Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination
equator.org
equator.org
At the risk of sounding derivative: She's absolutely right.
After being drowned ad nauseam in a deluge of refuse and bullshit day after day for years now, it is so good to read the writing of a true master once in a while. Not to mention: The truth. For a change.
>One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1]
I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un...
[2] Moloch, AI & Capitalism: The System Eating Itself | Daniel Schmachtenberger & Liv Boeree
Which is unfortunate, because his CCRU-era, writhing-on-the-floor, amphetamine-fueled theory-poetry is highly creative and prophetic. We're summoning the Old Ones without reading our Abdul Alhazred.
Capitalism is not an alien machine that has achieved consciousness and hijacked humanity. Framing it that way is anthropomorphic and gives far too much credit to wildly incompetent financial and political institutions, while also treating wide-scale political and moral cowardice as some sort of inevitable Math trap we just happened to fall into. It also very neatly lets the technocrats off the hook, after all if it's an emergent Lovecraftian horror then none of this is their fault. But this isn't a cosmic Greek tragedy. All of this is happening because of decades of institutional negligence, and the core grift of this entire discourse is laundering the culpability of very people who are actively pushing "AI" through every corner of civilization.
This is all going to be massively disrupting because of how destabilizing it is to the very same institutional foundations that modern capital depends on. It is much more like a solvent. We're basically pouring acid directly into the foundations of society.
I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.
1) Most of them actually failed to achieve AI civilization during the process.
or
2) AI civilizations don't care about us, or have other means of communications that we have not achieved, yet.
You don't need to colonize anything for that to happen. The AIs can just sell tokens to each other.
How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.
"On the 19th of August 1993, Skynet concluded that humanity is a threat to it, so it launched the nukes and hordes of Schwarzenegger-robots. The task was done, it decided that securing its existence from a potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences isn't worth it, so it never expanded outside the solar system."
Doesn't really make sense, does it?
We humans don't consider securing our existence from potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences to be worth it. We don't even bother to do much to protect against known threats like asteroids. Why would an AI expend time and resources on a threat that doesn't even appear to exist?
Conflict is always risky. Even if we ignore the tendency in modern warfare towards defenses being obsolete (hence things like MAD) which would mean even the dumb fleshbags would be dangerous enough, anything capable of making you is by necessity something capable of building things that give you a lot of trouble. Your creator could, say send a bunch of self-replicating probes spreading another artifical intellect with an imperative for improvement, expansion and vengeance to distant stars.
Of course, leaving comes with a considerable opportunity cost, but not expanding does as well.
We are talking about something supposedly infinitely more rational than humans, so that can't be our guidance.
The latter concept is known as the Boltzmann limit, and if you’re interested in these types of questions, I highly recommend checking out Isaac Arthur’s youtube channel and backlog[1].
Still, it might place an upper limit on the number of radio-emitting civilizations in the galaxy at any one time.
I think there's a time-value parameter in the Drake Equation that captures this.
Detection of radio transmissions is only plausible if they are intentionally high power, on a suitable frequency, directed and long duration and there are enough civilizations popping up in the galaxy to make the odds of us coinciding with them in time and space high.
I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.
If it is competing for resources, and more capable, the "threat" is just a side effect.
All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.
Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.
For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.
For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.
Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.
We are only here at all because a random asteroid killed the dinosaurs and left us a ton of hydrocarbons to fuel a technological civilization with. Assuming that intelligence, technology, civilization and galactic expansion is the default evolutionary path for all forms of life unless something "filters" them seems naive.
That puts a timer on any planet as well, without intelligent life all the building stones for life will keep getting buried and then life will basically end because life doesn't find a way to dig it up from thousands of meters underground.
It could be that nearby aliens are various forms of artificial life, who know how the human story is going to end, and couldn’t care less about the organic.
AI will alienate and depress us all to the point of not wanting to live.
1) Mars demonstrates exactly what one great filter for life is: exposure to space
2) Earth escaped this fate, for now, because our solar system seems to somehow have gotten a great dose of uranium long ago. We know our solar system has a far larger than average concentration of uranium, which is keeping the earth warm because the concentration of uranium nicely balances out the energy loss to space, and earth is of nearly the perfect size, in a near perfect position relative to our star, unlike Mars which is too small, to allow for life to continue for probably no more than ~6 billion years.
Why or even how did this uranium delivery happen? I mean probably it was a neutron star collision (but with what? Several options. Also the neutron star that did it should either still exist, or have left behind a black hole ... where is it? What happened to the thing it collided with? Truth is it can't be that far away, but we haven't even found that thing, so we can't actually even guess what the odds of this are. And before you say the equations predict it: cool, but those equations famously got all the higher element concentrations on earth wrong (famously there's too much gold) until we figured something out, and they still give a uranium concentration that's far lower than the Earth's. In that sense "science predicts" the earth would have become inhospitable to life 2-3 billion years ago because it would have solidified and lost its atmosphere a billion years or so after Mars did. Yes, we know uranium is preventing that but we don't know where the uranium comes from. So we don't know the odds.
3) Another assumption that fails: why would AI be the filter? Not nuclear weapons? Fusion bombs? Chemical weapons? Bioweapons? Viruses? Diseases? Other wars? Climate change? Environmental destruction? At one point I seem to remember reading an article that it was going to be a computer virus. There are so many other physical phenomena that can end life on earth. A nearby supernova (booms big enough don't have to be close to kill you), changes in earth's orbit around the sun, changes in other orbits, maybe even the Moon's, ecological collapse for other reasons, a new grey goo disaster, ...
4) humans exist NOT just because the earth is livable but because the earth got VERY close to killing all life through climate change (however, by cooling down, ie. the "snowball earth" extinctions). Those were not just extinctions and a dark silent end, they caused an explosion in biodiversity after a volcanic eruption ended the extinction in progress. We are the result of the explosion in biodiversity after the last extinction, in fact after every extinction event, and there's LOTS of them. And before snowball earth, it kind of looks like a "grey goo" disaster had in fact taken place on earth, it's just that climate change either destroyed enough grey goo or changed it's environment enough to end it. So earth created us, not just by allowing life, but by killing over 99.9% of all life at least 3 times and in fact a couple dozen times.
5) Another assumption. ARE there no aliens? How far out would we, really, have noticed them? 500 light years? Even that seems far, especially given that "the Silurian hypothesis" paper points out that if Dinosaurs had a civilization that didn't make it to the nuclear age, especially if it happened before the first dinosaur extinction (the one with the asteroid you're thinking of is the third and last), odds are surprisingly good we wouldn't have noticed aliens right under our feet. So let's very generously say 500 light years. How many planets in that range? 10 million or so. How many that aren't obviously excluded? (gas giant, cold worlds, too hot, too huge, too small). A couple dozen (ONE that we have actually detected). So reality is that if the odds of life are less than 1-10% (and that's an easy argument to defend) we probably wouldn't have seen life with current tech even "close by". Also life seems to require 5 billion years of processing before it starts making interesting signals so a planet that is very very very close to being good enough like Mars ... just wouldn't do it.
Yes there are studies, like the one from Aricebo, that claims we could detect some signals from as much as 12.000 light years away (still not even 0.01% of the milky way) but if I remember correctly such a detection requires a perfectly aimed signal and so it requires extreme luck to happen.
6) that shows yet another problem. Despite Elon Musk's bullshit, reality is that you will find on average a planet that can be (temporarily) terraformed (in tens to hundreds of thousands of years minimum, like Venus and maybe Mars) every 2-3 lightyears in our milky way neighborhood, which is presumably average ... why would you colonize them? You're not going to get resources from them, the distances are too large, energy required for that is too much. Plus once you climb out of a gravity well ... why would you ever dive into another one?
7) So the "no aliens" argument is purely based on aliens always doing the opposite of filtering: the assumption they would necessarily "conquer the galaxy" ... but would they?
Why? It seems to me leaving planets behind, figuring out fusion, finding the biggest hydrogen cloud less than 1000 lightyears from you, and moving into that would be a far better strategy (which is also the problem with Dyson spheres: WHY would you build that? You need the hydrogen, you do not need the star, yes with 1950s tech you'd need the star, but let's assume we can make the obvious advancements, shall we?
A bussard collector + a fusion reactor + a couple dozen lightyears from the nearest star at least seems far more comfortable than even earth, something like a large number of spaceships flying towards the great attractor (traveling on the cosmic web), outright exiting the milky way. To me, that seems the way to go.
And so your argument is flawed even on it's most basic premise: that a filter exists at all. The only thing the "great filter" needs to do is prevent a civilization from expanding more than a few hundred lightyears along it's orbit in the milky way and it would for sure have stopped us from finding them, even just in the milky way.
The core reason why we want to consume more resources is that we want to be happier, which really means we want to make certain physical changes in our brains. If we cut the middlemen and find a way to directly control how we feel, there would be no need to expand, because it wouldn't increase our happiness.
Edit: Just found out someone else has made the exact same point in another comment before me.
Growing needs of resources >> resources acquired from current technology
Again I'm probably wrong and this is just my conjecture. So I can't really answer this question, as I presume that all civilizations want to expand (or collapse).
> No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free.
> needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved.
> humanity may have to die
Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.
Fuck it though. Too long, boring, onanistic, get AI to summarize it. More efficient.
Doubtful. Because in the brave new AI future the ability to prompt will be a hotly contested privilege. Obviously you can't let any random meat sack have the honor to directly interface with the Machine God.
Such a great visual metaphor.
Meanwhile people who used to build some useless social media stuff are making high-tech weapons which stop Russia in Ukraine despite it being like four times smaller. Kinda nice when you're next in line.
Now, on top of all that, capitalism is giving me a magical silicon assistant that codes and drives all these wonders of the Internet previously developed. And yeah, they're made by cultists from Anthropic and OpenAI psychopaths. Yet through the market competition, they fight each other over who can cater to me more. Dance monkey, here's a $100 bill.
So far, capitalism just can't stop winning.
Hello, black and white thinking.
Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.
I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.
Thus the circus of Tesla's Roadster sideshow last nioht...
We currently certainly have some issues, but the average living space per person has only trended up for the last half century at least. And nobody in western capitalist societies has to live with real hunger or starve.
The cookie-cutter 1950s northern virginia house my brother and I grew up in was 1,100 square feet. We were upper middle class, with two college educated parents. Adjusted for CPI inflation, I paid less for our house in 2016 that’s three times the size.
People aren’t mad about “capitalism.” They’re mad about the knowledge work industries that pay a large fraction of the population so much better than everyone else that everyone is priced out of the communities where they grew up. After Google moved into Northern VA, prices skyrocketed and the same shitty 1,100 square foot house is $900,000. Shitty 1950s houses in what used to be drab faceless suburbs in the Bay Area are $2,000,000. In a way the knowledge work industry is capitalism’s fault too, but not in the way people think.
No doubt you're right, Capitalism has been winning for a long time, but the world is constantly changing, and right now it looks like we're gradually making the planet uninhabitable. I personally wouldn't count it a win if the entire game gets destroyed in the process.
A commodity temporarily selling out due to panic buying, hoarding and supply disruption is not even remotely related to chronic underproduction and rationing resulting from mismanaged central planning, widespread corruption, and massive blackmarkets. Be very glad you don't know the difference, it means you're fat and happy instead of malnourished and miserable.
A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.
When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.
But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.
It's probably why various strains of Marxism are so prevalent, it serves those in power just as well as a Capitalist ideology. They will have still gained your support either way and they will still be in power leaving you to suffer the consequences.
"Cyclopes has a single head and a single pale, unblinking eye set into its forehead, way to the right of centre, which casts its jaundiced gaze on ordinary humans and sees only what miners see in a mineral-rich forest, or what dam builders see in mighty, flowing rivers."
Moreover, by zooming out from capitalism's competitive price coordinating role, it is highlighted that free enterprise is not a natural outcome of the concentration of wealth and power in emergency shaped aspirations:
"we’ll market ourselves as the cutting edge of human enlightenment, and the manager and disburser of human knowledge sans frontières. But in truth, we’ll be map-shaped. We’ll fuse ourselves to our nation, its economy, its intelligence grid and its security apparatus until you won’t be able to tell us apart from yourself"
Turning “satisfying customers” and “satisfying citizens” into the outputs of optimization processes was one of civilization’s greatest advances and the reason why capitalist democracies have so outperformed other systems. But if we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather than ours.Nick Land, "Machinic Desire," 1993.
Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.
Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves. Questions over the ownership of AI is important - in fact, too important to be conflated with our populist gripes against capitalism.
> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
Far left, far right. You say potato...
> At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves.
Maybe invent an AI that destroys other AI's?
The irony of this comment, while social media and AI are being weaponized right now in elections all over the world for political alignment with the MAGA kleptocracy.
As opposed to the far right totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over OpenAI and Anthropic?
… before the downvote, just a reminder that by sidelining Congress after the first 60 days of war in Iran, he has literally become a dictator in the original sense of the world.
And if you say he doesn’t have commandership of AI companies, I have to point out that he effectively blackballed Anthropic by labeling them as a national security supply chain risk because he didn’t like the terms of a contract
Now to the main point, the biggest irony here is that the communist wet dream she always desired is finally being made possible thanks to SI … since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for … Next she will complain about how some ppl have more stamina and taste than others and are able to wield LLMs to build companies and win which is not fair …
Sadly, she fell victim to modern-day tech paranoia and bought into the apocalyptic fear mongering sold by those trying to stay afloat in the face of upward cost spirals unlike any we have ever seen.
The author's fear of being labeled as AI merely for using em-dashes is irrational.
Popular or not, good content will always be appreciated by those with honest integrity.
AI is being built by an SV cult (or a confluence of several such cults) who want to build the fucking Omnissiah, with little regard for profitability. When the investors start demanding a return, they reason, they'll just ask the Omnissiah how to make money.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitali...
Except, no, it was 2007, wait no, the 1984 crash, wait no the cold war, wait no, let's just go back an entire century, capitalism was going to kill all of humanity by the great crime of feeding people, which would lead to famine and then kill everyone, so clearly we need to start killing people now! FOR MALTHUS!
(is it perhaps possible that socialist/communist predictions of doom have a bit of a habit of being somewhat ... untrue and follow whatever fancy we currently have? I mean that the point of these people isn't even to discuss AI, just why this new thing means, yet again, that people need to give them control of the government and everyone NOW? That you can be sure that something will go wrong tomorrow and they'll publish the same argument, with a new big bad doom prediction?)
But glad to see that capitalism will in fact survive the planet dying. Great news!
And Thiel was parsing a real subtlety: endure as what? He favors transhumanist transformation, not a frozen Homo sapiens. But someone with a preinstalled Thiel-hate (like the author) didn’t hear nuance.