Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of the Meritocracy
This chapter discusses how IQ reappeared in the era as a proper measure of personhood. Numerous figures looked to psychometrics as confirming the objective existence of separate subjectivities. Examining the promise and defeat of artificial intelligence in philosophy of mind and New Wave science fiction, the chapter shows that a suspicion of Great Society welfarism took hold among writers with little in common except their commitment to the idea that human minds could neither be replicated by machines nor reconfigured by state institutions without injury to personhood. If there is something weird about reviving not just classical IQ science but also classical liberalism, at least one can trace the motivation for such retrievals to the widespread seventies attitude that the present itself had little to offer by way of solutions to social problems. Many forward-thinking or progressive figures in the decade preferred to look to the past, a habit of mind that hastened the collapse of the present.