Prepare for Imminent Disruption
O.G. Rose new course will help us dialecticize planning and absolutise preparation
O.G. Rose new course starts November 4th. I am enrolled, you can enrol here: Look at the Birds of the Air - How We Must Unplan Our Lives.
The discovery of the idea of the technological singularity was fundamental for me. I know I have told the story before,1 but it is hard to reiterate just how deeply this shaped my cognition as a young man (late teens/early 20s). For me, as I think many others, the discovery came in the form of reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near.2
In this text, Kurzweil outlines what he calls the GNR revolutions (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics), explicates his “Law of Accelerating Returns”, proposes a specific timeline for major technological advances in the 21st century (including human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, general artificial intelligence with a billion-fold human-level cognition by 2045), and grounding all these predictions in a type of expanded cosmic evolutionary narrative.
In Kurzweil’s big picture, the destiny of post-human intelligence in the cosmos is to “wake it up” (which means transform all of the inert/dead matter of the universe into living/intelligent matter in a process of “spiritualisation”).
These ideas re-oriented my mental relation to the implicit modes of planning instituted in my mind during my upbringing. I felt they were all fundamentally flawed because they seemed inspired by pathways for personal development that only made sense in the 20th century. However, if Kurzweil’s ideas were even close to accurate, the 21st century was going to require a totally different type of plan, or even a totally different relationship to planning as such.
How can one plan for that level of technological disruption?
I speculated that what was needed in the 21st century was not so much a plan that followed an arch of (1) education, (2) career, (3) retirement, i.e. a consistently predictable life trajectory, and one that had been repeated many times before me. Instead, what was needed in the 21st century was the capacity to prepare for the unexpected and innovate in uncertain conditions (like what do I do when technology has made my current career-ambitions/dreams irrelevant?).
Here education is more conceived as a life-long process (as well as an increasing symbiosis with our machine “friends”), career is a discontinuous series of projects (which may only appear unified retroactively, after the fact), and retirement itself becomes approached in a multiplicity of forms, if at all.3
In other words, we must confront a “revolution” of what was conventionally an overlooked aspect of our development in the 20th century (and arguably throughout all of history): “the middle years” (as Daniel Garner often emphasises).4 Whereas much of the 20th century failed to think “the middle years” (leaving it to a type of unreflexive careerism for many post World War 2 westerners), we are now forced to rethink (or think for the first time), “the middle years”.
In short: how do we live our life outside of traditional plans or schemas for life.5
One first step towards thinking this could involve what looks a lot like a dialectics of planning and unplanning. Whatever plan you develop can only see you so far into the future (if at all), and this plan needs to be re-adjustable, re-orientable, and re-negotiable with the near inevitability that what you think is a good plan today, might prove to be a catastrophic plan tomorrow. Another way to say this is that the technological singularity involves the breakdown of our conventional prediction horizon, and thus a breakdown of our capacity to plan.
In my personal self-relation, I based a career around becoming an academic who studies the technological singularity. But for various reasons, many of them related to technological disruption, the conventional pathway to career stability in academia is simply no longer available. As a result, I have constantly had to develop new plans which led to my intellectual creativity finding outlets in new environments produced by that very technological disruption. In some sense, in retrospect, my intellectual drive has attempted to “ride the wave” of technological disruption via the dialectics of planning and unplanning.
But even with the dialecticization of planning/unplanning we have a deeper existential problem. As Daniel Garner remarked in one of our recent discussions for the course on Parallax (paraphrasing):
“what do you do when your plans keep failing, if the only thing you know how to do is come up with new plans?”
For Garner, a being who only knows how to plan, will end up giving up, under the sheer weight of the negativity inherent to repetitively failing plans. How do you fundamentally shift from a being that makes and acts out a plan, to being a being that can plan and unplan in relation to the contingencies of the real? You have to be the type of being that is prepared for as many possible contingencies as possible. Or even better: you have to be the type of being that builds contingency as such into your dialectics of planning-unplanning.
My slogan for this after formally leaving the structures of academia has been: die again, die better!6
We may call such a being of contingency “prepared”. Prepared for what? Prepared for all planned necessities (implicit and explicit) to fall under the weight of their own unreflexive certainty in the face of imminent disruption. The only thing that remains certain in this situation is the constant process of self-othering.7
In that sense the future itself looks a lot less like an inevitable utopia/salvation/peace at the end of our (your) current plan, and much more like an alien world that will rip from us all conscious and unconscious presuppositions of being (including potentially our human being).8 The only being that could affirm that pathway is the being of an “Absolute Choice”. As Garner states, the being of an “Absolute Choice” is:9
“the choice of Self-Consciousness to value and actualise “otherness” and so become Reason and move towards Absolute Knowing.”
So why look to the “Birds of the Air”?
Well, surely this is not the reason behind O.G. Rose’s upcoming course (sign up now), but it could be funny to note, that the “Birds of the Air” can be seen as the perfect symbol for a being that weathered the storm of an imminent disruption which ripped all presuppositions of being away from them. To be specific: birds are the only known living dinosaurs.10 As such, birds are one of the only dinosaur forms that not only survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, but actually thrived on the other side of it.
This is not to suggest that birds in-themselves “prepared” for this extinction event, or engage in a dialectics of planning/unplanning; but it is to say that birds can represent an interesting symbol for us, for our reflection.
Perhaps in the 21st century we are facing something similar to what our avian dinosaur friends experienced 65 million years ago? This something similar is not necessarily an external non-human disruption to the entire biosphere (i.e. asteroid impact); but rather or more probabilistically an internal inhuman disruption of the entire anthrosphere. The internal inhuman dimension is, of course, the imminent disruption of technological complexification; and the entire anthrosphere is the basic plans that collectively make up what we call human civilisation.
Human civilisation is currently organised by adults who make plans.
Technological complexification is an imminent disruption to all those plans.
What human beings and cultures will not only survive what is coming, but what human beings and cultures will thrive on the other side?
Perhaps the wager of O.G. Rose upcoming course, is that it will be those human beings and cultures that drop whatever non-dialectical planning currently structures their life (explicitly or implicitly), and those that rather pick up the difficult “cross” that is preparedness for the unexpected and unanticipated imminent disruption(s) that will likely (continue to) constitute our existence.11 The paradox we are facing is that, in order to be confident in the unpredictable future, in order to have some semblance of hope, we must be willing to let go (of our current plan) and prepare to flip the contingencies that greet us, into all new necessities.
If you are ready to rethink planning and start preparing, sign up here: Look at the Birds of the Air - How We Must Unplan Our Lives. Class starts November 4th. Hope to see you on the other side.
This ultimately motivated my academic direction, up to and including the publication of my doctoral thesis: Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. (link)
In retirement, Kurzweil is planning to be a post-human infinite superintelligence. Apparently Bostrom is as well: Why I Want To Be A Post-Human When I Grow Up.
I suppose for Kurzweil “the middle years” would still be conceived as our human infancy in relation to a post-human duration that boggles or stretches the mind into infinity.
Today the temptation of “traditional life” (post-modern traditionalism) is becoming more and more appealing simply as a reaction to the level of uncertainty that is circulating as a result of processes we could describe as pointing to technological singularity.
Since we could say such a slogan builds contingency into being so deeply that you include your own repetitive death, but also your own sublated repetition after death.
The Owl of Minerva.
The Absolute Choice: Reason as Nonrationally Choosing Against Experience the Road to Absolute Knowing. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel (2022). p. 243-273.
Technically the extinction of the dinosaurs only refers to “non-avian dinosaurs”.