Futurism

The Firesign Theatre's 1971 album I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus

Thinking hardly or hardly thinking? Philosophy

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“”Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures; only in a world in which nothing of importance ever happens could the futurologists’ dream come true.

—Hannah Arendt

Futurism, or futurology, is the study, or hypothetical study, of what might become of the humanity and our relationship with technology and our environment. It is quite often difficult to discern between the realistic, the science woo, and the science fictional elements of the works of futurists.

Christian futurism

The first use of the term "futurism" appeared during the early 19^th century in reference to a specific brand of Christian eschatology that teaches that many parts of the Bible, especially the Book of Revelation, will take place in the future. Obviously, futurism still holds some influence in modern Christianity considering all the cranks still banging on about the end times.

Proto-futurism

The term "futurist" was not explicitly used in reference to a number of the 19^th century science fiction writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, though modern futurists claim to draw inspiration from them.

Italian futurism

Italian futurists (left to right): Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini

The original futurist movement was born in early 20^th century Italy which was known for exalting art, technology, and violence. One of the key documents of the early futurist movement was The Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. It featured such fun things like:

4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

...

7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.

...

9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

This positioned Marinetti as the leader of the Italian futurist movement and eventually the head of the Futurist Political Party formed in 1918. Many of the futurists were also Italian nationalists and became fascist ideologues and supporters of Benito Mussolini.

Futurist music

One of the many strains of futurist music (see the next couple sections) came out of the Italian movement. Musician Balilla Pratella (1880–1955) wrote an article "Manifesto of Futurist Musicians". In it, he addresses young musicians (because "only they can understand what I have to say"), encouraging them to ditch commercialism, academia, closed competitions, critics, sacred music, librettist/composer partnerships, vocal centrism, and quite a few other things he believed were holding back musical innovation. Typical of the movement, Pratella adopted a vitriolic tone, never taking a moment's breath to stop painting the "traditionalists" as mortal enemies of music.

Pratella was forgotten over time and 20^th-century classical music lived on, although the band Art of Noise and the record label ZTT were named after Futurist concepts.

Modern futurism

Alvin Toffler

“”installing a cyborg tube in my tuxedo which frequently sprays my ass with various advanced powders

—wint

Modern futurism came to be characterized as being more scientific (or scientistic, as some might say) while still retaining its artistic elements. Ossip K. Flechtheim called for a field of "futurology" beginning in the 1940s, an attempt to "scientifically" predict the future based on history. Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler is known for being one of the most influential popularizations of futurism. Nowadays the field is rife with anyone who can get the media to call them futurists.

Afro-futurism

Sun Ra in 1973

Afro-futurism is essentially a reaction to racism and the attempted erasure of Black history. Faced with a past blotted out by white supremacy, a number of African-American artists in the mid-20^th century turned to futurist imagery and ideas. This style eventually came to be known as "Afro-futurism." One of the most prominent Afro-futurist musicians is Sun Ra, a jazz pianist and bandleader; his film Space Is the Place is considered a major influence on the genre. A number of other musicians have become associated with Afro-futurism, including Parliament-Funkadelic, Model 500 and DJ Spooky. Afro-futurist writers included Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany.

Transhumanism

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

See the main article on this topic: Transhumanism

The current incarnation of futurism is known as transhumanism, a somewhat loosely knit movement that has gained a few wealthy financial benefactors in Silicon Valley. Many transhumanists are "Singularitarians" who posit a coming "technological singularity" in which an artificial intelligence is built that exceeds human intelligence and initiates an explosion of technological advancement. Transhumanists are also proponents of pseudoscientific, dubious, or otherwise problematic technology, such as cryonics and mind uploading. Ray Kurzweil is probably the most famous transhumanist around today.

Cyberfeminism and postgenderism

For more information, see: Abolition of gender

The movement that came to be known as "cyborg feminism" or "cyberfeminism" takes its inspiration from Donna Haraway's 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto". Haraway rebutted the idea that science and technology are inherently patriarchal or capitalistic. Cyberfeminism tends to concentrate on the intersection of gender roles and technology. Another movement with some overlap with cyberfeminism is postgenderism, which advocates for technological advances in service of erasing gender (and sexual dimorphism, too). Both of these movements also have some overlap with transhumanism.

Pop music

There was a strain of 1980s electronic synthesizer pop of this name, which they got from the Italian ones. It went "ZOMG MACHINES EXIST" in a New Wave sort of manner with silly haircuts and eyeliner. Examples include Visage and Depeche Mode. In the early 2000s, industrial bands VNV Nation and Apoptygma Berzerk invented the name "futurepop" for their version of this. Even more confusingly is a resurgence in 1980s-sounding synth-music thanks to films like Drive and videogames like Hotline Miami with a number of names, like "Synthwave" or "Retro-Synth." So "future" means "retro," except…

Retrofuturism

It's basically an aesthetic used in art and design built on all those failed futurist predictions leading to styles such as "steam punk" or "diesel punk". The subreddit r/RetroFuturism is dedicated to sharing examples of pretty pictures with this aesthetic.

TESCREAL

“”These are technologies [specifically OpenAI and Twitter/X] that are supposed to be so democratized and universal, but they’re so heavily influenced by one person. Everything they do is [framed as] a step toward much larger greatness and the transformation of society. But these are just cults of personality. They sell a product.

—Noah Giansiracusa, a professor at Bentley University in Massachusetts who researches AI

Philosopher Émile P. Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL to stand for a collection of overlapping futurist concepts: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.

Extropianism according to Torres is largely defunct, but its ideals (perpetual progress, self-transformation, rational thinking and intelligent technology) have merged into other ideologies.

Cosmism "is a set of ideologies advanced by Russian scientists and philosophers such as" Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903), Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), and Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945). The ideologies include maximal space exploration and colonization, and resurrection of the dead. Cosmism is closely associated with Russian nationalism. Cosmist Ben Goertzel first described the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in his book, A Cosmist Manifesto.

Rationalism in TESCREAL is specifically the Eliezer Yudkowsky's LessWrong variety, not the more general form of rationalism.

Torres has argued that TESCREAL is central to the rationale for OpenAI, and the believed consequent creation of AGI.

People who have embraced TESCREAL as a ideology (essentially by embracing at least two of its sub-ideologies) include:

• Sam Altman of OpenAI: AGI, longtermerism ("galaxies are indeed at risk"), mind uploading
• Marc Andreessen (software engineer/techbro): embracing the full TESCREAL
• Sam Bankman-Fried: effective altruism (EA)
• Nick Bostrom: Alcor (cryonics), EA, extropianism
• Vitalik Buterin, funder of the Future of Life Institute
• William MacAskill: EA, longtermism, transhumanism
• Elon Musk: AGI, cosmism (e.g., wanting to colonize Mars with a million people by 2050), EA, longtermism
• Jaan Tallinn, creator of co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute
• Peter Thiel: cryonics, MIRI/LessWrong
• Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong: AGI, cryonics, transhumanism

It has been claimed that because TESCREAL attracts disaffected young men, it co-occurs with the manosphere.

The danger then of TESCREAL ideologies is that they are consequentialist, with the ends justifying the means. They prioritize hypothetical distant visions by a few wealthy individuals of a future technological utopia over addressing real-world present, near-term and mid-term human problems.

TESCREAL as a concept has been criticized by the utilitarian/effective altruism Bentham's Newsletter, authored by an anonymous philosophy undergraduate.

James J. Hughes of the "technoprogressive" (i.e., technological utopian) think tank Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) elaborated on the Bentham's Newsletter criticisms, IEET was founded by Hughes (a transhumanist) and Nick Bostrom (noted above as being within the TESCREAL constellation). The main criticism against TESCREAL by Hughes is that it is conspiracist thinking, that there is a secret cabal is trying to suppress the truth. The problems with this criticism are threefold:

1. Torres and Gebru have not claimed that there is a secret cabal, all the claimed actors in this are making their activities known in public and in think tanks supporting their causes.
2. Torres and Gebru were well-acquainted with some of the actors in TESCREAL: Torres participated in the TESCREAL movement for several years (EA, transhumanism, longtermerism), Gebru had high-level positions at Microsoft, Google and Apple (the first two have been funders of OpenAI).
3. There are two non-contrived connections between the different ideologies of TESCREAL: futurism and longtermerism.

A second criticism of TESCREAL by Hughes is that Torres and Gebru have inappropriately attributed eugenics, racism and neoreactionary ideology to the ideologies. The problem with the eugenics criticism is that both EA and longtermerism are obsessed with the importance of high IQ, and hence eugenics. Bostrom himself drew the path from IQ to racism and eugenics both in a disgusting email he wrote as an Oxford University student in 1996 (later "apologizing" for using N-word but not retracting his claim that "Blacks are more stupid than whites.") and by his co-editing a book in support of eugenics, Human Enhancement.

See also

• Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Freeman Dyson
• LessWrong
• Michio Kaku

External links

• Association of Professional Futurists
• The Ghost in the Machine: Science, Mysticism, and Italian Futurist Literature, Piers Kelly, Monash University
• Cosma Shalizi's notebooks on futurism and prophecy