That pre-existing virtual boundary may have been established, explicitly or tacitly, for perfectly sound, justifiable reasons of, shall we say, “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity”; for example, male-female, public-private, amateur-professional, civil-military, intelligence-law enforcement, domestic-international. When that barrier is crossed, it no longer can perform its protective function, and we are left with what might be characterized, at the risk of metaphorical torture, as a transfigured conceptual or operational replicant. Here are a few possible examples:
Politics and/or Policy?
Journalist Ambrose Bierce said most pointedly in his early 20th-century satirical classic The Devil’s Dictionary that politics is “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” How inescapably true. We’re all political animals, as Aristotle first noted, so being political is natural, unthinkingly reflexive, pervasive human behavior, whatever the setting. It’s a quest for power to gain partisan individual or collective advantage over others for personal, not altruistic, reasons. In applied terms, it’s all about seeking and remaining in office, not about the hard work of governing.
Policy, on the other hand, is a product of governing – what those in public office are expected to do on behalf of the rest of us. Policy is a stated position on a particular issue: be it defense policy, foreign policy, housing policy, environmental policy, cyber policy, or whatever.
The very term politicization has a justifiably negative connotation, as do militarization and weaponization. It suggests sullying an issue with partisan considerations that distort ostensibly more objective, analytical bases for treating the issue on its own merits (crime, say, or religion, or race relations, or diversity, equity, and inclusion). When former Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously said, “Politics stops at the water’s edge,” he was inveighing against the impropriety of mixing domestic politics with foreign affairs; but he also, by association, was underscoring the symbolic and substantive significance of injecting politics into other areas of human endeavor.
While there can be no doubt that politics and policy are, if not siblings, at least cousins, the question is which does and should take precedence. Recall the tense dialogue between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Our system of government is run by politicians practicing the politics of narrow-gauged immediacy, not statesmen practicing long-view, big-picture statecraft. Politics has assumed a position of unassailable primacy, its practitioners focused solely on acquiring and holding office to the exclusion of all else. Policy, where it does emerge – whether as increasingly infrequent law or increasingly frequent executive action – is captive always of the politics of the moment (think abortion, gun control, immigration, voting rights, domestic surveillance, Gaza, or Ukraine, for example).
The singularity: Politics – holding office – has superseded policy – governing – as the singular motive force and practice of those in power.
Philosophy and/or Ideology?
At the trial where he was sentenced to death, Socrates proclaimed a truth for the ages: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It was a declaration that would stand in perpetuity as a paean to the philosophical life: that only in striving to know and understand ourselves, by questioning and reflecting, do our lives have any meaning or value. That’s pretty esoteric, especially for the many, many practicalists (minor-league pragmatists) among us who see little relevance in such abstractions.
For America’s founders, popular sovereignty – rule of, by, and for the people – was a cardinal virtue built, in turn, on civic virtue. Civic virtue, grounded in reason, formed the basis for what Thomas Jefferson characterized as a natural aristocracy, a political elite that derives its power from talent and merit. He distinguished this from traditional, artificial aristocracies, in which a ruling elite derives its power solely from inherited status, or wealth and birth. Jefferson said, among other things:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
John Adams, in turn, in a letter to his wife Abigail, proclaimed:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
It was this philosophical foundation that the founders considered necessary, if not sufficient, for the establishment and maintenance of a functioning democratic republic. That idealized conception ran head-long, though, into the more natural passions, impatience, and preference for action over reflection of the American people. This would lead historian Richard Hofstadter to famously decry Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and Neil Postman to cynically expose our penchant for Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Author Isaac Asimov spoke of our legitimized stupidity in a 1980 Newsweek column:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Into this intellectual vacuum rushes ideology. Ideology is a scripted paradigm, an algorithm, a belief system designed to replace bona fide thinking with received or revealed “truth.” It is the reification of reality (what Alfred North Whitehead called “Misplaced Concreteness”: mistaking abstract belief for concrete reality). Liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, capitalism, socialism, religious doctrine, MAGA-Trumpism: these are all ideologies.
Ideology is comfortable and comforting, for it relieves us of the burden of thinking. If we subscribe to its surface appeal, it tells us what to think. It is doctrine become dogma. Journalist Hendrik Hertzberg put it well when he said: “A political ideology is a very handy thing to have. It’s a real time-saver, because it tells you what you think about things you know nothing about.” In like fashion, historian Morris Berman has observed: “An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you.”
The singularity: Thoughtless ideology has displaced thoughtful philosophy as our intellectual north star.
Democracy and/or Autocracy?
America’s founders embraced popular rule as the preferred alternative – the only alternative – to kingly rule. But their embrace wasn’t unconditional. Their general disdain for the Little People and their fear of untethered mobocracy led them to leave us with representative – republican – democracy, a form of government ostensibly consistent with the classical Aristotelian view that “They should rule who are able to rule best.” That of course leaves one to ask whether, in practice, the best of us govern the rest of us?
The answer is decidedly no, an incontestable fact that becomes clearer and clearer every day in every way when any of innumerable knuckleheaded wingnuts on Capitol Hill open their mouths. Opinion polls show repeatedly that exceedingly small percentages of the American electorate – now only about 16% – approve of the way Congress is handling its job, a figure that has changed little over time.
In Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World rankings, the United States ranks only 58th among the world’s free states, tied with such democratic titans as Croatia, Panama, Romania, and South Korea, making us hardly the baddest democratic dude on the block. This is further borne out by other polls, which say that only about 28% of us are satisfied with the way democracy as a whole is working in our country. A recent Georgetown University poll indicated that 81% of Americans believe democracy in America is currently being threatened, 72% agreeing strongly with this view. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks the United States as one of 50 “flawed democracies,” based on such vital democratic features as the electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture.
When the rule of law becomes the lawlessness of rule, when elections become unfree and unfair, when transfers of power turn violent and unstable, when civil liberties are threatened beyond repair, when those in power repeatedly deceive the public and the public accepts that as the rightful prerogative of power, when civilian control of the military yields to praetorianism, the words of John Adams come home to roost: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” The result is a turn to strongman rule, the man on horseback, the garrison state. We have already suffered through this state of affairs once in recent years and are in danger of welcoming it back again. As psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich once noted: “It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.”
The singularity: Autocracy, with its accompanying authoritarian norms and practices, is on the verge of displacing democracy as the preferred form of governance.
War and/or Peace?
Si vis pacem, para bellum – “If you want peace, prepare for war.” This classic formulation informed George Washington’s first annual address to Congress, where he said: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace”; and it has continued to misinform America’s position on war and peace ever since.
Peace talk is cheap talk, characteristic of almost all politicians, almost all the time. From Ronald Reagan: “We know that peace is the condition under which mankind was meant to flourish. Yet peace does not exist of its own will. It depends on us, on our courage to build it and guard it and pass it on to future generations.” From George W. Bush: “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” From Donald Trump: “America is fulfilling our destiny as peacemaker, but it is peace through strength.”
And peace talk is just that – talk. It isn’t reality, even when, especially when we say it is. Even if one accepts the simpleton’s simplistic notion that peace is nothing more than the absence of war, America hasn’t been at peace in our lifetimes. War has merely morphed and transmuted into different forms. The best we can say today is that we live in an era of violent peace, war having become a violent, collective shapeshifter with a thousand faces. We have deployed military forces to hostilities 244 times since the end of the Cold War alone. We have something like 172,000 military troops stationed in 178 countries on some 750 bases around the world. We account for 40% of the world’s military spending, more than that of the next ten countries combined and more than the GDPs of all but 19 of the world’s countries. We have the world’s third largest military force, armed with the world’s most lethal and destructive weapon systems. We are the world’s second largest nuclear power, and the leading exporter of conventional arms to the rest of the world. What was to have been the perpetual norm – peace – has long since given way to what was to have been the extraordinary exception – war. We have too often forsaken the time-honored precept of force as a last resort in favor of force as a first or early resort in our international dealings.
The singularity: War and warmaking have overtaken peace, peacemaking, and peacekeeping as the accepted norm for the conduct of international relations.
These, then, are but a select few of the singularities we face today. Numerous others of pressing import are no less worthy of our attention: truth – falsification, for example; or transparency – secrecy; freedom – subjugation; principles – interests. All are entirely consistent with the postmodern age we now inhabit, characterized as it is by irony, paradox, contradiction, and the need for definitional and conceptual reformulations. These singularities are non-technological and therefore not subject to forces beyond human control. So, lest there be any doubt, we humans have the final say in whether their evolutionary trajectory continues unabated, is slowed down, or is reversed. In any event, whatever else they may be, these singularities aren’t inevitable.
Perhaps, therefore, we are at that point in time where we must face up to the limits of intellectual development we have heretofore imposed on ourselves. In the words of the late Norman Cousins: “The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.”
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