Exploring the Future of Humanity: An Interview with Nick Land

all right everybody Welcome to Theory underground what you're about to listen to is an interview that we did with Nick

land last week very exciting that he was able to join us considering how important he is for thinking the

situation today Michael DS AKA Mikey of the Mikey seminar here at Tu taught intro to land

almost a year ago and then taught intro to xiic about a month ago and we have been pushing for the xiic versus land

debate now for over a year and uh we also just wanted to have this conversation right because at the end of

the day we are just interested in seeing where he's at in his own development um if if you're at all familiar with his uh

Twitter uh sort of personality that's a very separate thing from his actual uh

theoretical work as is xii's Theory versus xii's articles that he writes for say the guardian right there's this big

difference with both of them between the sort of popular stuff they do this maybe trolling stuff they do and this much

deeper and rigorous level and we are starting to think that in a sort of sense uh there's this thing they do to

weed out unserious uh people um at a certain level saying certain things um at the

level of the public discourse uh can weed out the unserious and then you can kind of just focus on doing your thing

and you're not surrounding yourself with cowards or uh kind of naive utopians or what have you so it's a whole that's a

whole thing that we think about and uh look this is a fantastic uh interview it might be the

best uh land interview you'll ever listen to I don't know I think I think it probably is that's my personal

opinion uh but you know you can decide for yourself uh if you're curious to know more about Theory underground stick

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bit about who we are what our Vibe is and how to get involved if you're interested in lecture courses or the

ongoing research seminars or the books that we are publishing then yeah stick around also Mikey's book on Nick L and

xiic and capital versus time energy that book is in the works right now pre-sales are officially available and you can

purchase those via the link in the description enjoy recording in progress

all right everybody Welcome to Theory underground today we're joined by Nick land how's it going

nick uh good great to have you it yeah great to have you here and so uh this is going to be one of those ones where I am

really just kind of managing time and making sure that people get chances to to say their things or whatever I mean

I'm I'm in the student position here I'm still trying to understand where you're coming at uh this from uh and you were

just saying before we started recording uh that large portions of your own work are kind of like kind of mysterious to

you as well in a sort of sense and so uh I I was saying well we have that much in common right but I think Mikey's going

to be the one who really helps us drill into some certain aspects of your work and hopefully we can have a great

conversation so you want to take it away Mikey yeah sure so having this opportunity to talk to

you I was thinking like well what's the best way to open up the the conversation and your thought has certainly evolved

since the 90s and I kind of like the idea of getting a read on where you're at with this famous question or idea you

posed so Nick at this point in your life looking looking around does anything human make it out of the near

future um yeah that's that that haunts me a bit that that sentence

[Music] um I mean I could sort of retreat easily into semantics about

it um yeah I don't I don't want to be evasive I

think if if you sort of pan out a little bit from it I think the sort of

philosophical um structure around that is is that

uh the the the anthropomorphic subject has a uh much larger

context and um a lot of what the kind of catastrophist uh singularitarianism in which the kind

of apparently bounded human subject exists threatens to delude in in a

certain sense the future would be disappointing to anyone coming to it from that sort of uh there's a set of

there's a set of frames coming to the Future on the one hand from transcendental philosophy on the other

hand from the sort of technos singularitarianism and what they share is is a notion that

the absolute inundation of the narrowly conceived human subject is what it takes for the future to deserve a capital E

you know um so I mean I would just say there's a kind of current Trend um

which I'm sure you guys have all heard of that CA itself effective accelerationism

iak and that is really I think in this respect defined by sort of uh erasing that sentence you know it's

it's acceleration without nothing human makes it out of the near

future and I can respect why that's been done and it's certainly good

PR but at the same time I think that there's this certain philosophical disappointment about it you know I think

that it's there's something a little bit self deluding of thinking that what we're talking about with the future the

radical future is some kind of Star Trek scenario of like higher primates in space you know it's like

it seems to me to just really not be a plausible a plausible model so I I would say I mean I'm rambling on a bit here I

would just sort of as a summary thing would say I've come I think a lot more to respect the

myth of humans in space you know I think the whole I I love all this kind of M colonization stuff I think it's great I

think the technology people are doing to put humans in space is is great but I also think that it's

impossible on certain philosophical grounds to Simply subscribe to this

anthropomorphic anthrop future it just doesn't make sense it just shows a certain lack of understanding about what

people mean by superintelligence about what robotics promises about sort of understanding the

constraints I mean the fact that you have to stick a human Cranium through a birth canal is such a

kind of major obstacle to to to its Horizon that I think you can't just like move past that fast and and

easily is is that is that to say that um if we were to say avoid the way that child birth has happened for humans

for uh as long as humans have been humans uh and and come up with some other way of bringing us us I'm speaking

Loosely into existence we we stop being human at that point in any sort of a reasonable sense

so like to say nothing so you could still kind of say nothing human makes it into the near future because we're

changing the language is tricky but the point is is like the subject of the sentence is changing and and language is

kind of preserving it but it's that's just a language game right yeah I mean the thing about language you know all

are we're sort of um networked through language so you know people are very interested in these

larger scale social intelligences and such like or even these cyborgian mixes where humans are communicating with with

robots and and such like like and the and the bandwidth of language is so absurdly small I mean it's just like you

know pathetic the quantity of information you can get through that channel and that in itself is enough to

produce um a certain kind of hard individuation at the level of the individual human animal it's just it

just can't it's just not networked enough with anything else to not be most in its own head where stuff's going at a

kind of relatively respectful level of synaptic activity and until it just then hits this barrier and just goes this

incredible crawl through linguistic communication and so I think this whole question about what you know the Horizon

of the human is really the Horizon of having that hard language barrier as it's uh as its single channel for

networking and so whether you're talking about sort of dense much larger intelligences or you're talking about

just internet communicating intelligences or you're talking about um Elon Musk type

implant connections that are that are replacing language as a soul champ all of those things are such radical

violations of the kind of BAS boundary that I think constitutes any realistic sense of what it is to be

human um yeah Nick would you say like the issue with eak for you is the same issue

that left acceleration has which is this idea that um it doesn't take the singularity serious like this

idea that we just continue to exist in some relative human form uh with the emergence of super intelligence that's

that's the real problem yes I think so I think it's like um this the importance of the like space

stuff is it really just makes things Focus extremely tightly on this question about

uh efficiency in terms of mass you know when you're you've got a whole kind of um e social and technological ecology

based on moving stuff out of the planetary gravity well then you have to be

extremely serious about what you're getting in terms of your um functionality per kilogram

and it's I mean humans aren't even it's not even if humans are predominantly brains into on that level you know what

I mean I mean to a human is an extremely bulky thing to be moving around in space I mean there's just enormous pressures

going to be on doing stuff with robots um and you

know understanding really what kind of function is you're trying to you're you're putting all these resources into

taking it out of the Earth's gravity well so you're going to be really specific about that you know and things

like you know human digestive systems and livers and and skeleton structures and all of those things in terms of the

mass they they represent for functions that yeah you can make that trade on Earth but I don't think you can make

that trade for long if you've got a whole orchestrated system of shuttling stuff around in the in the solar system

it's just like what are you doing you know it's just a kind of um weird sort of Boutique thing to be

moving these large bodies around in order to move a brain around um and you know it I'd be very surprised if if

brains were some kind of extreme cas of uh economizing Mass to intelligence ratios

I mean I it would be I guess disappointing for everyone if that turned out to be the case but

certainly you know to H humans are just not very transportable I mean they simply AR and

and so yeah I'm banging on about this so much but I I think that it's like well once you

say um if you grant that sort of argument then you say the population off planet

is quite soon has to be mostly robots nothing else makes sense once you've once you we we at a point now

with llms where I think lots of people are basically saying the touring test is we're in a Zone where the touring test

has been clearly passed so it's hard to know what human organisms are bringing to the table at this point you know like

obviously there's the moon you could it's no point there was no robot that you could stick on the moon in the 1960s

but I think at the time even if it's really soon in a few years where you're doing

Mars um the reasons that you'd put people there is for PR it's for symbolism it's it's not because it makes

any kind of deep sense in terms of the amount of functionality you want to put on the

planet and and how much uh Mass you have to deal with to do that okay so I want to kind of move on a

little bit um so to me why your work just continues to be so relevant is to me your central thesis has always been

cap and you've said this in another interview capitalism is artificial intell

Ence and that for you like this is the core landan thesis and for me this is what sets you apart from other theorists

of AI uh Bostrom and ctsw and these guys I mean yeah sometimes they'll talk about capitalism but they don't see this

fundamental link that you picked up on in the 90s and so I want to talk to you a little bit about this

um when when people talk about artificial intelligence uh often times they don't

Define what they mean by intelligence what would the the landan definition of intelligence

be um well I I guess that I think the most robust one is competence at playing

games with a very wide definition of games that encompasses basically all kind of activity most obviously

competitive activity that people engage in um but on the way to that I mean that my sense of like the

ultimate landscape you're moving into with it becomes interesting with super intelligences you know post touring test

experiment intelligences um but on the way there I think that the classic Alan touring

touring test notion of intelligence is extremely helpful um and it picks up on this thing

that uh we are going to be impressed with something as intelligent if it can emulate us as part of a much broader

capacity for emulation um so I mean it can emulate us on the way they emulating all kind of

other things but emulating us has a particular sort of social and political importance because it's in it's in a

kind of um difficult it's in a difficult

political Dynamic with us I mean we're basically like

uh begin with the kind of legal status of slave owners of this thing and so it's it's dealing with us is going to be

a serious issue for him um and so so I think yeah I think that though just to think of intelligence in terms of that

in terms of being able to uh negotiate with people understand what people are trying to do with it understanding what

kind of deals are on the table um those are the games that it's going to have to play soon

after the touring test threshold is cross which as I say I think is basically that's where we are right now

yeah I mean with everything because I haven't seen you say that much about chat GPT but when you see stuff like

that do you have these moments like I told you so like where it it's so amping up again at this moment with AI uh and I

think there was a there was a period where people were like oh the AI thing it was the 90s you know it was pop but

there's this real moment of upsurge right now a wave yeah and so but yeah like I just

please so but I I think we could dwell on that for a second and maybe unpack it because isn't that just as much like

almost missing the point of like what you mean by by intelligence and and I mean because like people are people are

like oh chat gbt and look at what mid Journey's doing to Art and they're thinking that's AI but then it's like

but no like Al I mean that's almost distracting from how the entire economy itself was always already Ai and has

been for a couple hundred years right yes by by I mean if you're going by the kind of capitalism equals

artificial intelligence then for sure like I I would sort of say on that level we've been dealing with emergence

artificial intelligence for like basically half a millennium probably is right yeah yeah so I mean when we go to

the heart of this thesis capitalism is artificial intelligence if we're thinking in terms

of like the the Marxist formula of capital MCM Prime how do you see that process as intrinsically generating more

and more knowledge more and more intelligence what's the epistemological connection

uh to MCM Prime um well I think it's basically the people who've been strongest on this has

been the Austrian School of economists and they' I mean if someone said to me look you're

just simply paraphrasing or rephrasing what Austrian economists have said about uh capitalism as information

processing system fair enough you know I I I don't think there's anything maybe I just sort of sharpened

up a little bit and obviously they didn't have artificial intelligence as a reference point so when they're saying

oh capitalism's information processing system it's it doesn't have that those resonances that we have you know post

being the computer age in the Cyber Punk age all of those things um but yeah that would definitely be I think there's a

deep tradition of it um I think it's the development of the notion of spontaneous order in Liberal

economics is given this particular information theoretic SP in the Austrian School um and that's already a is a huge

current that I think compels that compels that thesis really okay could you I mean but could

we also see it as on some level being baked into Marx's critique of capital where you know Marx is always talking

about how you know on the market competition necessitates capitalist

revolutionizing uh their means of production which of course that's going to take the production of new knowledge

and new intelligence to be able to create those Technologies and so that's also part of the motor of where this

intelligence gener ation comes from for sure for sure and the person also that I would definitely want to throw in there

is Samuel Butler I mean his uh book of the machines in Era one is an incredibly

prophetic piece on Earth um and it's it's there's a kind of

independent uh emergence of this this MC m-h um circuit on the on the mark

side and obviously the question about the question that leads to um intelligence explosion on the AI side

particularly uh Goods article about the last human invention I I haven't read it for a long time but the but it's

basically the the essential point is to do with the fact that

uh the extreme sort of drama as a temporal phenomenon of superintelligence is the fact that once you've got a

machine that can itself build its own intelligence you have an extremely powerful positive feedback mechanism mhm

and I think it's obviously you know this this attention to positive feedback going right back you know to

the ccu's the cciu I think was born in that thought in the thought that positive

feedback has been neglected and derided um on behalf of negative feedback and so you know the basic sort

of right up to the 1940 and Vena and all of this kind of stuff um the the basic assumption was that positive feedback is

pathological it's you know the role of a cybernetic machine is homeostatic it's to preserve itself negative feedback is

the essential thing and if it's betraying signs of positive feedback it's going

wrong and so obviously the the I think the essential move that the cciu made was just flipping that over and said

like you know even if you think it's going wrong it's the basic thing that's happening it's the basic thing that's

happening and it's and you know it's it's what Marx is talking about exactly in the formula that you have just said

and it's what all the intelligence explosion people are saying specifically about what is to be expected from the

kind of uh growth curve of artificial intelligence if you know those those two

things have exactly the same Dynamics and we can sort of obviously see that the

um the the the marks D when you actually really get into it and it's a it's a loop between technology and

commerce so it's already it's not that you're bringing these two different things together I mean the tech the

technological explosion curve is already something that is being recognized and discussed on the economic side before

you even make it specifically a question about artificial intelligence and and

and computers right because I mean if we take that that circuit of capital marks

talks about and we we subtract the content the form of it is just one zero one prime so it's just a loop of

augmentation and so yeah it's like he it's he created a formula for uh cyber positive

feedback yeah so when def when people and that is the basic capitalist Dynamic so yeah

100% I I can hear the little the little uh comments now I I've seen it already I think when we talk about this but people

will say oh well capitalism is not intelligent actually it's very wasteful it's very stupid and it's like

I I feel like what you just said is the point that they're missing it's like well they think it's not intelligent

because their definition of intelligence is basically colored by thinking that negative feedback equals good you know

the Pleasure Principle and what they're missing is this this what the ccru was doing

with positive feedback right I I mean I think the thing about inefficiency is what's your Mark you

because this is having to build everything from the ground up it's not like there's no plan there's no model it

can follow you know any competence it has has to be trial and arrowed into existence in this kind of crazy growth

process so I mean obviously you can make comparisons that make capitalism look extremely

wasteful but I think it's like you know but compared to compared to what um so certainly I would go out on a limb

extremely hard against people with confidence in planning as a way of actually improving efficiency I think

its record is terrible there might be very short windows where it can build on something that's been spontaneously put

together by the system and just incrementally just tweak it in a good way but that's only you know the process

is dynamic so it's like it might do something that just gives a slight Edge for a little short period and then W you

know the thing has gone through a whole set of experiments in the in the uncontrolled part of the economy and

it's just left that stuff in the dust um and I think it's really crucial on the side of

AI how much that has been Vindicated in the sense that all the all the woman in the history of artificial intelligence

has come from the surrender of top down planification type models of what you're trying to do to

these kind of emergent blackbox evolutionary types of thinking you know deep learning the whole point of that is

you don't know what the hell the thing is doing but you set up an environment where it can through trial and error

um develop itself you know on the model of the nervous system um and yeah again I have absolute confidence that that all

the kind of I think we're out of the gate now in the sense that I think the amount of time where people could think

that they were going to be able to plan their way into the future AI is just surely pass because it's like they don't

have that edge to even lead to that illusion now I mean it's really getting to the point where its competence to um

project its own future is as powerful as anything that we can bring to there um but but even were it

the case that we were still in the old the old world in which human programers with a key the way it develops It's

Always by surrendering control that you that it moves forward um so yeah so Nick I wanted to go back just for a second to

the the thesis capitalism is artificial intelligence um interesting thing so you know uh I

was thinking about it in terms of uh contan statements contan truth do you think

like because what you're saying there is capitalism necessarily gives rise to artificial intelligence if we if we take

the statement capitalism is artificial intelligence and we know that that means

necessarily gives rise to it would you say this is like an AR priori analytic statement uh you know a aposteriori

synthetic or is it hypersal like what do you what status would you give this statement or this thesis

um well yes I mean I'm trying to think I've thought a lot about

it yeah I've thought a l I think on some level like the point is it's I think it reads like all

Bachelor are unmarried men like the point is to say it posits a you know a necessary relation there like it it's

definitional but but it's also not it's not simply it doesn't simply work the way that all Bachelors are

married men work there's there's a kind of empirical claim being made like the world is going to head in this direction

uh but I don't know I almost see it almost as it's hypersal positing an AR priori analytic where like time will

tell but you're tapped into a certain uh tendency you're seeing unfold that you view as a necessary tendency of capital

I I mean I think I'm sort of anticipating that there's going to be a phase of

discussion in this talk that will loop back to this because I think it's it's

maybe how we have to be sort of probably discussing these questions about retronic Dynamics and such things to

just to really lock in where that equation was coming from so I mean you if I try to say well let's just pretend

that we still believe in kind of standard Progressive temporality under those circumstances

what would you say was the kind of basis of that claim that there's an identity between capitalism and

artificial intelligence um yeah I mean I think it's I think it's

complicated I mean it's obviously based on saying that when you just actually see what people

are saying on either side uh you just see that they're discussing the same thing from two

different aspects but that's kind of in a way just to kind of I think avoid the question like you say well so what

convinces you it's the same thing or you know what is it that leads you to the conviction that it's the same

thing um and yeah I mean I I think I have a kind of a imaginative problem of not

seeing it so sort of stubbornly obvious that you know it would would actually be a problem and this is this is a this is

a failure on my part I think to to anticipate what the alternative thesis would really I feel like more of it is

being tapped in basically look you have you don't have empirical re you don't have like oh

everywhere in the universe capitalism's ever shown up it is we have the the data that shows it always produces AI so we

don't have that type of Empirical research but it's kind of like we know that uh diabetes is a cyber positive

Loop right uh more and more blood sugar the insulin doesn't get Rel the negative feedback doesn't kick in and all these

problems emerge from it and we have the empirical data to show how that works but we know that once this process

starts we we have ideas we have knowledge of where it goes uh what I think ccru and you guys were tapped into

is you see this trajectory um and you see the logic of how it gets to artificial intelligence

and so even though the empirical truth of it isn't established yet you see the the the Tendencies at work in capital

accumulation but I think you know you could usefully add to that what Dave was saying

about on the same topic of the fact that okay on a fairly narrow definition of AI yes the

relation is like exactly as you're saying it's it's prophetic but on a wider definition of AI it's already an

AI system when you have this distributed unplanned machine solving these distribution problems in a way that none

of the participants themselves individually are able to understand then you're already dealing with a form of

artificial intelligence you it's not it's not an lln but but it is a an

intelligent mechanism that is demonstrably working and when you want to say you know

already with Adam Smith uh you want to study that thing then what you're doing is basically

you're studying capitalism you're saying you know how how does this

thing emerg that solves all these problems that the individual people and do not even they can't even articulate

the problem let alone solve the problem um you know they're all the whole the famous Adam Smith thing you know it's

not through the altruism of the Bush or the baker that I go for my meat and bread I mean he's basically saying look

he's not going to tell you how this is working you know like you you can go and talk to anyone there's not anyone

anywhere in the system that is going to be able to explain how it is solving these

problems um it's you know it emerges out of the whole dynamic character of the system as a to as a whole and and

therefore I think is very reasonably described as already being a form of artificial intelligence before it

becomes a sort of thing that we now would recognize as that and what we would now recognize is an AR

intelligence a an actual computer system that that can solve problems that we can't even

understand like how to how to engage in uh complicated language games with people that they've never been taught

how to do or they taught themselves how to do it um there's a very I think very definite just

continuous lineage that goes goes to that you know and and the all the components of the narrowly conceived

artificial intelligence systems have been have emerged with I would say

some compelling inevitability out of the earlier issues you know like why do we

have computers I mean there's a whole history of computing precisely because like people will often

say I think again very convincingly that things like the jackard loom are these crucial stages in the history of

computing technology why did the system produ a jack Hing well you you know you only

have to start to understand how the system works to see why there was a need for a jackal you know and the

mechanizing human labor is the task that capitalism ass signs to technology from just originally

you know you've got a you've got people doing something they're quite expensive uh you could probably use them

for something more useful if only all the easily programmable part of their productive activity was assigned to a

mechanism um it's just incredibly Elementary to the way capitalism works and capitalist history Works

um and obviously is already you know on on the way to the touring test you know the

substituting for human behavior is is built into technology so deeply by

the kind of capitalist uh Matrix in which it operates that of course we get to this thing about can

machines convincingly emulate humans as a ho in there will pass the touring test it's just like you're just saying you

know at this stage all they can do is weaving they can there's only certain groups of people that they can throw out

of work at this stage in history but you know it's a it's a continuous process and it's got a very continuous

teleonomic pressure to it that that has to lead eventually to full spectrum

uh full spectrum touring test uh passage computation

so I mean could we could we just say that that the techn capital Singularity would be the selfrealization of the

Invisible Hand of the market you see a trajectory from like that that basic level if you're doing it

if you're running your hour of time in that direction sure yeah okay I I feel like this is going to we're gonna we

were naturally moving in the direction of talking about your theory of time and you know this it keeps kind of wanting

to go in that direction but I don't want to get away from uh this door you kind of open by bringing in inefficiency and

asking what's our Benchmark for what counts as inefficiency and I think this is probably going to be the biggest uh

sort of difference uh between uh us and you and so it's worth like kind of looking at for at least a

minute and I know Mike's probably got stuff to say about this but I'll just kind of say it this way it starts out

with you know there's I I forget who said it but there's that saying you know my you know I'm not I'm not so impressed

by the fact that there's an Albert Einstein I'm concerned about the fact that there's a lot of Albert Einstein

that never got to kind of develop because of uh the fact that they were probably down in the mines or working in

sugarcane fields and that's for us obviously as humans with our anthrop with our anthro concerns right like

that's going to be uh for me the standard of of what counts as inefficiency at a certain level which is

human potential I care about it you know and so maybe and I think probably to you and or at least to your younger self and

definitely for a lot of uh the people who are enjoyers of your work um it's just cute right this conern of mine this

priority it's a cute little thing that I care about uh human potential but where I come from uh you know people are dying

from opioid addiction people are they don't they don't see anything else to do with their garbage time except for drink

alcohol and and like the it's it's the the the H the homes and communities but also the individual level it's all

falling into dysfunction and that is a a result of the structural

stultification of our life worlds because of the collapse of time energy which is large energy infused repeatable

blocks of reliable time in your week or month between people right all of that collapsed into

individuals uh doing everything they can to prepare themselves to go back to work or to get a job and so all of this

effort all of this potentially Creative Energy is being put towards our reduction to a kind of Labor power and

effort uh to to do certain kinds of Labor that are about Surplus value valorization right and so that's I mean

there's potential here so like the this sort of Renaissance human maybe that kind of humanism we should just just

accept we're so far past that but then there is the potential for some other kind of Renaissance we're

interested in what that kind of Renaissance would look like but it's definitely one where people would have

the time energy for uh discovering and cultivating their talents and relationships just because we care about

not having miserable shitty lives in our limited span of time on this Earth yeah well here let me kind of take

you back through that okay that discussion because I think it's there's lots of interesting elements to

it and maybe the first place to kind of stop again on this is is potential so so your your initial

example of this is like Einstein's down the minds and it's very inefficient

to on any level you know you can there's a whole Spectrum from looking at this in a very kind of humanistic caring way

that you you're saying could be derided by the more cold blooded of being cute but but you can get very coldblooded

about it as well I mean you can be very coldblooded and see it as a huge waste to have someone with Einstein level

capabilities uh working G of mine as a as a coal miner and and and obviously you know to go

back a little bit to like the jackard loom and these kind of things I mean there's an implicit thing in all of that

all of those stages that is saying it's a waste to have anything about a machine doing this task I mean

this is something that a machine could do it's like why why do we have a person doing it and

as I say I'm not trying to pretend that this is particularly like based on any great humanistic sense of empathy or

anything like that I think it's just cold cold efficiency and so if we're talking about potential I think the

question is is this potential of a kind that makes sense to the capitalist mechanism or is it some kind of

potential that the capitalist mechanism just does not recognize and I I guess my St is like

you know we might think we can find some kind of recognition of potential that outd does what capitalism is able to do

in terms of recognition of potential I'm skeptical you know and I think capitalism is extraordinarily good at

appreciating potential you know and putting people to their most profitable use and even in things that would seem

extremely like far removed from grad grind type capitalism in the entertainment music you know artistic

talent musical Talent things that are you know are very far removed from what might be seen as kind of just industrial

potential it's capitalism does a serious job at trying to sift

out this Talent this potential and and the only way it SS out is by commercializing

um so yeah I mean I should probably let you come back to that but I'm I guess what I'm saying is like wastage of

potential is I think only something capitalism can be accused of if the notion of potential is for some

reason intrinsically inaccessible to the economic uh to the the commercial mechanism commercial I'm trying to avoid

saying the economic logic because I kind of really have a personal aversion to using logic in this way but that's kind

of what I'm saying I mean if if if you can't if you can't uh come to some commercial estimation of potential then

yes indeed you know you're then open to say that there is a kind of inherent wastage and inefficiency in capitalism

that it can't address because it can only it can only use commercialism as a s a sensory system it's just

intrinsically impervious to anything that doesn't make commercial sense or register commercially but you know how

restrictive is that actually yeah you know is it is it really that there's a lot of things that we value that simply

cannot be that no commercial sense can be made of them at all I I'm I'm a skeptic as I say so I I definitely want

to kick it over to to Mikey here because I know he's got a lot on this but I do I at least want to say uh from a sort of

knee-jerk response without having put a lot of thought into it yet um

the the need to commercialize something in order to show that it is indeed you know that there's actual potential there

is what that's what's driving what we call education today and the and the institutions that do what we call

education today right uh I don't know is that right that's right all the kind of

libertarian right people I know are in absolute despair about it AB I mean it's precisely because it's

doesn't seem to be doing that at all it seems to be just doing leftwing political indoctrination for sure but

I'm talking I'm not talking about the the social sciences or Humanities I'm talking about the physics research and

the maths and the engineering which is being driven by weapons manufacturer research and advertising like the

funding that you have to find where where does the funding come from does it come from like you know the the like the

government has said oh yes we want to fund science for objective truth we care about that no they don't care about that

right it's it's about the well I mean if they don't a lot of that stuff still seems to be done I mean you know physics

has its problems you know that are very interesting and obviously we could go into that but it doesn't seem to me the

problems are coming from the fact that there's a social unwillingness to fund pure physics

let alone math I mean you know is it is it the case there's any sort of constrictive pressure on Math's

education at a high level I mean I just I would need some convincing that that is really something that's

happening um it just seems to me that that math is so open to commercial perceptiveness like you

know the capitalism really as soon as it understood anything it was understood the value of math you know it

be it basically began in in Renaissance Italy with a recognition of the just incredible

revolutionary importance of of of the the new numerals of algebra of you know spoon calculus I mean so yeah I so again

I have some skepticism about this I I will I will have to do some heavy lifting then probably not just to

convince you but to actually just write out a piece maybe that could even lay out the case that I no I mean my

assessment of the situation is that the the math the potential math genius and Engineering prowess is going

towards seeing how much skinnier we can make the next Big Mac while selling it for more as opposed to yeah anything

else really you know yeah but you see to me that's a very interesting criticism because I

think the thing about capitalism is like okay just hypothetically Grant it an existence as

an alien entity that's impacting this planet putting itself together in a hostile environment we are that hostile

environment right you know humans like lots of people have made this point that basic human societies have been

organized to prevent this thing getting in you know and it required very specific historical circumstances to

break through those security mechanisms so it has to work with us it's not gonna capitalism can't arrive on the

scene in any of Italy and say look what I want is basically all human activity to be directed in the long-term goal of

producing in synthetic super intelligences you know we we're not interested in that we say I know we want

hamburgers you know we want commercial sex we want we all this [ __ ] I mean sometimes we want good stuff um but you

know or it's not capitalism telling us you want hamburgers we're telling capitalism we want hamburgers and and so

the only way it gets to do its stuff which is basically swapping out human and producing in increasingly

sophisticated uh mechanical intelligence the only way it gets to do that is by pandering to

us you know we're saying we want better weapons we want hamburgers we want all this stuff you know and and it's simply

that's the environment in which it has to operate to do its thing but its thing is not that you know it doesn't it does

I can really show you that like in its essential mechanism capalm does not give a [ __ ] about hamburgers mean it's like

it's a concession to us also to devel but the it's the it's the us or we in that paragraph that I want to

problematize because which part of us is it able to appeal to it's able to appeal to that part of us who when we're in a

hurry and we say it's good enough we go for the thing that is really fatty and tasty but it's not the part about us

that cares about the long term and it's not the part of you or or or me who that's able to like read cont or

practice the violin and so you can commercialize the sale of the violin or the sale of the lessons for the violin

but you cannot commercialize the actual doing it part the the doing it part's the part that can't be commercialized

and therefore we're not able to cultivate those higher human capacities right well I don't know I mean in so far

as those High human capacitors exist which of course they do it seems to me they're being catered to I mean you know

there are concert Halls there's there's orchestras there's there's music sales um you can be a professional musician

you can be a professional musician because things are arranged that the market mechanism finds that there's a

sufficient demand for the production of music that it can make commercial sense to pay musicians to allow them to spend

their lives training to become better musicians to group them together into orchestras to you know I mean those are

things that happen um so it's not as if it's not as if there's some process of Erasure taking place where none of that

stuff happens you know there's an art Market there's a musical Market there's a market for literature um

none of these things are disappear the are they are they I mean are they I mean are they there are they

are they there or are they there that's kind of the question it's like the the person who wants to do music because

they want to live in a state of Skol if they want to have have their Leisure Time and they want to have their like

Leisure Time free of uh like pressures and stresses and just literally just live and breathe music versus a person

who's training to be a professional musician like they're like a Korean going into like K-pop you know what I

mean like where they're just being worked to death just so that they can succeed in that environment it's a

different quality of life and of the the product itself is a different quality of music and then it's like that might work

for somebody who doesn't really they're they're not it gets them we get both haven't we got both now I mean of course

you know there's a larger commercial market for various types of pop music and people can be

more or less cynical about that but there's still there's still every type of music isn't there

still there's still people who are completely vocational musicians go to a high music school become a virtuoso

violinist join an orchestra and you know that's a completely viable thing for a small number of people and the number of

people that can be uh kind of the capacity for those people is obviously is ultimately based on what is the

market you know you take everyone on Earth you what are their what are their desires um and inclinations you know

they have there's quite a lot of high stuff and that stuff will be catered to um so I mean obviously the other side of

this question is like what is there really any imaginable institution that could do a better job

with this you know like you have some sense of what is really valuable and important and what people should be

encouraged to do and help to do and all of this thing and is there any imaginable institution that you could

trust to maintain a set of values about this that you would respect um and you know therefore

support those support those things because the things we've tried to do that with is democratic

governments I mean you know we've got let let the government decide I mean does the government make trustworthy

decisions about what the what part of human aspiration is worth encouragement uh certainly I don't believe that is

true um and so if it's not the government I mean maybe you're saying there is some kind of government that

would do it but if it's not the government it's not the market what is it like where is this

institution going to come from for right now I'll just say that the for me the the the way that science

and and uh and Technology being sort of Unleashed majorly like in in the in the Renaissance you know uh really has its I

mean I think it's it's kind of spelled out really well by Renee dayart in his uh the discourse on method right and

he's saying hey guys if we unchain this thing we could like make a lot of Labor saving devices

he says an Infinity of Labor saving devices um um and then he says we'll have so much more time and then he says

our workers could do this and that and the other and so of course there's this we here and the the class question rears

its neck and and so it's like okay but like are those labor saving devices for people or those labor saving devices for

the small number of people who've had the time to get to know their desires and inclination so that they can

appreciate things that aren't the cheeseburgers and pop and so the the I mean I want I want I want to

cash in on the promise obviously and that's a humanist desire and I and I get that but the the the point is is like

well it does say these devices do save labor in a certain sense but when they're being done for capital in the

way that they are um that that certain sense is one where a lot of this potential is lost so then and and and

it's like I don't care about this abstractly I care about this because it's just like I care about the people I

care about I care about myself I care about like being able to do the things that we want to be able to do um so

that's just that's where I'm coming from I kind of want to just leave it there yeah and and I I because I can I just

one thing back to this though which is whether you follow J's stuff you know that J that communism is free time and

nothing else position I mean you might be interested in it it's like I have obviously problems with it I mean he's

he's a full B communist but he's a very interesting one what's his name and J who his his his Twitter handle is Dan

uncore J okay um and um yeah super interesting guy but you got with it yeah I mean as I say I won't there's no need

for me to get into a whole complicated thing about my agreements and disagreements with him but but sure he

seems to address your concerns more intensely than anyone I can think of well just as in case I'm

being put in a bucket of deplorables I don't want to be associated with I look forward to meeting J and finding out

what he thinks but I do want to clarify I'm not a communist I don't care about a classless society I I'm not trying to

I'm not trying to do that at all just saying here's the whole thing is that he you know he Embraces

accelerationism but he says you know the fundamental Dynamic of it he he Embraces a kind of 1990s anti-humanist

accelerationism but he says you know the basic logic of the system is to just replace people yeah and that's what

should be embraced so he's a kind of marxist who who basically says look the whole thing is that this capitalist

mechanis is basically about pushing people out of industrial activity and that the whole

attention of what he sees as as his politics is is to embrace that and say you know that basically capitalism

should just become our [ __ ] it should totally replace us as industrial units and then I mean he for me Marx gets a

bit cringe with the whole fishing in the afternoon and stuff I mean I don't know but he he he doesn't he doesn't get that

cringe um I think sort of in the same place yeah Dam J who doesn't he he he's much less subject of these slightly kind

of weird I would see Victorian kind of you know romantic images but obviously in terms of substance is it is it's all

about the production of free time and that he thinks all other uh I guess he would say leftist I mean I

don't it's people use these this language tactically and in different ways but let me just pretend that he

would say leftist all leftist political activity should just be about fre time maximization okay and that in doing that

it's in some kind of deep Accord with the fundamental historical

capitalist Dynamic so yeah that that's why that's why I said I thought it resonated with the points you making and

not not to accuse you of of some kind of well and and I don't I don't part of it's not just like oh communism has a

bad record or whatever it's not that I just literally do not believe that the state is necessarily the solution right

and that you casting doubt on that I think is a good point and it's actually a good point that the Austrian

economists do bring in is like yeah centralization and State control and this top down governance of e of economy

that's not necessarily going to get the results that people are looking for maybe it can I'm open to that I'm

agnostic but I but I am very skeptical right and I think like there's nothing worse than a government that is ruling

over people who aren't skeptical of it right I mean nowadays you're supposed to be shamed for that but I I've got no

shame I I agree with you so but with that Mikey what do you have on all this I mean there's a lot to say I mean look

I guess for you Nick like I kind of want to give you more context like I guess where

we're coming from is obviously we take Mark seriously we take you seriously we take Bo dard seriously we take Mark

fiser seriously it's like we're living among all of you like like these different thought spaces and you know

obviously the the the leftists who love what we're doing and support us you know some of them they're like oh

but we see something essential in your work where you're like no you can't just brush land and ccru and accelerationism

under the rug I think what you did with thinking through artificial intelligence using DG especially what they were doing

in anti atopus I I there there's so much that I agree with there that I'm always having to think in terms of your work

when it comes to how I think about capitalism I I think you're one of the great theorists of capitalism and so if

I want to understand capitalism you're going to be there at the heart of whatever I'm I'm thinking through so

where where I'm at is I'm always caught up in a web of tensions right so on the one hand I see the thing that d& got saw

in capitalism that it decodes it deterritorialize old codes or imperial Co codes that they were talking about I

I celebrate capitalism in the sense of how it can uproot how it can deterritorialize and so I'm with you on

that but but then there's the lived reality like I'm not a professional academic I'm a wage worker I work in a

warehouse and this is where like the more the mark fiser stuff and the bodard stuff resonates with me because the a of

shitty wage labor it it's like the great nihilism the the real concrete nihilism where you get up and you go to a job you

hate and you you're you know it's just meaningless and what why we're so big about time energy is we see it as the

transcendental condition of the good life or the pursuit of the good life and wage labor trapped you in this situation

where you're at a job 8 to 10 hours a day you hate being there once you leave you don't really have the the the time

or the energy to devote to things that you love and so yeah like if there's if we're leftists if people want to talk

like that it's in the sense that we do want to see the emancipation of time energy now I I know I say that to you

and I mean one of your F famous comments when you were talking to Justin Murphy is you know you're not interested in

emancipating human beings or human groups and I I respect you for just saying that because most [ __ ]

would just oh I'm not saying that no I I get that but this is the tension I'm caught in where I do see that capitalism

does things that I like but the wage labor thing is the part of it I don't like so much and I I to bring this back

around the reason I said all this is I'm almost do you famously said this is in Fang Numa from machinic desire you said

for every problem there is a virtual Market solution so the question is instead of thinking outside of

capitalism for time energy uh is is capitalism what could actually provide time energy through automation through

um the the withering away of wage labor I mean is it possible to have capitalism without wage labor

[Music] um yeah it's an interesting question it's an interesting question I

mean basically do you believe what's the best way to get an is is the only way that capitalism can

produce Surplus value through human labor power I mean this has always been the standard Marxist view of where value

is produced but I've also seen you talk about Capital when you were talking to James Ellis on hermedics right you said

you know capitalism really is doing anything cyber positively like capital is uh this ability to just do something

with greater and greater returns greater efficiency and so I don't know if that means that

Capital you know capital accumulation necessarily has to always involve human labor power uh in order for Capital to

continue I just I I wonder if it's possible to actually think um Capital without human labor

power yeah I think yeah look this is a really good an interesting question I mean maybe the first place that I have

to sort of intervene it's just to say you know I've learned a lot from marks and I

have enormous respect for a lot of what he's done and you know I would say for me he has to be

read within a larger Austrian framework um I think what shum's

criticisms are really sort of irresistible I think that um the transformation problem is absolutely

lethal to a kind of naive notion of um marks and I think there is a sense in which the truest reading of the whole

massive uh exercise of D capital is as a reductio ad absurdum of the labor theory of value which is obviously something

marks inherited not uh you know so there's all those caveats and and as part of that

caveat I do not believe that um saying that the capitalist mechanism

Surplus value is entirely based upon uh it's it's based sorry to say that profitability of capitalist activities

totally based on Surplus labor power is an accounting trick you know it's like you can definitely do that accounting

but that's not to but you're not really doing a kind of causal explanation of why that's happening you could you

because of the fact that cabalism is bringing a lot to the table that disappears into that accounting trick I

mean it's doing the organizing it's doing all kinds of stuff and then you know it it it inserts human labor power

in and the human labor power is totally used as the as the unit of account for what is actually happening in that thing

and you guys must know from your own work that that's that's true I mean it's a very convenient accounting device to

say look there's fixed Capital that comes in and B and and that just simply you know is a it's a cost of business

and then we are doing everything and so you make sense of the whole economics of the company by like looking at how much

we're being paid how much the company is doing discount for fixed capital and that's the business structure I mean of

course that's like a nice way to talk about but I mean do you seriously think that's what's happening there you know

and it's like the the all the value is being input by the fact that you are you know the labor force in that thing is is

is doing the work I mean that seems to me like um weird like you know obviously AUST go

to the other side and still all the all the real Surplus value comes from sort of entrepreneurial input there's you

know there's a business idea they put the organization in they they hire uh the labor at competitive rates and then

if the idea if the entrepreneurial idea is great it will make money and you know the entrepreneur is the hero of profit I

mean that's also very one-sided uh I don't think it's more one-sided I think it's like clearly as

credible a story about where profit actually comes from in a business um and certainly if if work is kind of

routinized um and involves little initiative um just micro levels of initiative but on a level as Marx always

likes to do kind of just averages out um then it's hard to see how that competes with the sort of entrepreneurial

contribution in terms of making a business sort of distinctively profitable and functional

in a competitive economy so okay that's my this is my sort of right Wingery to your to your

left Wingery on that on that point um but the but the deeper issue is this yeah so can Capital can

you have capitalism without wage labor um and it's it's it's a seriously

interesting complicated question and it's very it's it's ineliminable from a

question that takes us back to touring test takes us back to artificial test intelligence takes us back to our social

relations with machines because the special status of wage

labor comes from the fact that humans have political rights you know they have property rights over their own labor and

so the fact that they treated as a special cademy by marks as we've just seen um by themselves and out also is

because they are um they they are the people disposing of their own labor power as their own private property so

you know you've got a special you've got a contract with your business where what you own your own capacity to put in

whatever hours a week for of work for them is something that you can freely dispose of and therefore you get

compensated for um in your your relationship with your employer

obviously you know if nothing else ever occupied that role then it's hard to see how you could

you could have a capitalist system like if it was to be the case that humans are the only beings that are ever

able to have this self- ownership rights of self- ownership that gives them the special status to enter into these

contracts with Capital via an employer then they would

then I mean you're faced with this peculiar thing about fixed Capital you know like

if fixed Capital all the Machinery that you could buy say say you've got artificial