Divining Truth

This article considers predictive AI as a cultural epistemological form akin to divination, which is to say, a future-oriented technology of knowledge that concerns itself with risk and uncertainty. The article explores some of the cultural logics that are embedded within AI, namely, the cultural history of ‘intelligence’ and how specific ways of knowing the world are encoded into the technology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in both the US and the UK, the article considers what types of ‘truth’ are configured through AI, and the extent to which these leverage longer standing cultural histories and epistemological forms. By emphasizing AI as a cultural product, the article focuses on the ways in which this technology simultaneously disrupts and leverages epistemological frameworks that have been dominant in western European and north American culture since the Enlightenment, but which are now shifting, pointing to emergent social constructions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ as networked, iterative, optimizable and future-oriented.