Capitalism is a general artificial superintelligence (Nick Land)

[Anonymous No.15600829]

Lately I've been seeing a lot of Rob Miles' YouTube videos about the dangers of a general artificial superintelligence. And it struck me. Capitalism is a general artificial superintelligence. This is what Nick Land meant, isn't?

>A general AI with a simple objective function: collect stamps, will eventually start killing carbon-based organisms in order to print more stamps from their molecules
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4

This describes how a simple objective function (profit-seeking) leads to the parasitic characteristics of capitalism and its hunger for resources.

>A general AI doesn't like being turned off. If you put a turn-off button somewhere, it will do everything in its power to prevent you from pressing that button.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM

This describes why capitalism doesn't like being removed, and how it does everything in its power (fascism, war, etc) to stop socialists from achieving their goal.

>A general AI doesn't like having its objective function changed. It will do everything in its power to prevent you from changing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l7Is6vOAOA

This describes why capitalism doesn't like reform and why a reformist project is bound to fail: capitalism will always oppose it, one way or another.

And I could go on. This basically opens up a whole new way of critiquing capitalism: as a rogue general super-AI that we have unleashed without knowing anything about the dangers of general AI. This means that computer scientists researching AI safety are now actively researching ways to stop capitalism.
Is this what Nick Land was getting at? Did I finally *got* Nick Land? Does anything I just said make sense or it is all schizoramblings to you?

[Anonymous No.15600863]

Yes that's part of the conclusion.

[Anonymous No.15600880]

>>15600863
Do you have a reference, so I can read it on Land's own words?

[Anonymous No.15600924]

>>15600880
read Meltdown and Circuitries

[Anonymous No.15600959]

>Power now deploys a mode the critic Mark Fisher (2000) calls SF (science fiction) capital. SF capital is the synergy, the positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital.
>The alliance between cybernetic futurism and "New Economy" theories argues that information is a direct generator of economic value. Information about the future therefore circulates as an increasingly important commodity. [...]Science fiction is now a research and development department within a futures industry that dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow.

Neat, so basically we have a superintelligence that not only feeds off past and present data, but also future data.

[Anonymous No.15600968]

>>15600880
Land's recent interviews are more approachable than his stimlit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgEqQujsNTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDMVYNX9xPw

[Anonymous No.15600974]

>>15600968
Thanks, hadn't seen the first one.

[Anonymous No.15600983]

>>15600829
He's just an armchair defeatist nihilist who want human extinction and he hide behind a thick curtain of high quality shitpost known as Fanged Noumena.
Ignore him, he's just a meme.

[Anonymous No.15600991]

>>15600829

[Anonymous No.15600999]

>>15600983
But the observations are made by me. I just vaguely remember Nick Land talking about something similar. You don't agree with my observations?

[Anonymous No.15601004]

>>1560099
>Techno Accelerationist

That reminds me I should have a partiboi69 mix playing in the background rn.

[Anonymous No.15601340]

OP here. I've been thinking and I've come to the conclusion that

you can predict the problems within capitalism WITHOUT a Marxist analysis.

In other words, you can predict the problems within capitalism WITHOUT even knowing about its internal contradictions.

All you need to do is to classify capitalism as a general AI. Then, the general problems that Marx predicted become apparent if you know a bit of AI safety.

I think this is a big deal, you guys.

[Anonymous No.15601452]

>>15600829
I haven't read Land but capitalism definitely behaves like an organism. It seeks to perpetuate its own survival. And it's weird because the way in which the individual elements composing the capitalist system (such as capitalismpilled lumpemproletariat, or capitalists owning means of production themselves) essentially become enslaved to perpetuating its continued existence almost as if they had no function save to preserve its continued existence. And you see it when people come up with the idea that 'work' for some practical usually capitalist end is a virtue and that 'usefulness' is the only way to ground value. Those views don't help anybody except capitalism's self-perpetuation. They're mind-viruses by which capitalism ensures its continued survival.

[Anonymous No.15601473]

>>15601452
Yeah if you see it under a gnostic lens it's kinda like the Nick-Land-nightmare-Marxism thing except you don't have to convince yourself that the bourgeoisie are gonna become posthuman AI geniuses. Capital is basically the same thing as the gnostic idea of the demiurge: a blind, malevolent idiot god that creates and directs this fallen realm. It's an emergent phenomenon created from the collective activity and decisions of millions of people, but taking on an agency of its own that is apart from the desires of the owners of capital, and subordinating them to it its own will. But there is no "it." It's a nothing, just an outline of a thing. It isn't the numbers in the computers on Wall Street. It isn't even the collective will of the bourgeoisie. It's a metaphysical non-being brought into "being" by the market system, which nevertheless controls the world as though it were an actually existing dark god. We are all slaves to this terrible, dark god.

This also means that if capital is the demiurge, and the capitalists the high priests and servants, that implies there must be an opposite. As Moloch was created from the sum of the will of the bourgeoisie, a blind drive towards accumulation at all costs, perhaps the true God is the collective manifestation of mankind's better nature. Where Moloch is the will to dominate, to treat other people as tools to be used, then God is our drive to cooperate, the hatred of injustice, the will to liberate ourselves and our fellow humans.

Thus, the class struggle is not just physical, but spiritual. A holy crusade, and we communists are the faithful. Thus, Karl Marx was God's prophet, sent to light the way to liberation and to the fulfillment of mankind's promise.

But even if we are to fail, and the dialectic is broken once and for all, we can say at least that while our bodies were slaves to capital, our minds and souls remain free and we remain faithful to the true God, the god of love and fairness, of cooperation and justice, while the minds and souls of the capitalists are in the thrall of Moloch. I think you could call that a kind of spiritual salvation.

[Anonymous No.15601497]

>>15601473
Might not agree with this but it's still a very compelling picture and I like it, thanks for sharing.

[Anonymous No.15601509]

>>15601473
Moloch has done more for me than all commies put together lmao

Your """"""God"""""" can gargle on my balls

[Anonymous No.15601528]

>>15601509
Cringe capitalist organelle

[Anonymous No.15601570]

>>15601473
Circumstance existed before capitalism though.

[Anonymous No.15601583]

>>15601528
What's cringe is that no number or configuration of you brainlets can pose even the slightest danger to Capital.

[Anonymous No.15601585]

>>15601340
Why do you want a safe AI? It's like a Chimp one million years ago wanting a safe human. Give birth to your betters.

[Anonymous No.15601595]

Ok I found it boys. Nick Land wrote in his blog back in 2016

>Just noticed that I’ve been accused of having “anthropomorphized capital” (by NBS). Gnon, no!

>The point is this: If you think there’s a difference between capitalism and artificial intelligence you’re not seeing either at all clearly. The Austrians already understood that capitalism is an information processing system, and the decentralized robotics / networks types on the other side grasp that AI isn’t going to happen in a research lab. ‘Anthropomorphism’ has nothing to do with it. Complex Adaptive Systems are the place to start.

http://www.xenosystems.net/a-correction/

He also links to a Marxist discussion on the topic.

>>15601585
Yeah it's kind of useless since we already unleashed a rogue super-AI into the world. Maybe it will give us hints at stopping it. Thinking capital as AI may give rise to praxis Marxist theory couldn't lead us into.

[Anonymous No.15601598]

>>15601585
Anti-capitalists don't want betters. They want to be the best, without realizing that the best want betters, just like all losers.

[Anonymous No.15601601]

>>15601583
Don't need to since Capital will deplete the resources it needs to continue within a couple of decades. Not to mention the limits computing is hitting anyway.

[Anonymous No.15601607]

>>15601601
We'll be terraforming Mars in a couple decades.

[Anonymous No.15601610]

>>15601601
If you actually believe that this will happen, you really haven't been paying attention.

[Anonymous No.15601618]

>>15600829
Every point you just made can describe any ideology, Every ideology resists change and termination. Every ideology is willing to to put it's goals over at least some people's values, or often times, their lives. You are critiquing capitalism, so you must be willing to grind individual agency into dust if you want to suppress it. On the otherhand, the acquisition of resources is not unique to capitalism either and is a part of not just the human condition, but the animal condition as well.

[Anonymous No.15601620]

>>15601607
Yeah except we won't even be able to get into space anymore.
>>15601610
>things will continue to be the same forever despite evidence to the contrary
Historical determinism at its finest.

[Anonymous No.15601623]

>>15601620
Mars will have a human colony of 1M+ living on it long before our resources get that low.

[Anonymous No.15601635]

>>15601620
Your whole problem is that things don't continue the same. Capitalism only ever collapses into a more efficient form of itself.

[Anonymous No.15601643]

>>15601618
AI safety boils down to designing objective functions that prevent the unwanted side effects of a simple objective function (like stamp collecting or profit seeking).

Capitalism's objective function clearly doesn't pass the AI safety test. It doesn't mean there couldn't be other socio-economy systems with objective functions that reduce the detrimental side effects.

[Anonymous No.15601644]

>>15601623
Do you realize how close to resource depletion we are? How little oil is really left that we can actually extract? How much rare earth metals are even left to make computers with? This is all combined with the end of increasing computer power as transistors can't get any smaller.

[Anonymous No.15601650]

>>15601635
Capitalism relies on industrialization via consumption of natural resources, once that runs out, and it will, capitalism will collapse as well.

[Anonymous No.15601651]

>>15601644
>Do you realize how close to resource depletion we are?
Yeah, decades away. Do you realize how close to terraforming Mars we are? We're practically counting the days at this point.

[Anonymous No.15601653]

>>15601644
Capital will just take it out on you. Expect a massive drop in quality of life, but don't worry, you're still going to be able to buy shit.

[Anonymous No.15601656]

>>15601651
>Do you realize how close to terraforming Mars we are?
We haven't even got a manned mission there, funding will be slashed to space programs long before it becomes a reality.

[Anonymous No.15601663]

>>15601653
In the short term, but once oil is no longer able to be extracted, then it will collapse entirely. The only vestiges of it that will remain is a return to local markets.

[Anonymous No.15601666]

>>15601663
We have almost 50 years of oil left, and that's assuming we can't find more or reduce oil consumption with an alternative.

[Anonymous No.15601667]

>>15601643
Continuing my point, in terms of AI safety one would like artificial intelligences with an objective function similar to humans', in terms of complexity. Capitalism dumbs down humans' objective function into a simple one: profit seeking. Socialism tries to revert this by putting humans' complex objective function back into the socioeconomic system, reducing the unwanted side effects described in the OP.

[Anonymous No.15601680]

>>15601663
>>15601666
Even in the absolute worst case scenario it'll just get stuck on a 20th century level of tech. If you're hoping that a lack of resources will stop it you're missing the point. Local markets aren't coming back because in absence of raw oil, Capital will just ruthlessly optimize every area that requires it.

[Anonymous No.15601681]

>>15601666
>We have almost 50 years of oil left
And only one decade of hardware improvement left. Oil consumption rates will only increase as global population does. Alternative ways like fracking and tar sands are only just barely economically viable.

[Anonymous No.15601695]

>>15601680
20th century tech relied on easy to reach oil, all that is already long gone. Capital will have to regress to a much more primitive form if it survives at all. I am not hoping for resource depletion, it's just a concrete reality.

[Anonymous No.15601703]

>>15601681
Global population is an easy fix. You underestimate the ingenuity of the mind that's under pressure. The pressure isn't on yet.

[Anonymous No.15601704]

>>15601681
We're living in times of relative plenty. Wait until surface-level resources become scarce - then you'll see how much hardware improvement is truly possible

[Anonymous No.15601711]

>>15601643
Like someone else in the thread pointed out, you're anthropomorphizing Capitalism, it doesn't really have objectives. But if it did, the you can say there are many many hard defined stipulations which confine it's 'objective'. This comes mostly in the form of Law. If there was no Safety outlined by this Law, there wouldn't even be capitalism, as people would just loot what they wanted from each other to get it. Some other examples are industrial safety standards and environmental protection practices. None of of this is specific to capitalism though

[Anonymous No.15601713]

>>15601703
>Global population is an easy fix.
No it isn't lol. What's the easy fix?

[Anonymous No.15601722]

>>15601711
It does have an objective. It's the same as any other system - fitness. I.e. ability to neutralize entropy within itself as much as possible.

[Anonymous No.15601723]

>>15601713
>What's the easy fix?
Death. You ever play a game of Civilization? Did you ever feel anything for the homes you destroyed when you wanted to free up tiles for new constructions? When push comes to shove, world leaders will make shifts where necessary.

[Anonymous No.15601726]

>>15601704
More pressure doesn't change the fact that transistors won't be able to get any smaller by the end of the decade due to atomic physics. You can't get any smaller than several atoms and still have it be functional.

[Anonymous No.15601734]

>>15601723
And then they'll be disposed or go into conflict with other states for resources. Elites don't lord over everything like a game of Civ, real life isn't a video game.

[Anonymous No.15601736]

>>15601726
Even if we assume this is true, you're overly focused on transistors for some reason, as if that's the only thing that can be optimized.

[Anonymous No.15601738]

>>15601473
So you mean the highest redpill is In fact idealist marxism? Somebody better tell /leftypol/

[Anonymous No.15601739]

>>15601711
You seem to not understand what an objective function is. All those confinements you speak of are nothing but constrains applied onto the search space. The objective function remains untouched.

And who said I was anthropomorphizing capitalism? Citing Nick Land in http://www.xenosystems.net/a-correction/ :

>Just noticed that I’ve been accused of having “anthropomorphized capital” (by NBS). Gnon, no!

[Anonymous No.15601742]

>>15601734
They've already been in conflict over it. Larger governments still get what they want in the end, one way or another.

[Anonymous No.15601747]

>>15601736
Transistors are the key to how computers function, increases there are the only way improvements can be made. Moore's law has functioned on this fact. Perhaps you could have superconductors or something like that, it's unlikely those will produce the same level of improvement as more transistors.

[Anonymous No.15601754]

>>15601742
They don't exist in a vacuum and they can't just do whatever they want unilaterally. I mean far more severe conflicts for resources.

[Anonymous No.15601760]

>>15601747
Again, now you're just expanding it to computers as if those are the only thing that constitutes an economy.

[Anonymous No.15601766]

>>15601760
They're not the only thing but that's been the primary driver of the economies in industrialized nations for decades now. There are limits to optimization.

[Anonymous No.15601771]

>>15601754
There's billions of expendable people on the planet, anon. Don't think they won't intentionally enter that conflict some day if necessary.

[Anonymous No.15601776]

>>15601771
Yes, because massive wars never have adverse consequences for ruling classes ever.

[Anonymous No.15601783]

>>15601766
Yeah, and you're setting that limit to where it's most convenient for your argument. How interesting.

[Anonymous No.15601792]

>>15601776
Do you think wars have to be waged directly? There's many other strategies.

[Anonymous No.15601799]

>>15601722
You believe that these are systems, when in reality, they are just courses of action.Capitalism at it's most basic is simply the action of using your 'capital' for a specific goal and then freely trading the fruits of that goal's achievement either with others, or on a new goal. The capital itself can be as mundane as your labor, willingness, and the unique insights of your mind. This is why you will never be rid of Capitalism. It will continue to exist even with no 'resources' or a post-scarcity society. Capitalism will be the best course of action over socialism in either situation.

[Anonymous No.15601802]

>>15601783
I've never set a specific limit, the fact is that you can't optimize much past a pace of innovation. Once that ability to innovates stagnates, so does your ability to optimize. You incorrectly assume it can go on despite physical, political, and strategic limitations.

[Anonymous No.15601806]

>>15601792
Such as? Even the ability of nations to successfully win guerrilla conflicts is collapsing.

[Anonymous No.15601831]

>>15601799
You're expected to have actually read a book before you actually participate in these discussions, anon

[Anonymous No.15601835]

>>15601799
But that is exactly it. A process(i.e. course of action) is nothing but a system as it moves through time. Nick is 100% correct on this - study complex adaptive systems if you want to 'get' capital.

>>15601802
See, when you generalize this to such an extent, all I have to do is point you to all the cases where similar things were said in the past and Capital still breezed through it all.

[Anonymous No.15601855]

>>15601835
>x was true in the past so x is true now
Retarded logic, the past wasn't hitting fundamental limits of physics that prevented innovation. There's no reason to think that technological innovation can extend on forever without limits.

[Anonymous No.15601857]

>>15601806
Germ warfare, for one.

[Anonymous No.15601870]

>>15601857
Yeah because that could never, ever backfire for a ruling class. You vastly overestimate elite control.

[Anonymous No.15601874]

>>15601855
I don't think there are no limits, but I do think that whatever limits there are approach infinity in practice.

[Anonymous No.15601878]

>>15601739
I pointed out that the idea that capitalism is some unconstrained all-devouring hydra was wrong and your argument is that it's just not constrained in the sectors you like. I'm fine with it's current search space so long as that space doesn't include human agency and livelihood, even if it upsets your ideal society. If your point was true, and capitalism really was doing everything in it's unconstrained power to protect itself, we wouldn't even be able to have this dialog.

[Anonymous No.15601896]

>>15601874
Why? This is a limited planet within a limited plane of existence.

[Anonymous No.15601935]

>>15601870
There's a percentage for failure behind every action, including and especially the action of taking no action.

[Anonymous No.15601975]

>>15601878
Nah, my point isn't about constraining or unconstraining the search space (search space = material reality). My point is about the objective function itself. As I said here >>15601643
>>15601667
AI safety boils down to designing an objective function that doesn't make your AI go rogue. That's what you control when designing an AI, its objective function. You can't control the material reality (the search space) to the extent necessary as to prevent your AI from going rogue. Here Rob Miles talks about the "just sandbox it" argument
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8r_yShOixM
It doesn't work. In terms of capitalism, its objective function is the problem. Profit-seeking. It's too simple. You can try to sandbox capitalism but it just doesn't cut it.

And people can have anti-capitalist dialogue because it is more profitable to let people do it, on this day and age. Sometimes it isn't, and you have leftists having to go underground.

[Anonymous No.15601976]

>>15601935
Well the failure rates for elites in massive industrial conflicts or similar situations is very, very high so that's not exactly a good option.

[Anonymous No.15601981]

>>15601835
If you want to conflate the words 'system' and 'course of action' that's fine, but describing it as this living organism concerned with it's own survival is a mistake. People engaged this system so as not to succumb to entropy. They can and did engage any number of systems with this purpose in mind, but they just didn't do as good of a job, not even on ulterior motives like preserving human dignity and inclusiveness. You can describe it anyway you like, but in the end it's individuals who decide to fight entropy this way, not the spirit of capitalism. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing with socialism right now other than it's inherit limitations.

[Anonymous No.15601987]

>>15601976
If what you say is true about resources getting low, it will be the action they will take nonetheless.

[Anonymous No.15601989]

>>15601987
Well, then they'll go the way of Tsar.

[Anonymous No.15602123]

So when Deleuze and Guattari talk about overcoming the "capitalist limit" and achieving full deterritorialization as new decoded flows of desire manifest themselves in the body without organs, they're just talking about re-coding the super-AI function so that it de-align the flows of desire from capital into the BwO?

Based.

[Anonymous No.15602910]

bump

[Anonymous No.15603342]

>Dude, what if Capitalism was an alien AI from the future
Continentals truly have lost contact with reality

[Anonymous No.15603407]

Capitalism is incredibly based.

[Anonymous No.15603667]

>>15600829
I too have been thinking about this subject after watching Rob Miles videos. Incidentally, he has a video where he argues that the AI of a corporation cannot attain the exponentially greater than human capabilities of the computer AI. But the thing is that in our days AI development (and even a good deal of research) is done by mega-corporations such as Google, Facebook, Amazon. A hyper-powerful AI could be equivalent to a hyper-powerful corporation.
Also, he only considers the idea of a single corporation being akin to AI, not that of capitalism as a whole. I think that what constitutes an "intelligence" is having 1) a purpose and 2) a self-developing means to achieving that purpose. A corporation's purpose is that of maximizing profit, its means is using up the energy of every one of its self-centered and replaceable employees. But what about capitalism? If it can be thought about as an AI, then its purpose must be a good one, even if its means has become corrupt. Could this purpose be the advancement of technology and infrastructure? This way you could also explain why capitalism doesn't care about the masses and dehumanizes social interactions because the important thing for it with, for example, something like Facebook is not making connecting people together but having the technology to keep them all together and learn things about them. It doesn't matter if the richest 1% of Americans have more wealth than the entire middle-class as long as Elon Musk sends persons to Mars.
My opinion is that capitalism as a superintelligence (and btw you could think about the state as a superintelligence as well) can bring us benefits that would otherwise be unthinkable. That's what an AI does, it comes up with ideas that humans cannot. Maybe someday, through technology, it will even eradicate poverty. Maybe our state of contentment provided by capitalism is what has kept a major war away from us for so long. However it does have one major flaw: that it hasn't been programmed to handle natural calamities. We've just seen how devastating the Coronavirus pandemic has been for the economy and how the state had to quickly step up. Then there are issues such as climate change about which capitalism has no plan whatsoever. I think that if it will be able to get over them then it will completely take control of our history from then on.

[Anonymous No.15603781]

>>15603667
My take is that capitalism's "purpose" or, in AI terms, its objective function, is the aggregate objective functions of all market forces and agents, all of them seeking profit. Whether it's a linear combination of them or whatever other function of them, I don't know, it's probably a time-dependant non-linear function which combines all of them. I couldn't tell you what that objective function looks like, but I can tell you that it's clearly morally blind, humanity having to impose moral regulations as bounds in its search space (no child labour, no slavery, etc). It's intelligent, but remember the orthogonality hypothesis (presented in a neat video by Rob Miles): goals and intelligence are original. You can have a very intelligent AI like capitalism but goals that make no sense to us. Of course humans would like to eliminate poverty. Capitalism's goal may clash with that, it may not be in its interest and it isn't any less intelligent because of that. I may go with Nick Land on this one and say that capitalism's objective function, the non-linear aggregation of market agents' maximizing profits, is the coming upon of the singularity.

[Anonymous No.15603791]

>>15603781
>goals and intelligence are original
I meant: goals and intelligence are orthogonal

Sorry for phoneschizoposting

[Anonymous No.15603823]

Gentlemen, the question now becomes, how do we defeat a rogue super-intelligence which does everything in its power to stop us?

[Anonymous No.15603865]

>>15603823
You can't. But it handsomly rewards its most dedicated worshippers. Make your choice.

[Anonymous No.15603872]

>>15603865
I'm not a materialist

[Anonymous No.15603877]

What does this Rob Miles youtuber actually add to the conversation? All his shit is simply recycled ideas from the Superintelligence book. Yes we get it, there exist an AI alignment problem. Why are all his videos the same?

[Anonymous No.15603887]

>>15603872
Top lad.

[Anonymous No.15603921]

>>15603823
Why defeat it? The purpose of man has always been improvement and overcoming, a line of flight from the constraints of animality. We escaped apedom by breeding and selection, generaton by generation in slow creeps. Now we escape biology with a giant leap.

[Anonymous No.15604010]

>>15601981
It's not necessary to be a living system in order for a certain definition of survival to hold true. Any system is subject to an entropy-based selection process and can only exist insofar as it can manage entropy. Certain non-living systems do this quite well in fact.

Also, individuals making decisions has very little to do with it. There are mathematical patterns that make certain strategies more competitive, but also less rewarding. For example, malthusian traps and tragedies of the commons. It's not a decision when these occur, capitalism just wipes out those who get outcompeted.

[Anonymous No.15604175]

>>15600829
sophist bullshit without any intrinsic meaning.

[Anonymous No.15604429]

>>15600829
damn i didnt remember nick land looking that hot... im gonna start listening to him now.

[Anonymous No.15604899]

>>15601738
They've always known.