The Inevitablists

The name for people sharing the future as settled fact.

When someone tells you mass AI adoption is inevitable, they are not sharing a finding. They are preaching a faith. And it’s time we treated it that way.

We call these people technologists, founders, “techno-optimists,” CEOs. Those titles confer a kind of authority — they suggest the speaker knows something we don’t, has seen the future the rest of us can’t. But the word we actually need is one that describes what they’re doing rather than what they are. They are inevitablists. And the thing they are selling is not a forecast. It’s a belief.

I’m writing this after watching a particularly unsettling clip from a panel at SXSW London where Katrien Grobler (Goebbles?), founder of an app called TWINNING, opined that “99% of all content will be AI generated in 3 years” so we might as well at least have perfect digital replicas of actors at least 50% of the time. This is who we’re platforming at film/tech fests now?

A belief, not a fact

The claim is always some version of: this is happening whether you like it or not. Get on board or get left behind (especially you, women!). Notice that this is never accompanied by the kind of evidence we’d demand of any other extraordinary claim. It is asserted, repeated, and treated as settled. That’s exactly how belief operates, and exactly how facts do not.

What makes inevitabilism so seductive is that it disguises a choice as a condition. Every model trained, every product shipped, every dollar invested is a decision made by specific people with specific interests. None of it fell from the sky. But “inevitable” launders all of that decision-making into something that looks like weather — impersonal, unstoppable, no one’s fault and no one’s responsibility. Just gotta ride it out.

“Nothing can stop this” is an enormously profitable thing to convince the world of when you are the one building the thing. It concentrates power, attracts capital, and quiets opposition — all before a single argument about whether any of it is good has been allowed to take place. Data centers with capacity far beyond what we current need are being built. Damage is already being done. But DON’T LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

We have been here before

Beliefs in inevitable outcomes — no matter how untrue, no matter how biased or shoddy the science beneath them — have driven human catastrophe before. This is the value of Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine, also known as “The Not AI” Doc, which trace the threads connecting today’s AI ideologies and the ‘science’ of intelligence back to eugenics: a body of thought that also dressed itself as destiny, also claimed the authority of science, and also told people that the future was already determined and resistance was just sentimental. (You can screen the film on Kinema now, I have hosted a screening with (m)otherboars members and it’s powerful.)

The lineage matters because the rhetorical move is identical. Declare an outcome inevitable. Borrow the prestige of science to do it. Frame anyone who objects as standing in the way of progress itself. It worked then. It is working now. Coraline Ada Ehmke’s book We Just Build Hammers weaves us through the stories that show at each moment in the big technology advancements of the last 150 years (nuclear age, computing, internet, AI), there were folks closest to the development of the science urging us to imagine the potential harms alongside the potential innovations and build meticulously to prevent them. They were sidelined for standing in the way of progress. (And Ehmke shows how each of these incredible stories of technology ethics were deeply influenced by science fiction - STORIES MATTER.)

Belief forecloses imagination

The real danger of a powerful belief system is that it shrinks the space of what we can imagine — and a shrunken imagination produces a shrunken set of actions. If the future is already written, there is nothing to debate, nothing to choose, nothing to build differently. You can only comply or fall behind.

But nothing we build is inevitable. Saying otherwise is the same as saying the future is already written, and the future is not a document we are reading. It is one we are writing (badly) in real time, with our hands. Every adoption curve reflects choices - of the people who are building and those who are adopting. Every “this is just how it’s going to be” is a decision someone made and then hid inside the passive voice.

Name it so you can question it

So this is a small proposal with a large purpose. When you hear that AI adoption is inevitable, name the person saying it. Not as “technologist.” Not “visionary.” Inevitablist — someone advancing a belief that happens to enrich them, dressed as a fact that happens to silence you.

The name is a reminder to do the thing the belief is designed to stop us from doing: examine the claim. Ask for the evidence. Ask who benefits. Ask who is building and whose harm are they considering (if at all). Ask what becomes possible the moment we stop accepting that the future has already been decided for us.

The inevitablists are counting on us not asking. That alone is reason enough to start.