commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient … As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself. (Land 2017)
Elsewhere, Land more fully names what is at stake in the emergence of AI when he declares that if such a process is emancipatory, what it emancipates is not a ‘human species, who reaches species-being to emancipate human individuals’, but only the ‘means of production’ themselves:
so in using this word of emancipation, sure, I will totally nod along to it if what is meant by that is capital autonomization ... I’m no longer interested in ... pretending this is the same thing as what the left really means when they’re talking about emancipation. I don’t think it is. I think what the left means by emancipation is freedom from capital autonomization. (Vast Abrupt 2018)
Irrespective of the fetishistic nature of Land’s analysis, we agree with his conclusions: from our point of view, however, capitalist autonomization is what must be defeated and destroyed.
The great problem with Land’s perspective is that the advent of human-free AI-capital is not only hailed as inevitable but greeted with ‘adulation’ (Goldhill 2017) as a necessary evolutionary supersession. It is this celebratory fatalism about the emergence of inhuman superintelligence that connects Land’s writings on AI to his notorious involvement with racist and misogynist ‘neoreactionary’ strands of the alt-right. Neoreaction (or ‘NRx’) is an agenda for a futuristic and technological restoration of traditional political hierarchies of race, gender and class, and a resurgence of feudalism where corporate CEOs are the new monarchs. This political current, in which Land’s ideas mix with those of figures such as computer-scientist Curtis Yarvin (aka ‘Mencius Moldbug’), circulates widely through Silicon Valley and is supported by corporate moguls such as Peter Thiel, forming part of the cultural ambience of AI development (Burrows 2018; Sandifer and Graham 2018).
conclusion: communist ai
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