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Anxiety and sadness are actually mild emotional responses to the dissolution of human culture. Nick Land in 1992: "It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think
by gom_jabbar 2y ago
Anxiety and sadness are actually mild emotional responses to the dissolution of human culture. Nick Land in 1992:
"It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into 'dehumanized landscapes ... emptied spaces' where human culture will be dissolved. Just as the capitalist urbanization of labour abstracted it in a parallel escalation with technical machines, so will intelligence be transplanted into the purring data zones of new software worlds in order to be abstracted from an increasingly obsolescent anthropoid particularity, and thus to venture beyond modernity. Human brains are to thinking what mediaeval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and parochial places to be.
[...]
Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem." [0]
Land is being ostracized for some of his provocations, but it seems pretty clear by now that we are in the Landian Accelerationism timeline. Engaging with his thought is crucial to understanding what is happening with AI, and what is still largely unseen, such as the autonomization of capital.
[0] https://retrochronic.com/#circuitries https://retrochronic.com/#circuitries
- achierius 2y agoIt's obvious that there are lines of flight (to take a Deleuzian tack, a la Land) away from the current political-economic assemblage. For example, a strategic nuclear exchange starting tomorrow (which can always happen -- technical errors, a rogue submarine, etc.) would almost certainly set back technological development enough that we'd have no shot at AI for the next few decades. I don't know whether you agree with him, but I think the fact that he ignores this fact is quite unserious, especially given the likely destabilizing effects sub-AGI AI will have on international politics.