Dr. Ben Goertzel on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1211
SUBJECT: HISTORY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
we have to get the us government to give billions of dollars to your research to guarantee that the singularity in 2012 is a good singularity, right? So he led us around to meet with these generals and various high hoo-hahs in DC
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Goertzel's anecdote rests on the idea that a technological 'singularity' was due to occur specifically in 2012, a date that traces to Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero theory, which predicted a mathematically-derived 'novelty' event on December 21, 2012, based on numeric values McKenna assigned to the I Ching's hexagrams. McKenna himself, in a recorded interview, backed away from claiming literal belief in the prophecy, calling it 'a kind of fantasizing' and saying history is not a mathematically defined entity; no such novelty event was publicly observed on that date. The broader technological-singularity concept invoked in the anecdote (AI recursively self-improving to superintelligence) is a contested hypothesis among philosophers and AI researchers, not an established scientific prediction with a fixed date; a 2024 peer-reviewed paper (Thorstad, Philosophical Studies) concludes the hypothesis 'rests on undersupported growth assumptions' that its leading philosophical defenders have failed to overcome. No independent, publicly documented record was found confirming the specific circa-2007 Washington DC lobbying trip or a multibillion-dollar government funding effort tied to a 2012 deadline; this remains Goertzel's personal recollection. Overall: the 2012-deadline premise underlying the anecdote is unsupported by science, while the specific DC funding-trip story could not be independently verified either way.