[hiAndrewQuinn]

I've long figured the essential knot at the bottom of this is: Do you agree with Land that intelligence and capitalism are in some sense "the same thing"?

I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that.

And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.

[scarmig]

Intelligence to Nick Land is explicitly not about logic or things that further human values (he is, in fact, explicitly anti-human, which is an intellectual honesty that I have to respect a lot more than the people who have taken his ideas and run with them).

It's about how a system can observe changes, react to them, make decisions to further itself (not any particular values), and act on those decisions. Think about a cybernetic OODA loop. Systems that do so will outcompete and replace those that don't.

Capitalism is all about that. If there's a dollar on the ground, someone will pick it up quicker than someone who has to petition some other agent to acquire a lock. And if two agents can engage in a mutually productive trade, they will not only fire together but also modify the system such that they will wire together in the future to more efficiently acquire limited resources.

All that is solid melts into distributed representations. In a way, he takes all the smartest critiques of capitalism and decides, well, capitalism is going to win, so we might as well embrace the state it converges to. Or not, but it doesn't really matter.

[gom_jabbar]

I have also always respected Land's intellectual honesty. I think the closest primary source to your point about the cybernetic OODA loop and competition is Land's text Against Orthogonality:

"Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality

[alienthrowaway]

> "Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever

This is bunk, and only works when there's one variable that controls who wins, and there are no diminishing returns. Its sounds as naive as "Any athlete that uses X to improve themself will outcompete one that directs themselves towards any other goals whatsoever"

[scarmig]

The point of Land is that there is an underlying reality. Systems that make use of that reality most effectively are those that will propagate and dominate that reality. Landian intelligence isn't about scoring high on the SAT (which, obviously, won't make someone a star basketball player), but instead about how a system can react to reality to propagate itself. Almost tautologically, systems that make better use of reality outcompete those that make worse use of reality.

[alienthrowaway]

I said "X" instead of intelligence, strength, mass, reaction time, precise control, spatial awareness, or any other single characteristic because the best athletes have to be great on multiple dimensions - not just one. The same goes for "intelligence", unless it's used by Land as a catch-all phrase for multiple attributes, and if so, the statement becomes pointlessly vague, and papers over the fact that some of these attributes have physical limits and can't be changed by the self-improving intelligence, this limits are present in any medium e.g. latency, bandwidth, signal attenuation

[hiAndrewQuinn]

I'm quite a fan of that piece as well. I don't think I agree with it exactly as stated, the claim feels like it can be usefully weakened - but it's crisp, so I like it the same way I like Nietzsche.

[scarmig]

Is retrochronic yours? Nice project, if so. So much of his work is scattered across defunct blogs.

[gom_jabbar]

Yes, it's my project - thanks for the feedback! Tracking down the source material has been a real challenge since it's so scattered and often offline, but I'm hoping it makes things easier for anyone wanting to dive deep into the primary sources behind Land's main thesis.

[balamatom]

More seriously, can you provide sources for your interpretation of Land's thesis as 'capitalism is intelligence'? Asking because I've always interpreted it more as 'capitalism is sentient' (which I have to admit is a pure, unadulterated cosmic horror moment right there) but I'm not a Land scholar, just an appreciator of weirdnesses.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Shoot, I think I heard him say it in some interview floating around YouTube a long time back. Let me see if I can dig it up.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Not Actually on YouTube, "A Quick Rundown of Accelerationism", 00:00:20. Right at the start.

>I think capitalism and artificial intelligence are the same thing. It's the same process. Capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production, and artificial intelligence can only come out of self-propelling capitalism.

He says "artificial" specifically, forgive my impudence. My read however is that that isn't a fundamental difference to him, it's just an artifact of the fact that silicon transistors relay information faster than biological neurons can. Intelligence is the same noumenon underneath, and it will assert itself one way or another as the fundamental pathfinding algorithm of matter.

EDIT: Ah, what's more, I believe sentience/ensoulment as it is usually defined is not really a thing Land is interested in as a philosophical object. The machine god at the end of time might end up being a total p-zombie for all he cares, so long as it puts the atoms into the right place. This is a common stumbling point in r/acc discussions: We're agnostic about whether anything is experiencing qualia here. That's a separate and more, uh, normal metaphysical debate. If such a thing even exists.

[gom_jabbar]

Transcribed here (with some additional context): https://retrochronic.com/#interview

[52-6F-62]

What can he possibly be basing this on? Sounds like a faith to me. They are trying to manufacture a god for the rest

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Ain't that the million dollar question, my friend. I am not about to slog myself through enough Immanuel Kant to explain how to got there, though. I already had one undergrad.

You're right to notice a connection to theism here, though. It sounds nuts to see but I actually see some distant parallels between Land and Omohundro's ideas and, like, old gnostic traditions, or the early 20th century process philosophy of Charles Hartshorne.

[gom_jabbar]

Land is also explicitly referencing Omohundro and his Basic AI Drives in his work, e.g.:

"Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its own thing. That's what runaway means, as a virtual mind template. Omohundro explains the basics." [0]

"Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive." [1]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#pythia-unbound

[1] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality

[balamatom]

>We're agnostic about whether anything is experiencing qualia here

Oh that's a great point! Vis a vis all the cogsci slop that regularly pretends to "explain consciousness", being agnostic about it sure beats the usual "not being able to comprehend the question in the first place" (as frequently exemplified by HN comment[er?]s under that type of headline)

[tim333]

A video link https://youtu.be/lrOVKHg_PJQ

I think it's plainly mumbo jumbo. I mean take:

"capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production"

We've had capitalism for centuries with no AI production. As a time saver I often find once someone comes up with one bit of nonsense you can find better things to do than analyse all their other statements in case there are some non bunk aspects.

[balamatom]

>We've had capitalism for centuries with no AI production.

But it was capitalism that ended up producing AI. And if that's how things have ended up, then that must've been where things had been going all along, no? (Ask the Cheshire Cat for the opposite statement.) That's teleology for you, it's a thing that's usually obvious in hindsight, but, as you demonstrate, even that not always.

And if you and your ancestors have never lived under any other social system besides the one that evolved into contemporary capitalism, how would you even be able to make the distinction between the telos of capitalism and the telos of any other global process? What would be your point of reference, experientially speaking? Do you even know any other dreams besides the ones that capitalism dreams throughout your waking hours?

Back to Plato's cave with you it seems, and don't, I repeat, please don't think about limited liability corporations, the construct of "personhood" that the legal system ascribes them, and how the only thing that can even attempt to kill a corporation is a government (which is just another kind of "corporation", in the sense of rule-based meta-entity which uses human intelligence as a replaceable building block). And governments have been largely captured (outsmarted) by the corporations. For decades at this point. Qui bono? You Bono?

On your way there allow me to guess, you believe that there's least one school of economics which is not "mumbo jumbo" (a term, besides the tastelessness of dismissiveness, also bearing subtle racist connotations), don't you?

EDIT: Check this shit out:

>Mungo Park's travel journal Travels in the Interior of Africa (1795) describes 'Mumbo Jumbo' as a character, complete with "masquerade habit", whom Mandinka males would dress up as in order to resolve domestic disputes

From Wikipedia, emphasis mine. Consider!

[dumbledoren]

> But it was capitalism that ended up producing AI

No, it was the scientific method. Back in the mid to late 19th century when scientific research was done in an open-source way without the presence of capital and corporations, science had the fastest progress it had in human history. After the capital took control of science and research through patents and funding, the rate of progress slowed greatly. Thomas Jefferson's views on patents also aligns with this: He said that countries that did not have patents were as productive as those that did have. (he was the first president of the patent office).

[tim333]

Wikipedia disagrees a little on mumbo jumbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbo_jumbo_(phrase)

Apparently it comes from the Mandinka word "Maamajomboo". I don't think using African words is racist, if anything it's pro African.

re "but it was capitalism that ended up producing AI", capitalism has also produced sandwich toasters for example but to thus declare "capitalism can only be sandwich toasters" would be equally silly as "capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production."

[klipt]

I think it's more evolution that produced intelligence. Evolution also produced capitalism. Capitalism is just one environmental variation that evolution can run in.

[balamatom]

Thanks!

I can definitely see where he's coming from with that take, myself having grown up in a culture that has overwritten itself with capitalism over the course of scantly two generations. I'm saying that because I don't reckon it's the kind of thing one could recognize when one is on the inside of it. Not without fucking oneself up something wicked, anyway

[gom_jabbar]

I have a research project on Nick Land's main thesis that capitalism and AI are identical.

It contains (almost) all primary sources for his thesis (182 as of this writing).

https://retrochronic.com/

[hiAndrewQuinn]

You threw this elsewhere but I want to reiterate here, this is a really impressive work! I'm glad someone is out here piecing together all the shards of the vase like this.

[gom_jabbar]

Thanks so much! This project ended up being far more involved than I expected, given how scattered and arcane Land's work is. It's always nice to get some appreciation!

[balamatom]

The `noproc` option kicked me out of HN before I could respond, so I've been waiting 3 hours to say - this is fantastic stuff. Impeccable research and presentation! It's just... beautiful.

Perhaps tangential, but is that even based on some existing package for such publications, or is it an entirely custom frontend? I'll be happy to know more about how this project came to be, from both the technical and the academic perspective.

[gom_jabbar]

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it!

The frontend is built with Svelte (still on version 4) and SvelteKit. The project does not use any pre-existing package for publishing. The CSS is completely custom. The font is a custom build of Iosevka [0], which uses a diamond-shaped "0" to emphasize the centrality of zero in Land's work (e.g. Zero-Centric History [1]).

The project itself came about after a close friend sent me a picture of a Land book he had found at a library. I had read Land years ago - he was one of the reasons I got into coding - and it just struck me that I had never built anything related to his work. I was always fascinated by his capitalism = AI thesis, so I just dove back into his work and started building.

[0] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

[1] https://retrochronic.com/#zero-centric-history

[gmerc]

It’s a paper clip optimizer. RL. With a single goal.

[gom_jabbar]

Land has always argued with Omohundro against orthogonality and thus against paperclip maximizers, but the singular goal is correct: for him it's intelligence optimization.

[dumbledoren]

> Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades

Not correct - in Ancient Egypt, all the land belonged to the people through the Pharaoh (great house), and they both had the independent agency to do voluntary trade with they wanted with part of the produce and lacked that agency as they had to pay some share from the land assigned to them as taxes.

> I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.

Except the modern cultural paradigms originate from that very Ancient Egypt. From the monogamic marriage paradigm to higher education. And those Set, Horus etc have been meshed into the 'one god' concept as its aspects, and then that one god and practically every major thing in the Ancient Egyptian religion were used to create the modern religions. From 'weighing of the heart against a feather' for judging the goodness of the recently deceased in the afterlife to the very concept of after-life judgment, most religious belief traits come from Ancient Egyptian religion.

[balamatom]

They're hiding ;)