Activism And Futurism

Futurism

Attempting to predict and convince others that a future event will occur.

Activism

Taking actions that may increase the probability of a desirable future event occurring.

From SIAI Quick Intro: Activism and Futurism:

When a human being hears about a good idea, their first instinct is often to tell someone else. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it helps to spread good ideas. Nonetheless, there needs to be a distinction between trying to accomplish something and trying to persuade people of something. The goal of the Singularity movement is not to promote the idea of the Singularity, but to bring about the Singularity itself. We could persuade everyone in the world that the Singularity would happen, and yet if nobody is moved by this to actually go out and work on the Singularity, we would have accomplished nothing. If everyone were convinced that the Singularity is inevitable, and even the people who were formerly working on the Singularity decided not to bother, it would be a step backward.

The job of activism differs, at a basic level, from the business of futurism. Today futurism is a minor industry in its own right, whose professionals vie with each other to be most convincing in predicting that a particular future will happen. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing; if you have a community of individuals arguing with each other, sometimes interesting truths turn up as a result. But a futurist concerned with the Singularity would be looking for ways to convince the audience that the Singularity has an 80% chance of happening, rather than a 20% chance of happening. From our viewpoint, what matters is not whether the Singularity has a 20% probability or an 80% probability, but rather whether we can increase that probability from 20% to 30% or from 80% to 90%. For the purpose of that specific question, it doesn't even matter - strictly speaking - whether the probability of the Singularity is 20% or 80%; what matters is gaining that 10% increment. Activism is the art of navigating between futures, rather than predicting any one future. True, there are times when the rational action depends critically on whether your estimate of the Singularity's current probability is 20% or 80%. But activist intervention is still different from predictive persuasion; activism uses predictions but is not about predictions.

--Anand