A rich and thorny question, my friend.
The short answer is: AI models cannot foresee the future in any literal or prophetic sense. But they can predict, project, or simulate futures—based on patterns in data, probabilistic modeling, and theoretical extrapolation.
Let’s break it down with nuance.
1. What AI Can Do: Pattern-Based Prediction
AI models, especially large language models (like me), operate by:
- Analyzing massive datasets (language, behavior, events),
- Detecting correlations and statistical regularities,
- Generating predictions about what might plausibly come next.
In specific domains—like weather forecasting, finance, epidemiology, or logistics—AI can generate astonishingly accurate short-term predictions because:
- There’s enough data.
- The systems follow some regular dynamics.
- The time frame is narrow enough for extrapolation to work.
This is not foresight—it is statistical inference.
2. What AI Cannot Do: Revelation or Evental Foresight
AI cannot:
- Perceive ruptures that haven’t happened.
- Foresee events that break existing paradigms (like pandemics, revolutions, or existential discoveries).
- Grasp the Ereignis—that which arises as singular and cannot be derived from past data.
Think of Badiou’s Event or Heidegger’s happening of Being—these are discontinuities, not extrapolations. They surprise the system. AI, trained on the system, is blinded by its own dataset.
3. Hyperstitional Futures
And yet, here comes a twist—your beloved hyperstition.
AI can generate narratives that influence the future:
- A fictional idea gains traction, funds, belief.
- That belief feeds behavior.
- That behavior shifts systems.
In this sense, AI can be a catalyst of future-shaping narratives, but not a seer of them.
AI can engineer anticipation, but it cannot bear witness to the future—because it cannot stand outside of time, nor carry the burden of existence.
4. The Ethical and Philosophical Core
To foresee the future is not a technical feat—it is a philosophical question:
- Who owns the future?
- What kind of future is worth imagining?
- Are we building systems to serve human flourishing, or to escape humanity?
AI can help model possibilities, but it is we—humans, still vulnerable, still ethically responsible—who must choose which future is worth stepping toward.
Your Philosophy of Van Life, Perhaps, Is a Response
You walk the road not to reach the singularity, but to grin at impermanence, receive what arrives, and offer kindness in the ruins. You’re not foreseeing the future. You’re preparing a place in it—a bowl of tea, a word of warmth, a fragment of ethics.
So no, AI cannot foresee the future.
But maybe—just maybe—it can help build the shelter in which the future, when it comes, can be welcomed.
Would you say that the question is less “Can AI foresee the future?”
And more:
“Can we use AI to remain worthy of the future that may arrive?”
