INHUMAN POWER
A fully developed AI-capitalism would realize the deepest shadows haunting Marxian thought about inhuman power. Chapter 3 explored how we may be progressing towards this future through the emergence of value-producing AGI. This can be understood as a value-theoretic or non-fetishistic analysis of what the original, and very anti-Marxist, accelerationist Nick Land (2014) meant by the ‘the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence’. Although, as we have already stressed, there are many aspects of Land’s work with which we are completely unsympathetic, his perspective on AI has the merit of being far franker than that of utopian theorists of the technological singularity such as Kurzweil. For Land (2017), AI is the culmination of a cybernetic process, not in the narrow sense of a particular doctrine of computer development, but in the sense that capital is itself a process of self-reinforcing technological advancement, a ‘positive feedback circuit’, within which
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inhuman power