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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.

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.

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

52-6F-62 480 days ago

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

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.

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

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]

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

balamatom 480 days ago

>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 479 days ago

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 479 days ago

>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 479 days ago

> 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).

balamatom 478 days ago

Surely there must be plenty of rigorous studies by now which convincingly demonstrate how "AI" as sold today is a bad idea? Not to mention tons of individual experiences which fail to be acknowledged by science as datapoints, for which we have the wonderful term "anecdata".

Neither seems to be stopping capitalism from forcing the existence of AI upon us (nor of the proto-AI technologies, such as the ones that gather data for it, or make public opinion receptive to it). Knowledge is [nothing without] power, and it saddens me to see how power-blind supposedly "intelligent" people keep making themselves, leaving the reins to self-important idiots who... do you think they even have an agenda? They're just like us, status monkeys doing whatever the smartphone commands them to do.

And this is, again, AI in the narrow, marketing sense. I'm one of those frowned upon people who say a corporation, or a government, already is an artificial intelligent subject, just a very slow one.

tim333 479 days ago

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."

balamatom 479 days ago

Using an aspect of an African religion as a metonym for "worthless nonsense", sonorous as it is, is still pretty fucking colonialist.

And the example you give to point out what you think is a false equvalence, is itself a false equivalence. Nobody says sandwich toasters are eating the world, if anything they help to feed it :)

klipt 479 days ago

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 479 days ago

Same conflation already happened upthread. Classic Sapir-Whorf stuff (rejected as that linguistic hypothesis might be.) Imagine trying to do philosophy in English, a language where blunt treachery passes for subtlety, and the normative complexity threshold is so pathetically low!

The phrase "artificial intelligence production" (as seen here https://etscrivner.github.io/cryptocurrent/#_footnotedef_22 - courtesy of https://retrochronic.com/#introduction - and Land's source [IS (has picture of)] a guy in a suit and tie and not presumably on speed! rejoice!) can mean either "production of artificial intelligence" or "artificial production of intelligence".

But it's very difficult to consistently point out the distinction between the two. Not without overloading the sentence up to the point of people starting to say things like "Mumbo Jumbo, go away, we are good and u r ghey!"

So, I'd rather describe that distinction as power fucking points:

- "evolution" [IS (the autopoiesis of)] "intelligence"

- "capitalism" [IS (the autopoiesis of)] "artificial intelligence"

All things considered, the notion of "intelligence" is itself pretty artificial. But I reckon yall are too intelligent to be ready for that conversation just yet. Give 'em time.

Clinton said it best: it all depends on what your definition of "is", is...

balamatom 480 days ago

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

https://retrochronic.com/

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).

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.

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 480 days ago

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.

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

gom_jabbar 479 days ago

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

gmerc 480 days ago

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

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.