19: Simulation and Singularity
“Singularity”, Original Art by Molly Mendoza
Zoooooompf psshhhh. Greetings! *My smiling hologram elegantly exits an invisible spaceship*. We’ve landed on the third and final blog post on simulation, inspired by a thorough reading of Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” from 1981. In the first two, we pondered its role in social media and artificial intelligence. Now, we will be exploring if and how Baudrillard’s theoretical ideas stand the test of time compared to more modern explorations of AI and predictive arguments for or against the possibility of achieving “Singularity”.
For those who have yet to explore the meaning of the modernized term of Singularity in the context of AI, Google dictionary defines it as “a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have become so advanced that humanity undergoes a dramatic and irreversible change.”(Funnily, Merriam-Webster has yet to list its definition). It is basically the idea that there will be a turning point in which technology will advance beyond human control.
“First coined by John von Neumann in 1958, the term ‘Singularity’ describes a hypothesis that developments in science – especially in the fields of informatics, nanotechnology, and biology that will ultimately lead to the invention of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, predicts the Singularity to occur around 2045, while other AI experts show a median value of 2040”(via Creavis).
How does the idea of Singularity fit back in with Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”? Well, Baudrillard spoke on what he called “the death throes of capital”, a hypothetical time period in which simulacra would challenge human ideas of value and power. In this context, the Singularity enters the third order of Baudrillard’s simulation: simulacra of simulation.
“But we also have to fight against the profound fascination exerted on us by the death throes of capital, against the staging by capital of its own death, when we are really the ones in our final hours. To leave it the initiative of its own death, is to leave it all the privileges of revolution. Surrounded by the simulacrum of value and by the phantom of capital and of power, we are much more disarmed and impotent than when surrounded by the law of value and of the commodity, since the system has revealed itself capable of integrating its own death and since we are relieved of the responsibility for this death, and thus of the stake of our own life”(Baudrillard 153).
Would Singularity be the death of capital as we now know it, or as he knew it in 1981? Singularity, then, becomes a question of “late stage capitalism”, potentially a philosophical and socioeconomic paradigm shift.
Jean Baudrillard Art by Kenny Lucky
“Late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation”(via The University of Sydney). Think digitized banking, Bitcoin (digital currency independent of a central bank), NFTs, social media influencers, the individual’s identity(real or hyperreal) as commodity and vice versa.
An Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that could hypothetically become self-sufficient enough to surpass human guidance, programming, or control (though not with conscious agency), would produce a Singularity that Baudrillard may have marked as the end of traditional human power as we know it. If Singularity is posited as the ultimate Simulacra within Baudrillard’s theory, then it would follow that its use would potentially have no direct relation to reality, causing an implosion of both meaning and the social within its sphere.
So, would Singularity hypothetically democratize power to previously unknown levels once technological entry-point saturation is reached, or further deepen socioeconomic inequalities in an increasingly confounding, digitized, “uploaded” world of meaning?
In McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”, an old tale is recalled: “Then anger rose up in the old man’s face, and he said ‘I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity’”(12).
My favorite part about this tale is that it’s implied that machines complicate things, reduce actions to reproducible yet complex mechanization, commodify the body—that to be human is to remain in some desirably imperfect way—simple.
I, for one, do not want to carry the heart of a machine. Is the only way for one to remain simply a writer, an artist, an independent thinker of some kind--to remain human--to avoid total adoption of systems of AI like ChatGPT that perpetuate and further promote an eventual Singularity? Is Singularity inevitable and therefore its resistance futile? Would resisting it one day turn me into a cranky old cat lady reminiscing on the yesterdays of innate human value systems tomorrow? Would I start saying phrases like, “back in my day”, “before the Singularity”, or “when human touch was still valuable”?
These philosophical questions bring me back to a late quote from Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”: “Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems.”(162). Though he frivolously generalizes here, he does admit to acquiring a general nihilism in lieu of this simulacra of the future, but does he not get at something like the human need to feel connected, valuable, or irreplaceable? Could the magic of human production be reduced to AI? Or would the truly valuable, irreproducible human creations of the world finally become revered for that very reason?
Regardless, Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy submits that “in general, the attitude of AI researchers is that philosophizing is sometimes fun, but the upward march of AI engineering cannot be stopped, will not fail, and will eventually render such philosophizing otiose.”
So, thank you for reading my “otiose” philosophizing. I hope this blog post was thought-provoking or informative if not vaguely unsettling in nature. I appreciate you reading to the end.
Gabby
