我们为何需要社会奇点？对AI生存风险论述中渐进式情景的基于机制的批判
Why do we need social singularity? A mechanism-based critique of gradual scenarios in AI existential-risk discourse
AI总结：
本文批判AI生存风险论述中的渐进式情景，提出社会奇点概念，指出AI扩散伴随的社会机制将重塑其未来轨迹，核心扰乱或源于对AI到来的预期引发的社会动态。
AI中文摘要：
本文对近期渐进式、累积式的AI生存风险情景展开批判，指出尽管这些情景具有实质性贡献，但在社会学层面的具体阐释仍显不足。具体而言，这些情景缺乏反思性视角，在很大程度上保留了技术决定论的结构，且低估了集体能动性及其他社会过程的作用。因此，它们也忽略了AI扩散过程中伴随重大社会冲突的可能性，这限制了其整体可信度。本文进一步识别出在AI部署前或部署期间可能变得重要的一系列社会机制，包括阐释与施动动态、动员与反动员、路径依赖与锁定、跨制度分歧与多速度扩散，以及依恋、逆反等社会心理机制。本文认为，这些机制将与AI扩散产生递归互动，重塑未来轨迹，进而可能出现分支、逆转或发生不连续转变，从而拓展了AI未来的可能空间。在此基础上，本文还提出了技术奇点与社会奇点之间的新颖分析区分：前者指AI发展中一个假设的技术阈值，后者指由该阈值的预期到来所引发的社会不连续性。其核心含义是，最具影响力的扰乱不仅可能来自先进AI本身，还可能源于对其到来的预期所引发的社会动态。
英文摘要：
This paper critiques recent gradual and cumulative AI existential-risk scenarios, arguing that, despite their substantive contributions, they remain insufficiently sociologically specified. In particular, these scenarios lack a reflexive perspective, retain a largely technologically deterministic structure, and underestimate the role of collective agency and other social processes. As a result, they also discount the possibility of major social conflict accompanying AI diffusion, which limits their overall plausibility. The paper further identifies a set of social mechanisms likely to become significant before or during AI deployment, including interpretive and performative dynamics, mobilisation and countermobilisation, path dependence and lock-in, cross-regime divergence and multi-speed diffusion, and social-psychological mechanisms such as attachment and reactance. It argues that these mechanisms will interact recursively with AI diffusion and reshape future trajectories, which may subsequently branch, reverse, or undergo discontinuous shifts, thereby expanding the space of plausible AI futures. On this basis, the paper also proposes a novel analytic distinction between technological singularity and social singularity. Whereas the former refers to a putative technological threshold in AI development, the latter denotes a social discontinuity produced by the anticipated approach of that threshold. The central implication is that the most consequential disruptions may emerge not only from advanced AI itself, but also from the social dynamics provoked by the expectation of its arrival.
