Announced in 1981 "with an uncharacteristic publicity blitz" by the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry, Fifth-Generation was the codename for a ten year $850 million government financed project designed to pioneer commercial AI applications in Japan's civilian dominated economy.

"Or perhaps, the blitz was not theirs at all, but Edward Feigenbaum's, who used the Japanese Fifth-Generation as his foil in a well-publicised book by the same name," Athanasiou contends. "Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, AI entrepreneur and one of AI's most tireless backers, Feigenbaum wrote his screed - subtitled AI and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World [Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1983] - as a means of promoting U.S. research. In this, he certainly succeeded."

Feigenbaum's heavily promoted book fuelled the U.S. military funded response, which lead to the rise of DARPA's Strategic Computing Program (SCP) and a spin-off commercial AI industry. By 1986 when commercial industry investment nosedived, a receptive environment had been created for President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative fantasies, which dominated U.S. industry and foreign policies and public discourse.

Whilst surveying the sociological effects of two thousand years of prophecy, Max Dublin draws attention to long-term speculation's serious dangers and flaws, notably the uncertain impact of accompanying sociological processes. "Prophetic futurism is often used not just to influence current funding decisions, but also to profoundly affect the future trajectories of key social institutions, and socially-engineer specific responses in the mass psyche through NLP, memetic propagation, and strategic marketing techniques," he claims.

Moravec's grim scenario predicts widespread sociopolitical upheaval (offset by a future profitable robotics/AI industry?), particularly rising longterm unemployment caused by structural dislocation and ruinously intense competitive ecosystems. His fast-track scenario compresses sociopolitical upheaval comparable to the cultural paradigm shift from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution in just over fifty years.

"There is the terror of an Hegelian necessity to this scenario," Dublin asserts, "which is accepted as not just necessary, but desirable. These longterm predictions usually only extrapolate current trends, they can't account or adjust for new paradigms, new technological solutions, or the unknown. By dominating public discourse and economic resource allocation, they actually impose their visions upon us, limiting our actual choices and responses."

Limits to Survival

Discussing these problems in the Wired interview, a disconnected Moravec sounds uncannily like the Club of Rome justifying their dystopian report Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), which ushered in futures studies research into the popular consciousness. Aware of the moral implications of naturalising biologist J.S.B. Haldane's biological/genetic arms race and A.G. Cairns-Smith's genetic takeover theories of early life-form evolution, social critic Christopher Lasch called such scenarios The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Holt & Co., 1995). Global-orientated managerial elites prefer being cocooned in illusionary hyper-reality to fostering civic leadership and moral responsibilities.

Max Dublin agrees: "These prediction contains the kind of smugness that characterised the worst kind of Victorian Darwinism, in which [Herbert Spencer's] dictum survival of the fittest was uttered not merely as a scientific principle, but as a war-cry. Only the fittest will survive - and the prophets are pleased to count themselves among this number."

The Business of Crypto-Politics

Similar military imprinted crypto-politics have increasingly infiltrated IT sectors/organisational mechanisms, evident in management fads such as Total Quality Management, reengineering and kaizen. Allusions to merciless neo-biological landscapes abound in Cybercorp: The New Business Revolution (New York: AMACOM, 1994), a management text written by CASE developer and Pulitzer Prize nominee Dr. James Martin, the grandfather of influential cyber-gurus and technophiles. "Cybernetic corporations now emerging have a vast web of electronic links to other organisations; they have virtual operations worldwide, are designed to adapt rapidly and continually to changing environments, and learn and evolve constantly at all levels," he argues. The fusion of AI-based monitoring systems, IT infrastructures and the legacy of strategic planning result in ruinously intense corporate ecosystems. The landmark case was the U.S. airline industry's 1991-92 net losses after American Airlines' SABRE computer-booking system led to brutal price cutting wars.

"Using intelligent agents for important competitor surveillance and data analysis expands," notes Martin, but surprisingly, he's wary of AI: "the term is one that I don't like because you just can't make computers intelligent in the same way that humans are. The word intelligent comes into discourse: people say intelligent agents, but just about all of the agents that I've looked at on the Internet aren't intelligent, they're executing simplistic algorithms."

Ironically, AI research risks becoming extinct in such a highly competitive environment, succumbing to the fate of cybernetics ("killed off by the priority of AI funding," Tom Athanasiou believes). Without lucrative military contracts, AI research would probably flounder in a commercial environment ("The last twenty years have been a little disappointing to us robotics enthusiasts, but things have started to come around in this decade," Moravec counters). Despite corporate milestones like IBM's expansion of direct text-to-speech recognition software into general consumer markets (fulfilling a goal AI has promised since its inception), commercial applications are likely to be in narrow vertically integrated industries (the brief 1980-86 commercial AI boom-bust cycle confirmed this).

Anno 1997: Three Consensus-Hallucinations

Increasingly, consensus-hallucinations are maintained by AI favorable socially-engineered events that double as sociological barometers of Moravec's unfolding Vision. 1997 was blessed with three: the anniversary of HAL-9000's birth (13 January 1997) in Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick's primal mythopoeic text 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); the dramatic Deep Blue/Gary Khasparov chess match debacle and background manipulative political sub-texts (resurrecting primal fears of computer superiority that have been intertwined with AI culture since its beginnings) and the successful NASA Pathfinder/Sojourner Mars mission contrasted with technical errors on the Russian space station Mir.