Proleptic Epistemology for Societal Impacts of AGI

The societal impacts of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) are studied almost exclusively through foresight: forecasting, scenario analysis, risk assessment, and anticipatory governance. We argue that foresight carries structural epistemic limitations no methodological refinement can overcome, because its temporal orientation renders present-day preconditions of future structural transformation invisible as ordinary. Drawing on the rhetorical and literary tradition of prolepsis, we give it philosophical form as Proleptic Epistemology: a method of generating knowledge about the present by treating an assumed future state as already realized and examining the present as its preconditions. We apply this lens to four domains of AGI's societal impact: power structures, labor dispensability, popular sovereignty, and political agency. We show that foresight frames each as an independent risk to be managed, while proleptic epistemology reveals them as stages of a single integrated trajectory toward the structural dispensability of the governed. We conclude that the ML community's epistemic toolkit requires not only better foresight but a fundamentally different temporal orientation, one that generates diagnostic knowledge about the present, testable against present-day evidence, rather than predictive claims about the future.