Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Fueling this is a particular vision of technology—one that, we really ought stress, is a fantasy not just in the way it imagines a particular and improbable sequence of technological developments, but in the way in which it imagines technological development as something with a teleology in the first place. There is, crucially, no particular reason to assume this. There’s barely a reason to assume that scientific knowledge is something with a teleology, and the equivocation of science and technological development is just as dubious a leap. But the techno-eschaton does so, presuming blithely that artificial intelligence is something that is advanced towards, as opposed to a weird idea. And it’s worth noting, it really might just be a weird idea from some science fiction stories like FTL drives or time travel; a piece of magic that is in fact entirely distinct from advanced technology. Just as we could not entirely rule out the possibility that we are Turing machines, the possibility that the Turing Test actually cannot be passed by a digital computer still cannot be definitively rejected through means other than faith. (Nor can its more unsettling counterpart—the possibility that a Turing-complete computer might be capable of imitating a human female more persuasively than an actual human female.) But the singular vision of their Singularity is not so much the point as that they believe in any Singularity—that there is such a thing as a historically necessary interaction b...