The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science
by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
Book Review
Roundtable Review 16-13
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė. The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science. Cornell University Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1-5017-6977-1 (hardcover, $56.95).
15 November 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-13 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Benjamin Peters, The University of Tulsa. 2
Review by Teresa Ashe, The Open University. 7
Review by Ivan Boldyrev, Radboud University. 14
Review by Ksenia Tatarchenko, Singapore Management University. 20
Response by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Kingston University London. 24
Introduction by Benjamin Peters, The University of Tulsa
In her new signal history that spans early modern science, the positivism of the Russian Revolution, Cold War cybernetics, and ends with the post-Soviet period, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė has accomplished something extraordinary, as is affirmed by this roundtable of experts and scholarly specialists. In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science, she outlines a serious history and theory of Soviet scientific prediction. Her book is both an alternative genealogy as well as work that is uncomfortably resonant with the current late modern epistemic condition. Her seven chapters on the Russian twentieth-century history of scientific prediction led her to what she describes in her response as “a pervasive feeling of the inadequacy of human knowledge to confront the existential uncertainties of social, political, and geophysical futures.” As this roundtable which involves close readers of the Soviet century makes clear, The Will to Predict brings into close relief what Peter Brown calls “a sense of the salutary vertigo” in the differences between then and now, even if this sense is itself an uncertain fiction that likely stems from the fractal differences embedded within any historical moment.[1] It also offers a cautionary similitude between the Russian scientific tradition of prediction and the presentist artificial intelligence (AI) moment. Behold scientific prediction, an unsettled and unsettling positivist pharmakon.
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