2020: Deus ex Machina

This post concerns my second official book, 2020: Deus ex Machina. I have just submitted it for publication to Zero books, who published my first book The Universal Subject of Our Time (2019).

When I started to write seriously about AI in 2016 in preparation for the first book, I was writing at a time of technological excess. The smartphone had arrived and within a few years Big Data had taken over the show. What we were witnessing was nothing short of a digital informational revolution. People would wonder where this would all lead and it was this question that my first book tried address, in the years leading up to the advent of the AI we see today.

So, the trajectory had been set long before 2020. In fact, you could even mark the year 2000 as the event horizon of the eventual Singularity itself. There were major changes afoot around the turn of the Millenium with the advent of the Big Four technology companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

In the first book, I am introducing a theory of subjectivity or selfhood that concerns the machine subject as well as the technologically-mediated human. In the meantime, a range of different contemporaneous issues concerning AI are explored and the book leaves no stone unturned, even trying to formulate a relationship between subjectivity and the physics of black holes. It's a wide ranging book that is not to be taken lightly.

With 2020: Deus ex Machina, I am focussed on the Singularity itself that is placed in the Year 2020, in other words we have already passed this event. AI is alive-and-kicking, enough investment has gone into this industry, enough hype and hysteria, it has passed the Turing test and has learnt to programme itself for improvement.

In January 2025, according to the boss of Open AI, Sam Altman: “i always wanted to write a six-word story. here it is: near the singularity; unclear which side.” The cryptic social media message alluded to Altman's belief that AI had arrived in a major way, in fact, to such an extent that he was willing to call the Singularity. Well, the book I have written leaves little to doubt, the contention here is that we have passed the Singularity as of the arrival of GPT-3 on 11th June 11th 2020, a software package that passed the Turing test. The AI's performance was found by a test group of users to be indistingsuishable from human behaviour (in answering straightforward questions).

So is the Singularity with us? It was in 2020, we just were not aware...

p.s. today I went to the Science Museum in London and found inspiration with their Supercomputer