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Short abstract:

Present debates on speculation raise recurring questions about the distinctions between divination, statistics, computation, and AI. From the ancient to the contemporary, this paper reveals original historical insight on the socio-cultural functions of speculation and its hegemonic entanglements.

Long abstract:

Present debates about the nature of artificial intelligence (AI) and its capacity as a technology of speculation (Natale, 2021; Pasquinelli, 2023) point to longer traditions of producing predictions through data aggregation, algorithmic calculation, and pattern recognition—highlighting recurring questions about epistemological and ideological distinctions between speculative practices like divination, statistics, computation, and artificial intelligence (Benqué, 2021; Lazaro, 2018).

From the ancient to the contemporary, societies have sought to foresee the future to mitigate uncertainty, circumvent crises, and engineer favourable scenarios (Andersson, 2018; Daston, 1995). Techniques for speculation, accessible even today largely only to those in positions of power, have been in use long before the advent of AI: occult prophesy, astrology, weather forecasting, demography, epidemiology, financial markets, and strategic foresight.

Conceptually situating AI amongst these techniques, I engage with a media archaeological approach (Parikka, 2012) that rejects linear and teleological historiographies. Using archival methods, historical analysis, and critical discourse analysis, I analyse the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, Islamic Golden Age astrolabes, seventeenth-century Pascal’s calculator, the mid-twentieth-century ENIAC computer, and Chat GPT to determine how these technologies of speculation have and continue to shape one another across shifting societal contexts.

This investigation reveals original historical perspectives on the socio-cultural function of prediction-making and insights about the deep-rooted entanglements of speculation with sites of hegemonic contention. Moreover, this paper demonstrates how the lines between pseudo-science and science, magical thinking and secular rationality, and divination and speculation have consistently been redrawn in efforts by ruling classes to maintain political and economic control over populations.