The Technological Singularity Point and the Open Society: Match or Mismatch?

How can liberal theory process the technological acceleration embodied in the advance of artificial intelligence? Is that theory viable when a point shows on the horizon, beyond which our perceptions of ourselves as individual subjectivities might have to accommodate to a reality in which machines self-regenerate and human inputs become redundant? I address these questions from a premise that equates our current perceptions of liberal democracy with the notion of the open society, as formulated by Karl Popper. I argue that the open society can be thought of as both compatible with a technological singularity point and as being to a degree subverted by it. Writing at the end of the Second World War, Popper defined all democracies as underpinned by commitment to a civilization that admits ignorance about final ends and accordingly allows for conversations among different opinions, facilitating mutual enrichment and constant advance. This perception of democracy implies a potentially complex relationship with the singularity point. For Popper, political liberty and knowledge connect through what he calls World Three, the area of intersubjective constructs that present themselves to each participant as objective reality while being impacted by these participants' inputs. Science is one such system: its scope and procedures set engagement rules for scientists, but its own contents gradually change by absorbing these scientists’ individual contributions. Democracy both protects World Three by securing each citizen's freedom to participate in the elaboration of knowledge, and reflects World Three by giving each individual equal voice in shared deliberation. Political institutions may thus align with the open society. But as politics includes decision and coercion, it involves closure. Even democratic politics is not a true World Three phenomenon. This places the open society’s trademark political organization, constitutional democracy, in conflict with its other foundations. Popper resolves this by anticipating that with the growth of science, the practices associated with it, and comparable World-Three phenomena, the significance of formal politics will diminish, allowing the open society to be regulated by the anonymous and equitable dynamics of knowledge. Developments in digital technology can be understood as validating Popper's prediction and therefore as concurring with the premises of the open society. Information technology embodies World Three as it is accessible to aggregate contributions while being autonomous from the control of any single participant. Governments and citizens progressively rely on the data and the solutions generated by this field. The expansion of digital management fulfils the terms of structuring public life through World-Three systems that are independent of any person's arbitrary will. But at the same time, this dynamic might sever shared life from considerations rooted in the universal vulnerability that grounds human reason. Popper is aware that technological advance might undermine freedom, as when used for surveillance, but there is little in his perspective to preempt the potentiality of human discretion and its collective manifestation in civic choice from being sidelined by technology. The relationship between the vision of democracy entailed and the singularity point is accordingly complex and ambivalent.