The confluence between AGI research and Neoreaction is addressed by David Golumbia, whose critique of ‘computationalism’ (2009) and the attempt of much AI research to detach cognition from embodiment is influenced by and shares many of the same concerns as put forward by feminist and postcolonial theory. Golumbia (2019) argues that the flaws of AI systems in regard to race (and, we would add, gender and class) extend well beyond correctable instances of algorithmic bias. Rather, they lie in the very concept of an abstracted and technologically created ‘general intelligence’ that mirrors the mindset of a predominantly white (and male) AI research community. In this, he sees affinities between AGI research and the notoriously race-laden search for a measurable and objective ‘general IQ’. The quest for AGI is, Golumbia says, the search for a ‘Great White Robot God’.<sup>3</sup> His analysis of the white supremacist bias of AI is, however, complicated by the emergence of China as an AI superpower. Nonetheless, Golumbia’s argument about the reactionary tendency of attempts to create a ‘singularity’ that potentially elevates the logic of the dominant social system – racist, sexist and, above all, capitalist – to a level of transcendental authority – is important; he is surely correct to identify a futurological fascist impulse in the affirmative adoption of Land’s vision of human-free capitalism by right-wing accelerationist AI developers and computer programmers. In the face of this material instantiation of neoreactionary ideas, it is important to recognize the possibilities Land names, not as a power to embrace, but as a force to oppose. Lands’ view of AI-capitalism is a history of Skynet written from the point of view of the Terminator; ours is from the perspective of Sarah Connor.
Capital is already an ‘automatic subject’, but with AGI it would also become autonomous from the labour of humans and, therefore, humanity. Capitalism could continue, but with inhuman general intelligences representing both sides of the struggle between capital and labour, one side accumulating wealth, while the other continues to work for a wage (whatever form it may take) in machinic misery. All the violent contradictions of capital could continue, but enacted by hyper-intelligent machines. Faced with an AGI that can think faster, do things faster, and which is not bound to a particular morphology with consequent biological needs, such as feeding, breathing and defecation, what would and could human workers do? And what would humans do when inhuman general intelligences started to objectify themselves in the world in a way that slowly or quickly makes the planet less and less habitable for human beings?
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