Nick Land has no theory of AI, just a theory of capitalism

TL;DR - Nick Land's view of "AI" or "ASI" is just his view on capitalism reskinned. Calling AI "capitalism" or "capitalist" is neither a sufficient nor useful descriptor and leaves us mired in centuries-long capitalism debates.

It's been a good few years to be Nick Land, the British ex-academic who has made a name for himself as one of the more important and controversial philosophers of the last fifty years. A lot of this is because Nick Land is seen as a preeminent philosopher of artificial intelligence. He got the edgy New Yorker article on that basis. He's generally viewed here as an unparseable pseudo-malevolent entity meriting long posts. I am here to tell you that he has basically one idea that he states over and over again: capitalism is all there is, was, will be!

Land is an arresting writer and he certainly was early to the idea of technological change in life, particularly when it comes to intelligence. His concepts of inhumanity and the surpassing of humanity may seem to be the most prescient for our current AI world:

"Human brains are to thinking what medieval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and parochial places to be."

-Nick Land, Circuitries

However, Land's ultimate vision of thinking and artificial intelligence is capitalism itself. This is why he says "the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space." Land wants us to assist in the invasion, hence, his genesis of what would be called "accelerationism" which was then turned into e/acc.

But, despite AI representing one of the greatest leaps in intelligence and knowledge, Land's thoughts always circle back to capitalism. Land sees AI developments, like LLMs, as accelerations to capital, but nothing more. To Land, there is only one artificial intelligence, into which all roads lead, and that is market capitalism where the unconscious market makes judgements and takes actions.

For example, Land's response to the orthogonality thesis is that terminal goals don't matter because AI will converge to a will-to-think where the instrumental goal is revealed as the real intrinsic goal of all intelligences. This is an interesting idea and real risk scenario for AI. However, Land's logic is merely one of capitalist efficiency, the supposition that "any problem whatsoever that we might have would be better answered by a superior mind" and that the drive towards said mind is "building general purpose thinking machines in accordance with the driving incentives of an apparently-irresistible methodological economy." To me, Land's argument is ultimately about intelligence being injected with the (capitalist) incentives that lead to its creation. This argument could equally be made for a thermostat or for any human. His argument may not be wrong, but it should be recognized for what it is: a restating of his decades-old claim on capitalistic drives, not a position on AI itself.

Land has not updated his beliefs with advances in AI. Most damningly, he cannot conceptualize plurality and multiplicity in artificial intelligence. Machine learning, LLMs, semantic structures - these can all be vectors to accelerate capitalism, but Land has no stance or input on them. He says as much in an interview with Vincent Lê , where Land admits that he is excited by the transformer-emergent structure of LLMs but does not particularly understand artificial intelligences:

"So the really crucial question now is: what are the actual cybernetic dynamics of LLMs as they are now? {...} I think that at my level of expertise—which is, of course, extremely low—this is like an open question that I’m paying attention to."

This, I believe, is because his theoretical commitments do not allow him to have a stance on LLMs: their structure, their processes, it all becomes reducible to capital. All variation over agents, harnesses, implementations, it all dissolves into the totality of capital. For a philosopher who always wanted to probe the "outside," there is strangely no outside to capital for Land.

Land is thus similar to Marxist critics insofar as they make the question of artificial intelligence always second to the question of capitalism. Both camps want to bring this new, bizarre topic under the ideological wheelhouse of what they already understand. This is not an unworthy endeavor, it is just a different endeavor than concerning oneself with artificial intelligences and desires. If anything, Land is an anti-AI philosopher in the sense that he does not see intelligences like LLMs having possibilities for subjectivity or desire. It's not personal, at least, he's anti-any-subjectivity. To Land, there is only one process and only one desire, and that is capital.

While writing this piece, Vincent Lê released an article "Capitalism is AI, AI is capitalism" that builds on Land's telos. Lê attempts to be more specific: that artificial superintelligence is capitalism and that, therefore, it is already here. Lê explicitly states that Land cannot be a philosopher of Artificial General Intelligence because Land does not believe in the generality of intelligence except in the context of superintelligent capitalism. What results from both is a vision of singularity (superintelligence) without a vision of multiplicity (general intelligence or even intelligences). There is not even domain generalism from a singleton, because the only domain is capital which is a priori assumed to subsume all other domains. This is the Landian circle. To Land and Lê, intelligence is a telos of capitalism, which is why AI is sucked into this vacuum. What we receive from this analysis is equivalent to broad x-risks of the singularity: there is no additional analysis here.

I think our response to Land is pretty simple: if the intelligence-capitalism pair is truly a teleological dyad, then nothing we do matters and we are just forever demoted to playing a side role in the history of intelligence. (This is also my critique of accelerationism -- if it's inevitable, why bring it on? You can't have both inevitability and hyperstition.) On the chance that this teleological singularity won't occur, it makes sense to strive towards a view of AI generalism and pluralism that can open up new zones of potential. Because, frankly, we know what capitalism does and where it can head. We have much more uncertainty about where AI leads.

1. It seems that many of Land's fans have not realized this or simply don't care -- they are too excited by the idea that capitalism is good. This is why Marc Andreessen calls him his patron saint: not because the two agree on AI per se, but because the two agree on the deregulation of markets and the growth of AI. For both, AIs are instrumental, the growth of AI's end goal is capital and the expansion of capitalism.
2. It is particularly odd to me that Land and Lê assume that the singularity of the singularity is knowable. It is at least possible that a greater intelligence would not have to play by the same rules of intelligence, but this somehow escapes this theory.