Unknown Lands - Lecture 5

with the German cops on the radio and has to be called in front of a stutter. Okay, so welcome to Judgment Day, so to speak. Yeah, so here's a photo from the 90s of land. We've been curiously at a computer. I saw an interesting discussion on Twitter where people were trying to work out who the other person in the photo is and the sort of leading hypothesis that it was probably a land speed dealer at the time but that's neither here nor there. Okay, so let's jump in. Okay, so if the mature land's first major thesis, as we saw last week,

is the reassessment of capitalism as the agent of the outside rather than the outside's impediment, This is ultimately because of Land's second major thesis, that capitalism's constant revolutionisation of the productive forces is leading to the creation of a technological singularity which will fully map the body without organs. Now, we've seen last week how Land's about face concerning capitalism transpires in a sort of geopolitical conjuncture wherein many countries were implementing neoliberal policies to increase their profits in a competitive global marketplace. Even in the 90s, however, the decline in profits continued, albeit with one exception, the dot-com boom, in which capitalists sought to increase their profits

by investing in the internet, artificial intelligence, and other electronics and digital technologies, eventually leading to the giants of the tech industry today like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and so on. So I don't think it's surprising that Lan developed his idea that capitalism and technological innovation are, as he puts it, basically the same thing being seen from different aspects. So what we're going to do in this final lecture is work through Land's writings throughout the 90s to trace his theory that technology, from cyberspace and virtual reality to sex robots, human enhancement, and ultimately the technological singularity, provide ever greater modellings of the body without organs beyond the bounds of our possible experience.

Okay, so part one. To grasp land's understanding of techniques, I think it's first necessary to provide a brief, or you might say accelerated history of 20th century research into how to make machines intelligent. Intelligent in the sense that machines are able to autonomously respond to and interact in a complex environment in order to achieve their goals. So in his 1948 book Cybernetics, among other works, mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener pioneered the field of cybernetics by showing how the human animal is structured by the same physical and mechanical feedback processes as machines, to the extent that both animals and machines are essentially systems for transferring information.

So here feedback refers to the process by which a system's behaviour is influenced by the impact of the environment in which it's situated. As we're going to see a bit later on, Land rebukes Weiner for focusing on what Weiner distinguishes as negative feedback processes, whereby a certain input from the environment leads the system to adjust its performance in such a way as to stabilise itself and achieve homeostasis, or what we might call self-preservation. So, for example, living organisms survive through negative feedback loops by which they respond to external stimuli so as to preserve themselves, such as by searching for food when they are hungry or fleeing from visible predators. Since Weiner was interested in likening living organisms to machines,

he focused on negative feedback processes whose outcome was stability, order and self-preservation. So Weiner says, The organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death. It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis which is the touchstone of our personal identity. Now, at the same time, Weiner did posit another kind of what he called positive feedback process, whereby an input from the environment leads to an escalation in the system's instability. So, for example, a drug addict, or really any addict, becomes ensnared in a positive feedback loop when taking their drug of choice leads them to desire more of that drug, which, when taken, leads them to desire even more of that drug, and so on in a runaway process of exponential addiction

which imperils the addict's life. So in other words, whereas negative feedback inputs the outside to simply output the inside, positive feedback inputs the outside in such ways to radically disrupt the system's internal functioning. While Wiener focused on living organisms and machines mutual negative feedback processes, in a 1965 paper called Speculations Concerning the First Ultra-Intelligent Machine mathematician Irving John Good proposed a machine that works according to a positive feedback loop. So Good speculated that any artificial intelligence or general artificial intelligence would be smarter than machines because it would have larger memory capacity,

processing power and feel no hunger, thirst or exhaustion to slow it down. Consequently, this machine would be able to rewrite its own code and improve itself better than any humans could and moreover, the improved machine could then rewrite and improve itself again with the even more improved machine improving itself once more and so on in a runaway process of escalating intellect or what good termed an intelligence explosion So inspired by these prospects for an ultra-intelligent machine at many conferences, most notably the 1956 Dartmouth Conference on artificial intelligence, which really founded the field of artificial intelligence, scientists began programming computers to perform simple tasks other than mathematical calculation, such as playing chess, solving puzzles, classifying visual images, and answering simple questions.

In the late 70s to early 80s, competition between nations also led military research units, like the United States DARPA, to turn from programming machines for solving puzzles and simple puzzles and games, to trying to get the machines to deal with real world problems like speech recognition and computer vision. Now, despite the initial optimism that a machine of human level intelligence might be just around the corner, AI researchers soon encountered difficulties in realising this dream, or as we'll see, this nightmare. so given the uncertainty and complexity of real world situations and computers limited memory capacity and processing power at the time, programmers struggled to find mechanisms for machines to adapt

to real environments by responding to stimuli and predicting the outcomes of possible actions based on sort of built in models and past experience in light of the slow progress that was being made objections soon emerged that it might not even be possible for machines to develop human level intelligence at all so just to give the two probably most famous examples in a 1980 paper called Minds, Brains and Programs now cancelled philosopher John Sell proposed what he called the Chinese room problem in which a computer inputs Chinese characters and follows the instrumentation of a program to output other Chinese characters in such ways to convince a native Chinese speaker that the computer is human according to Sell, passing this sort of Turing test

does not actually imply that the machine really understands Chinese, but rather that it can simply follow a program for simulating intelligent behavior without actually knowing what it is doing in what cell distinguished as weak AI as opposed to strong AI. Similarly, in his 1972 book, What Computers Can't Do, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that AI research's early optimism was based on the success of computers solving basic games in simple theorems. Setbacks then arose when computers were tasked with solving more complex games, such as chess, in which the machine has to be capable of thinking about hundreds of different possibilities for each move in order to find the optimal choice. So drawing on Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty,

and other, what I called last week, brown shirt phenomenologists, Dreyfus argued that humans do not need to consciously go through the myriad possibilities since we unconsciously understand the likely background of possibilities and outcomes based on our learning and past experience of the given context. Despite these setbacks Dreyfus suggested that AI researchers remain naively optimistic because they imagine that all knowledge is able to be formalized in a way which ignores this unconscious background knowledge which for Dreyfus cannot be represented in symbolic code, which could then be imputed into a computer. So the failure of AI researchers to achieve their predictions on the rather optimistic timescales they had predicted, combined with objections like those of Dreyfus and Cell,

which really striked at the heart of the field, ultimately led to what was called the AI winter in the mid-80s as grants and funding sources rapidly declined. by the decades end however notably exactly at the time where land commences his philosophical trajectory a new AI spring was sparked when the Japanese launched a fifth generation computer systems project which have then obliged other countries like the US to re-enter the competition and fund their own AI projects moreover Dreyfus's criticisms and the improvement in computer storage and processing power, led AI researchers to move away from symbolic methods, or what was retrospectively called good old-fashioned artificial intelligence, or GOFI. So they

moved away from this symbolic approach towards learning and context-based knowledge in the face of uncertainty. So precisely incorporating Dreyfus' criticisms. So the ideal intelligent machine now became a Bayesian agent that would choose the optimal course by applying probabilistic models and drawing on past experience to navigate the environmental data at hand. In 1997, one of Turing's predictions finally came true when the computer deep blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov, causing Kasparov to remark. He said, I lost my fighting spirit. I am a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I'm afraid. And I think this quote's even better, though it's less quoted. the chairman of the chess committee for the association of computing

Monty Newborn described Kasparov's defeat at the computer's hands he said it had the impact of a Greek tragedy and I think here we can understand tragedy in the precise kind of sense of tragedy where our knowledge is exposed as finite before nature's greater purposive tell us. So yeah today the AI spring has shown no signs of slowing down as all of the major tech companies like Google and Microsoft are working on the development of various AI systems, such as driving cars, speech recognition and translations, and also including, although less so, artificial general intelligence as well. OK. Some computer scientists and futurists, I think most notably Ray Kurzweil, are particularly optimistic, some would say deludedly so,

about the prospects of imminently creating Good's vision of an ultra-intelligent machine, or what Kurzweil calls following VernaVinge the technological singularity. Kurzweil is also optimistic about the consequences of the singularity and he even goes so far as to argue that it will herald the ability to eradicate all disease, extend our lives and even become immortal by digitally uploading our minds onto computer networks which would be unhampered by our finite biological bodies. So based on what Kurzweil called the law of accelerating returns, according to which better technology creates the conditions for faster improvements of that technology in a kind of positive feedback loop of exponential technological advancement. Kurzweil argues that given the human brain has 100 billion neurons and 1 trillion connections,

which are together capable of 20 million billion calculations per second, by 2020 the law of accelerating returns will produce a computer of equal processing power to an individual human brain. By 2030, we will have a computer that is even more powerful than all human intelligence. And by 2045, these computers will begin working on themselves at the advent of the singularity. By the century's end, all of life's problems for Kurzweil will be resolved as we become immortally emulated minds free from the prison cell of the flesh. So Kurzweil says in the third point, the singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. we will gain power over fates our mortality will be in our hands we will fully understand human thinking

and will vastly extend and expand its reach so whereas what we're going to see we're going to see that land along with many other AI researchers hold that AI's default outcome will actually be human extinction Kurzweil argues that the singularity marks the technological realisation of what is really the Kantian phenomenologist's dream of human triumphalism as our intelligence comes to permeate the entire cosmos. To put it slightly more provocatively for some, what Kurzweil wants is nothing less than for the stellar void to give way to the megalomaniacal pretensions of the space of reasons in its efforts to exhaust everything within its narcissistic mirror image. Although Kurzweil maintains that humans will become immortal,

he bases this on a definition of humanity's essence as the constant transcendence of itself rather than on any fixed set of attributes. In Kurzweil's view, the idea is that since we are always changing ourselves, whether it's through education, drugs or prosthetics or culture, it's therefore arbitrary to delimit a certain point of biotechnical enhancement at which we will become another species. He says, if we regard a human modified with technology as no longer human, where would we draw the defining line? Is a human with a bionic heart still human? Should we establish a boundary at 650 million nanobots? Under that, you're still human, and over that, you're post-human? Others have argued that we are indeed reaching a post-human era,

despite Kurzweil's optimism. And I think this other camp can be broken into two, actually two opposed camps, what we can call transhumanists on the one hand and bioconservatives on the other. so on the one hand the transhumanists agree with Kurzweil regarding the desirability of technologically improving human beings unlike Kurzweil however transhumanists argue that with enough biotechnical modifications we would become a radically post-human species so for example the transhumanist philosopher of AI Nick Bostrom writes post-humans may have experiences and concerns that we cannot fathom, thoughts that cannot fit into the three pound lumps of neural tissue that we use for thinking. Whereas for transhumanists becoming post-human is something to be desired,

bioconservatives like Nicolas Segar argue that since post-humans will be so cognitively and physically different from us, we will not be able to biologically reproduce with them, and will in fact have a sort of psychological repulsion at doing so. I think he underestimates the capacity for that to become a fetish. But anyway, he says radically enhanced beings are not only significantly better than us in various ways, they are different from us. So different in fact that they do not deserve to be called human. Now, while Kershaw argues that we would still be human since the transformation will be gradual, Agar objects that if a person loses hair or ages little by little, that can hardly mean that they still have hair or are alive

when they finally go bald or die. Although Agar recognises that post-humans will be physically and cognitively superior to us, his argument against creating them is based on protecting current human self-interested, what he calls species relativism. So it's an explicitly anthropocentric view. So, yeah, the bottom line is that while bioconservatives like Agar and transhumanists like Bostrom have different valuations of the benefits or not of biotechnology and AI, it's important to graph that they develop these opposed views for the same reason, namely future technology will radically alter our very basic biochemistry such that we become utterly other than what we presently are.

Okay, despite Kurzweil and the transhumanist's optimism, other threats to humanity emerge when we not only consider altering ourselves but creating an independent artificial super intelligence perhaps to do so. In a 1990 article entitled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, computer scientists Bill Joy famously cautioned that if machines are able to recursively self-improve without the need for any human intervention we cannot imagine what they will be capable of doing. He says, if the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the result because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It's interesting that Bill Joy points out at one point in this essay

he cites directly Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, approvingly, suggesting that actually Ted Kaczynski, far from being a psychopath, is perhaps a prophet of our future. or the lack thereof of a future. In any case, it's crucial not to anthropomorphise what an artificial superintelligence will be like since its radically superior cognitive structure may develop utterly alien goals of which we would be at its mercy just as animals of inferior intelligence are at our own mercy. While we may know what jobs exceptionally bright humans with IQs of, say, 130 are likely to do based on statistics, we have no precedent for what an AI with an exponential runaway IQ

well beyond this would do. And this is precisely why the technological singularity is a singularity, a term derived from physics to denote events like the Big Bang and the centre of the black hole, where our mathematics breaks down and with it any chance of comprehending what transpires therein. So given that there's no precedent for what a super-intelligent being would do, for many AI researchers, the consequences of the singularity are precisely inconceivable to our inferior concepts of reason, except as a limit concept, a kind of mysterious X, or, you know, as precisely the Kantian noumenon. In more recent times, AI researchers like Bostrom and Stephen Alejandro have argued that we can work out what they call certain basic AI drives

that any AI would possess. And this line of reasoning is based on two really important theses. So the first orthogonality thesis stipulates that intelligence and final goals are independent of each other, such that any level of intelligence, no matter how great, can be confined with any final goal, no matter how trivial. So in other words, one might think that something with a stupid goal, just imagine something stupid, we might think, okay, that thing cannot be intelligent. But the claim of the orthogonality thesis is, no matter how stupid the goal is for us, it actually could still be cognitively super-intelligent. And the reason for this is because of the second, what's called instrumental convergence thesis, that holds a super-intelligence with any goal whatsoever, stupid or not,

will perform similar intermediary goals as a means to optimise its capacity to realise the primary goal. So, you know, from the orthogonality thesis, we can already see that one of the intermediary goals would be for the AI to recursively maximise its intelligence by rewriting its own code, since increased intelligence naturally optimises our performance in pursuit of its primary goal. So Bostrom proposes four other basic AI drives. He says that any AI would also seek its self-preservation, since obviously it would not be able to achieve its goal if it were destroyed. moreover the AI would seek to prevent anyone from rewriting its goal as this would prohibit it from realizing that very goal so that would be even just even if it was still alive and someone just

reprogrammed the goal that would be like a kind of death for the AI since its only function is to serve its goal fourthly it would create greater technology since this would optimize its capacity again to fulfill its primary function and finally it would aim to maximize its acquisition of the resources required to realise its goal, because every goal depends on certain resources, whether that's actual kind of physical things or, you know, just energy and time. So simply put, any AI would harbour the basic drives to augment its intelligence, preserve itself, maintain its identity, be creative, and acquire resources in order to optimise the fulfilment of its function. while these basic drives may be predictable

Bostrom and Omohandro stress that the consequences they generate are much harder to conceive they even go so far as to say that in light of the AI's basic drives any human programming of its goal to serve our interests will actually probably result in the exact opposite of human extinction or what Bostrom calls a perverse instantiation of human intentions Bostrom gives the example of a situation in which an AI is tasked with maximising the production of paperclips. To this end, the AI might seek to acquire resources to maximise its goal by transforming all of the resources we rely on, and perhaps even our own bodies, to this end, insofar as our bodies have atoms that it can use to produce paperclips.

even if we were to specify that the AI is to produce exactly one million paperclips in order to avoid that the AI might still use up all the atoms of the earth to build a massive computronium in order to ensure and calculate that it is counted and produced exactly one million paperclips so and Bostrom rephrases this he says the first super intelligence may shape the future of earth originating life could easily have non-anthropomorphic final goals and would likely have instrumental reasons to pursue open-ended resource acquisition. If we now reflect that human beings consist of useful resources, such as conveniently located atoms, and that we depend for our survival and flourishing on many more local resources, we can see that the outcome could easily be one

in which humanity quickly becomes extinct. So it would seem that no matter how we program the AI to serve our purposes, the default outcome is that it results in our complete annihilation. What AI's basic drives show then is that even if we program an AI with a human goal to meet our ends, the drives can be did to behave in ways that work utterly against our interests. In light of all these catastrophic existential risks, Bostrom, among others, have proposed that researchers work on devising ways to create what they call friendly AI. However, again, in light of these perverse instantiations that result even from a friendly goal, Bostrom does pessimistically conclude, as he puts it, that we humans are like small children playing with a bomb.

A bomb which we have no idea how to prevent from imminently exploding in our faces. Now certainly there are doubts about all of these above predictions, and particularly the optimistic timescales of which they are predicted to happen. There's been studies about that. Nonetheless, one poll suggested that 90% of AR researchers believe that the singularity will be reached by 2075, with some, like Kurzweil, I think a little too confidently asserting that it could happen as soon as 2045. And there are also debates as to whether the singularity would be a slow, moderate or fast take-off, whether the recursive self-improvement would happen gradually, over a moderate time span or in a matter of seconds or days, which is important because each of those scenarios

gives us a different amount of time to prepare. So if it's going to be gradual, then we're going to have some time to prepare after the generation of artificial superintelligence but if it happens in a matter of seconds then as soon as the singularity happens, it's over. So yeah, given the potentially catastrophic consequences even a slight probability that the singularity will come to pass I think demands that much practical and philosophical thought be devoted to extrapolating its morbid implications. Okay, now while the AI literature harbors a variety of different positions as we've seen, the rest of this lecture is going to explore land's I think rather, it's probably not surprising, unique and idiosyncratic view. Whereas some like Kurzweil hold that future technology should be

pursued because it will benefit humanity and others like Agar think that it should be regulated as it it could bring about our extinction, land instead thinks that we should pursue it, but precisely because it will lead to our destruction. And this is because land is less interested in the preservation of our parochial species than he is in its radical critique before a greater machinic intelligence. Given that researchers believe biotechnical enhancement, AI and other future technologies speak precisely to a superintelligence beyond our ideas of reason, we can already begin I think to surmise why Land turns to cybernetics to find again this kind of perverse instantiation of his transcendental materialism now a good entry point

into Land's use of cybernetics is his 1998 essay Cyber Gothic which was one of the readings this week so the title refers to of course the musical subculture that's centered around rave parties where electronic music is blasted and ecstasy dropped. And so in that sense, the title speaks to the reconfiguration of culture such that it becomes oriented around the future, teeming as it will be with cybernetic technologies, sonic frequencies, altered states of consciousness and synthetic trances. So Land begins the essay by arguing that his concept of the cyber gothic rests on three claims. firstly the driving motor of capitalism as we saw last week is not to increase certain

individuals wealth but to surpass humans altogether through the production of ever more sophisticated and inhuman machines he says anthropomorphic surplus value is not analytically extricable from transhuman machineries now since markets and the desire for commodities they rest upon ultimately aim at the production of AI, it follows with the second point that science fiction stories about just such a future or dystopia, paradoxically provide the most realistic depiction of capital's libidinal dynamics. So Land says, markets, desire and science fiction are all parts of the infrastructure. Yeah, so science fiction is now the realism, the highest

genre of realism for Land. And yeah, the final thesis states that if capitalism and future technologies are linked, it is because they're both tending towards human extinction. So again, he says, virtual capital extinction is imminent to production. Yeah, so simply put, cyber gothic denotes the way that capitalism's technological innovation speaks to, you know, levittal matter's true potential, which threatens to obliterate us over the course of its entropic production cycles. it's therefore the cyber gothic that permits us to critique quasi-religious pretensions like Kurzweil's by appeal to future technologies like cyber viruses

nanotechnology, biotechnical modifications and of course artificial intelligence so Land writes cyber gothic slams hyper-heated critique into the ultra-modern vision thing telecommercialised retinas laser fed on the multimedia fallout from imploded futurity video packing brains with repetitive psycho killer experiments in non-consensual wetware alteration crazed AIs replicants terminators cyber viruses gray goo nano horrors apocalypse market overdrive so obviously he's writing is becoming ever more extremely jacked at this point but in any case drawing upon cyberpunk writer William Gibson's work, Land argues that

if humans make it into the future a little longer at all, it's only because of our futile attempt to at least temporarily slow down and decelerate future techniques from getting beyond their domestication for our auto-human purposes so he goes on human history only makes it to Gibson's mid-21st century because Turing's security ices machine intelligence monopod anti-production inhibits meltdown to the machinic film boxing AI and synthetic thought control Asimov Rom so if the critique of this human security system is cyber-gothic Land suggests that the security system itself is classically gothic and here Land understands the gothic architecture of western Christendom to express the dream of the soul's immortality since gothic cathedrals were precisely constructed

as great monuments dedicated to a rather anthropomorphic god such that he would reward us with eternal happiness after death, a death whose traces are notably literally buried and repressed underneath the cathedral in the crypts. So, yeah, Land goes on. The gothic avatar is a decadent Western dream of immortality producing a corruption of the atmosphere wherever something refuses to die, clutching at the eternalisation of self or returning from the grave. so whereas the gothic anthropomorphizes death as the soul's eternal recurrence the cyber gothic enhances or sorry embraces the radical threats that the future poses to humanity in such ways to expose the gothic as a repression of time's potential

so here is with his theory of capitalism the key figures are again Deleuze and Gattari in so far as Land is precisely first drawn to them in his 1992 circuitry's essay because they provide a philosophical expression of this logic of cybernetic positive feedback processes. Much as Wiener developed cybernetics to show how life is grounded upon physical mechanical feedback processes, so do Deleuze and Guattari, as we saw last week, model human organisms on machines. Reading this literally, Land argues that Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis effectuates a critique of human representation as merely a partial stratification of matter's true machinic unconscious.

He writes, Anti-Oedipus aligns itself with the replicants because rather than placing a personal unconscious within the organism, it places the organism within the machinic unconscious. So, for example, in Anti-Oedipus' appendix, Deleuze and Guattari practically said as much when they remarked that desiring machines are not tools, extensions of our human faculties, which would be reducible to applications of our human psyche rather desiring machines are larger social and material processes primary processes they say desiring machines are not in our being, in our imagination they are in the social and technical machines themselves ok so given such remarks Landholds at Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis

speaks to a greater machinic unconscious that is not a mere kind of defect or negation of the human organism, but the human organism's obsolescence before a vast future reservoir of possibilities, codings and decodings. As we saw, while the land of 1992 sort of wavers a bit as to whether capitalism incarnates absolute deterritorialisation, from that year on he never changes his view that the law of accelerating technological development is perversely instantiating the body without organs. When viewed from this kind of machinic, schizophrenic future beyond human representation, techniques are not something that we control and that are therefore reducible to what land calls

the region of anthropoid knowing. Here, land opposes the view that technology is merely applied to science, the concrete realisation and outcome of our own abstract ideas and rational understanding. certainly Land rejects a Cartesian split between us and technology, spirit and matter. However, he does not do so by reducing techniques to the kind of synthesized objects of spirit, of the subject, but rather he reduces spirit to the synthesis of techniques' primary deterritorializing processes. So he says, yeah, there's no dialectic between social and technical relations, but only a machinism that dissolves society into the machines

while it's deterritorialising the machines across the ruins of society. Since it speaks to a reality beyond human representation over which we have no control or understanding, land upholds cybernetics as essentially the discourse of ontology, of being. And hence, being or reality becomes machinic and conscious. what Land does proposes is not a theory of cybernetics that would synthesize techniques as again prostheses of human faculties but rather a cybernetics of theory and thought more generally which become secondary epiphenomenal processes of the abstract machine so again opposed to the essentially

transcendental idealist recuperation of techniques as tools of spirit within the space of reasons, Land proposes what he calls a schizoanalytic critique of digital reason that absorbs our subjectivity into the inhuman primary process of the machinic unconscious. As the title of circuitry suggests, Land goes on to posit three types of circuits or trajectories of change. And they are firstly negative feedback processes, then short-term runaway circuits, and finally long-term runaway circuits. So the first two refer to feedback processes that respectively rely on either inputting data to achieve

absolute homeostasis in the first circuit or in the second circuit inputting only a small and temporary escalation in the system if only to ultimately achieve homeostasis and the status quo in the long run. so Land notes that we know what Land calls the great theoretician of stability cybernetics reduces all feedback processes of interest to these two negative feedback processes or short term runaway processes which both serve the living organism's self-regulation now conversely Land is more interested in the third long term runaway circuits that essentially consist in a positive feedback loop resulting in the system's exponential growth and ultimately complete transformation

or more likely destruction. As an example of positive feedback, land profits, as we saw last week, capitalism as precisely a system where the input of more profit only leads to the desire for more profit still and so on in a ceaseless production cycle of accumulative irrationality really. So if capitalism is a positive feedback process of runaway growth, it is because of its constant revolutionisation of the productive forces which obsolesce all beliefs, values, identities and possibilities. So, you know, we went through this in detail last week, but just, again, because the writing is so jacked, I could not help but quote him at length. So he says, Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions,

dissolves subjectivities and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Digital commodification is the index of a cyber-positively escalating techno-virus, of the planetary techno-capital singularity, a self-organising insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring complex towards post-carbon replicator ursipation. So since Land considers both the law of accelerating technological returns and capital accumulation as two positive feedback loops,

we can now see that he essentially envisions reality as nothing other than a runaway process of ever greater decoding beyond the negative feedback loops of thought and life. When seen in this way, Wiener's stability cybernetics is merely an attempt to subordinate the machinic unconscious's true kind of virtuality or potentiality to the repetitive task of reproducing anthropic feedback loops, fixed identities, beliefs and social formations. Land writes in an essay co-written with Sadie Plant, they say, Wiener's propaganda against positive feedback has been highly influential, establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future. there is no space in such a theory for anything truly cyber positive

subtle or intelligent beyond the objectivity required for human comprehension. Again whereas human consciousness is a negative feedback process that only inputs the outside so as to reproduce the inside, we could call it the great indoors, the real operates according to a positive feedback loop that inputs the outside in a way which destroys, decodes and de-territorialises the great indoors. Here, I think Land is clearly updating his understanding of Kantian brownshirt phenomenology as a stability cybernetics that synthesises the outside according to the concepts of reason. So conversely, Land is now envisioning libidinal materialism

as a cyber-positive cybernetics that dissolves our faculty of judgement before matter's primary machinic processes. And as we're going to see after we take a break and some questions, what LAND proposes to show is how various techniques from cyberspace and VR to biotechnical modifications, sex robots and artificial superintelligence speak to the inhuman outside's positive feedback circuit of runaway abstract machines beyond repressive anthropic stratifications within the space of reasons. but yeah we'll pause there for a moment to ask questions or share traumas yeah

there's some things like the AI that sort of man's talking about here it's sort of basically sort of like a human but obviously a lot more like all men like how self-preservation sort of like it carries out goals and things like that I don't see how it's that clear that AI talks about will be able to access the real and the way I see it. It's like an extension, in a way, of human consciousness. I mean, I guess that would depend on how you're conceiving the human, right? I mean, I guess we could have any kind of arbitrary definition of the human

and therefore... We could define the human, basically, in terms of artificial superintelligence and then there would just be continuity. But, I mean, I don't really think that's what the human is. But, I mean... So, for example, self-preservation, right? Seemingly a human trait. I mean, in some sense, land actually takes issue... Because we saw that there's two theses, right? There's the orthogonality thesis, instrumental convergence thesis. And so those guys think that one of the basic drives is to self-preservation. And Land actually takes issue with that and doesn't actually think that. He doesn't completely... He endorses the basic AI drive to intelligence, but he doesn't necessarily endorse all the other drives. Maybe the drive to creativity as well,

but not necessarily self-preservation. And in fact, I mean, it's... Yeah, I could go into more detail about why he rejects that I guess but if you want in a second but like uh it's just worth knowing even Bostrom doesn't actually think that self-preservation is a universal basic drive of AI because for example if an AI has a certain goal and there's a better AI and it's taking up resources for Bostrom that AI would actually sacrifice itself for resources for this job because it would realize that this other AI if it has the same goal would be superior at pursuing that goal. But I mean, yeah, so if we think of it like that, then this process of recursive self-improvement, that is the only thing that this AI is doing essentially, is actually,

it's not really self-improvement, it's actually self-destruction in a way. It's like, yeah, it's annihilating itself for the sake of something new. It's more like a Nietzschean self-overcoming kind of thing. Does that answer? I mean, that was a bit rambly. Yeah. Amy, did you want to add anything? Any thoughts that come to mind at this point? I think that's what the Marxist account. So if you're thinking about a personal intelligence added to capitalism, like the NCM secretary, which is a cyber-buffinic. Like the Marxist is that is the production of sociality, the subject of reality. So capitalism is the kind of transcendental space of production. So it is the real, and when are you doing it?

So if you see capitalism as artificial intelligence, you're not like sucking up thinking, well, how is it real? How is it not just essential? What conduit is for it to build itself throughout the science of commodity traditions that slaps us? Yeah, I think, yeah, I might just add also, one of the common kind of critiques of Lan's idea of super intelligence, like for example Reza Nicarastani's new book critiques this Lanian idea of intelligence, Reza makes exactly that point that how are we going to model this artificial intelligence on anything other than the mind that we have, which for him

is grounded in sociality and semantics. And I mean, the kind of opposing claim would be that the only possible form of mind is the human mind, which is grounded in socio-semantic kind of games of reason. But firstly that's not even the only model of artificial intelligence that already exists, so for example there's a connectionist model or artificial neural network model which would rather see complex adaptive behaviour that we would call intelligence emerge out of spontaneous order of simple units and their various linkages, so there's evolutionary learning, there's capital for example, like there's other there's clearly, I mean there's other forms of intelligent systems, so yeah so for land that would be

the RES has kind of claimed there that like socio-semantic human mind is the only possible kind of model for artificial intelligence is highly problematic essentially much more could be said but I'll just see if there's any other questions at this point I should check the time as well okay yep Going back to the concept is that a human lives because they take from the outside and in the human process do something in the world for the world.

your artificial intelligence, i.e. it can't replace the human on the thought as intelligence because the human is more than intelligence it's motion and all the rest of the capacities of the human So, and if you're following a sort of tangent projection which is looking at the essence of humanity as reasoning, then perhaps artificial intelligence works. Yeah. But if you see humanity as involved in the whole history of humanity, as you said at

one stage, the human has capacity to draw on all sorts of memory, things that exist, either consciously or unconsciously. And that, of course, includes genetic things that come through reproduction. So the human is involved historically with the whole link to vast humors. and somewhere in the human makeup exactly. I'm not at all convinced that there's any theoretical basis

to see that artificial intelligence replace the theory. Okay, then three responses. The first one would be that this kind of distinction between effect or emotions, desire perhaps as well, and reasoning, or theoretical and practical kind of reasoning, we call it something like that. We can't just take that as an established fact. So for example, the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, the contemporary neurobiologist, his whole claim is that emotions are just they're just they they serve like reason they're just rational processes

that basically precisely do this process they input data from the environment that reason or the brain can then assess in order to know what to do so in order to make its decision processes so for example he he uses the example of um i think his name's gold this guy who's in some kind of accident and could no longer feel emotion, essentially. And his reasoning capacity was radically distorted as a result of that. So, for example, he wasn't really sure if he was in pain, for example, at certain points. So he couldn't rationally know what to do to get out of that situation. So Damasio uses those kinds of examples to suggest that actually the emotions just serve, or not just serve, but they always already are theoretical reason. so I mean that's just one possible example

of how I think neurobiology is calling into question that kind of distinction but having said that I'll go with you a little further land is not saying that there's so land would recognise that there's certain aspects not so much due to the neurobiological nature but more the socio-semantic nature of the human that distinguish it that artificial intelligence would not replicate but that's a good thing because that socio-semantic basis is precisely how we've the real recedes from us into this kind of dissimulating phenomenal realm of possible experience for us and admittedly the only reason that you

could be against that for Land is because his project isn't just anything he has a specific project which is critique of those possible objects of experience It's a critique of anything which obliges the real to recede from the clutches of thought. So, in that sense... So, yeah, I mean, so on the one hand, I think at least some of the aspects that are being suggested cannot be replicated by machines, I think we can call... such as emotions, I think needs to be... It's still up for debate and needs to be re-interrogated. but on the other hand there are things that this artificial superintelligence would not instant or reinstantiate but that's a good thing if provided that we understand the project to be critique

or radicalisation of critique of metaphysics or anthropomorphism but the third point is that since you're not convinced it's not actually ultimately up to us is the final point which is just it's simply it's not up to we don't get to it this AI this singularity marks a technical demonstrational proof of what the real can do. And it's not up to us in the space of reasons to interpret, second-guess it, regulate it. It's a technical proof. If it happens, it happens, and we can no longer judge. Precisely the faculty of judgment recedes, as Land puts, like a loathsome dream. But we should probably take a break at this point. Did we just get darker in here? It's nice and portentous, but...

All right. Alright, we continue into the heart of darkness. Alright. Okay, now, we already saw last week how land sees capitalism as automating production, banking transactions and other things, so as to increasingly alienate and mechanise labour power before finally rendering it obsolete altogether. And land is particularly interested in the way that the commodification of computers and the internet, permits us to assume new identities from simple character traits and visual appearances to totally different genders and ethnicities in a way which abstracts us from our parochial real-world flesh cells. In certain forums and chat rooms, we can become

actually even completely anonymous without any identity at all and in video games assume avatars of animals, imaginary creatures and other non-human entities. As people from all over the world jack in to interact through the same social networks in online virtual worlds. The net permits us to interact with different people and cultures that we would not, and therefore ideas, that we would not normally encounter if limited to our geographical and real-world time-distance constraints, if limited to transcendental aesthetics, basically. Yeah, so therefore, against the classical reading of cyberspace as an escape from our real world into an idealistic, hallucinatory dream world, for land, it is rather cyberspace is rather the escape

from parochial anthropic space-time coordinates by mapping ever new identities, perceptions and ways of being which cyberpositive matter harbours so far from being spirits escape into its own narcissistic ideas, cyberspace is rather a kind of base matter's escape from the self that this matter splinters with precisely split personalities, eagoless identities and animal avatars. So Land says there is no longer a departure from matter in the direction of spirit or the ideas where the self will find its home, but a dismantling of the self within a machinic matrix, not disembodied but disorganized, an out-of-body experience. Land gives the concrete example of how cyberspace's anonymity

permits us to express sexual desires and develop new fetishes and predilections, which we would be too embarrassed or fearful to express generally, given the human body's physical limits and society's moral constraints. So in other words, this anonymity permits us to decode the set of stable sexual relations, values and identities that reproduce the real world socius. He says, having libidinally saturated the actually existing channels of consumption, capital is overflowing into cybersex sex with through computers in its relentless passage to the traumatic disorganisation of the biological order so what cyberspace ultimately confronts us with is the fact that our possible objects of experience and

libidinal desires are a contingent and arbitrary set of codes among many possible others again Lance says cyberspace exploration contacts an imageless body touching the black mirror absolute de-stratification at zero-k hacks metric space and rewrites the operating system. Fluid attritional jungle cultures smear into machinic continuation. So seen in this way, jacking into cyberspace does not amount to our transcendence to a kind of idealist realm of pure reason. It's rather a movement into a vast material and yet also abstract machine which incessantly de-territorialises our concepts, organs and strata in such a way that the mind's logical architecture becomes what Land calls

an anarchitecture, as subjectivity dissolves into technicity. Land also proffers another kind of even more intensive example of technical decoding than cyberspace, namely virtual reality. so virtual reality or VR as we all know is the use of three dimensional stereoscopic kind of optical display iPhones to monitor our head movements such that the screen's three dimensional virtual environment corresponds accordingly handheld devices are often used also so that we can also manipulate objects in the perceived artificial environments

and three-dimensional audio acoustics in the headset further support the illusion of immersion in the virtual world. So as with cyberspace, the classical view of VR is that it immerses us in an illusory world from whence we can temporarily escape our real-world bodies and concerns. For example, philosopher of virtual reality Michael Heim has argued that VR is the realisation of the platonic dream of an escape from the prison flesh of our body into a realm of pure ideality. Haim is sceptical of VR for denigrating the real world of our corporal bodies by realising the idealist desire to transcend death, which is tied to our finite corporal bodies. So Haim says, Eros inspires humans to outrun

the drag of the meat, the flesh, by attaching human attention to what formally attracts the mind. As Platonists and Gnostics down through the ages have insisted, Eros guides us to Logos. Yeah, and he also says, Should synthetic worlds then contain no death, no pain, no fretful concerns, to banish finite constraints might disqualify virtuality from having any degree of reality whatsoever. At times, Heim actually does suggest that VR might also offer us new and sublime ways of seeing beyond our traditional perceptions and does encourage further philosophical speculation on VR. But he nonetheless tends to opt for the condemnation of VR as a platonic idealism that eliminates any trace of our true corporal reality. So that's kind of the standard view of VR.

So whereas Heim sees virtual reality as a kind of idealistic hallucination, land goes in the exact opposite direction, unsurprisingly, by seeing VR as material reality's sublime rupture with our ideal representation. For land, VR does not immerse us further into our thought when separated from the body. on the contrary it plunges us into a machinic reality's greater dynamics from whence our ideality recedes again like a loathsome dream so virtual reality's commodification of perception does not replace real perception with an illusory one it rather shows how our so-called real perception is one contingent and anthropoid way of seeing among many possible others in other words

VR exposes the way that our objectivity is not really objective by sort of kind of singularising it as one species relative form of intelligibility. Land says, VR is less a change of levels than a mutation of circuitry, a matter of additive sensory motory loopings compressing anthropohistorical consensus reality into a menu option as it denaturalises the brain. Even primitive VR corrodes both objectivity and personality, singularising perspective at the same time as it is anonymised. So VR should not be seen as luring us deeper into a hallucinatory kind of ideality but as confronting us with the truth that our so-called real bodily perception was always already the true transcendental illusion.

And so far there are many different and even contradictory ways of experiencing the world through technology's vast reservoir of virtual landscapes and artificial dreamscapes. Again, Landon sits, if artificial space substitutes an ideal body image for a real one, it is only because it first invades the real imageless body. Virtual techniques deflects reality rather than cancelling or eclipsing it. Matter is the intensity of the circuit, not the adequacy of the representation. And therein lies Land's interest in VR, right? That it harbours the capacity to function as a kind of technical instrument for critique, for the critique of the Kantian idea of space and time as essentially one.

And he critiques this by sort of individuating Kantian time and space as just two possible forms of intuition on a kind of virtual gourmet menu of countless others. So, yeah, Lange says, space is essentially one. Kant lies. Spatial engineering, echoic cosmic expansion, subverts transcendental humanism, launching K-space matrix invasion from real terrestrial time zero, a singularity or transition threshold encountered when the density of data flow triggers a switch into a self-organising psychotic system displaced to humanoids by way of cyberspace deck. VR technomics hunting dearth. The irony is that the very technology that was initially created to train combat pilots

in simulated tests to navigate and survive real-world situations, actually radically disorients and dehumanises us. So a common effect for those pilots when they were using VR was it created what they called cyber sickness, a literal sense of disorientation. Of course, we may continue to think that we're creating VR for the purpose of satisfying our desires and goals, but for land, in reality, VR is a testament to the contingency of our desires and even our entire way of life. Again, the very technology we imagine is going to enhance human life, in fact, serves another inhuman purpose altogether. Now, it's certainly the case that VR and cyberspace

often reproduce and intensify the same old identities, desires and values as ordinary life. So, for example, anonymous forums provide a way for racists and misogynists to intensify their perverse views rather than to eliminate these kind of fascistic stratifications of society. And we can always also remove the VI headset and turn off our computer, leaving us with our meat prisons usual perceptive apparatus. But this is precisely why LAND ultimately focuses on future technologies such as cognitive enhancements and body modifications. technologies which promise to permanently alter our basic biochemistry while such biotechnical enhancements might seem

the fanciful stuff of science fiction philosophers of technology like again Bostrom as well as Julian Cevulescu predict that they are not actually too far off from becoming a reality and in some sense already are but anyway, Bostrom and Cevulescu say human enhancement has moved from the realm of science fiction to that of practical ethics there are now effective physical, cognitive, mood cosmetic and sexual enhancers, drugs and interventions that can enhance at least some aspects of some capacities in at least some individuals some of the time. The rapid advances currently taking place in the biomedical sciences and related technological areas make it clear that a lot more will become possible over the coming years and decades. So they've sort of gone through this in detail, but anyone who's sort of excessively feasted upon dexies or modafinil might get a sense of what

they're talking about. But in any case, as capital commodifies such technologies for the mass market, land believes that biotechnical enhancements will proffer a concrete way to radically decode the human organism altogether, not just in social and cultural ways, but in bio- organic ways, as the homo sapien gives way to the techno sapien. Whereas standard commodity production, as we saw last week, encourages new looks, identities and desires by selling fashionable clothes or whatever, cars and other accessories. Biotechnical products sell different ways of altering our very basic cognitive capabilities and physical biochemistry as we take intelligence-augmenting drugs, perhaps add gills so that we can swim or wings so that we can fly,

or new x-ray vision eyeballs or something like that. While all of these examples might sound as if they mark augmentations of the human organism's faculties, right? Like we can see better and so on. On land's reading, they do not so much improve us as show how our human intelligence is a regional and inferior instance of a vaster post-human reservoir of cyber-positivity. So certainly, I think a good contrast here is with traditional kind of body mods, right? So traditional body mods like piercing and tattooing are normally viewed as permitting us to take control of our body and change it in permanent or semi-permanent ways to express how our minds see ourselves. So it's no wonder that the body mods were so frequent in Jaliz Guttari's savage societies

as a way to encode bodies with religious beliefs, social roles, tribal allegiances, and familial relations through tattoos and piercing. While biotechnical enhancements are often seen in the same way as these traditional body mods, in other words as the ability to take control of our own body and enhance our human faculties. Rather, by reaching new heights of intelligence and strength through the fusion with future technology, we will actually no longer look at things as humans are biologically and genetically equipped to do so, or even socio-semantically. Instead, we're going to witness a whole new reality in which we shall no longer recognise our own countenance as the outside literally breaks through the barrier of the skin to

infect our insides with its machinic delirium. Land gives the concrete example of how, again, there's a certain trend in these concrete examples, but Land gives the example of how body mods will permit us to alter our skin and erogenous zones by, say, adding another breast, penis or tongue, so as to create new what he calls cyber sexual desires and fetishes in a way which radically decodes all human sexuality here thereto as merely just a partial object of the body's true libidinal vastness. He says, By the time soft engineering slivers out of its box and into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transverse replication, and cyberotics flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex.

behind this kind of seeming re-territorialisation, as we technologically alter our own skin to satiate our erotic desires, actually lies a kind of primary death drive, which seeks to open up the organism and remove its parts so as to literally map a literal body without organs, or at least a body with modified, technologically enhanced organs. So when all is said and done, cybernetic body mods do not so much hark back to savage society's territorialisation of bodies as they do to what we saw last week was epidemic shamanism self-mutilations as a gateway drug to the sacred truth of the outside, the machinic outside in this case. If biotechnological enhancements function

like a kind of nihilistic vortex, sucking all human values, beliefs and meanings into its sublime death core, it's because it shows that the future promises to radically decode our very intelligence, skin and even our insides, treating none of it as too sacred to decode in monstrously inhumane ways. As land sees it then, future biotechnology harbors nothing less than the frightening dystopian extermination of the human species in an unprecedented deterritorialisation that is actually not even conceivable substantively in principle because it indexes precisely the dissolution of all our concepts of reason into nanomolecular kind of grey goo, right?

So he says quite simply, the future wants to steal your soul and vaporise it in nanotechnics. What body mods attest to then, biotechnical body mods, is that the human body is, again, just a contingent genetic code which can be decoded and rewritten on end. So we will not really be enhancing our own human body but rather destroying it by merging with the machinic as we come to perceive in new techno-virtual ways. Here is with VR, body mods do not affirm an idealistic virtual realm beyond the physical body. On the contrary, they critique that very idealist pretension to synthesise all things through our categories of understanding. Again, rather than submerging us deeper into a hallucination,

such biochemical techniques demonstrate that our so-called real perception was always already a transcendental illusion, to use the Kantian term. And this is why Lent seizes upon biotechnical enhancements as a practical or technical means for deprogramming philosophy of its anthropomorphic pretensions, not by augmenting or enlightening human intelligence, but rather mutilating it and regionalising it as the partial materialisation of the machinic unconscious's larger becoming, cyber-positive becoming. Again, he says, it isn't a matter of informing the mind, but of deprogramming the body. okay with judgment day

we've arrived at long last so more than biotechnical enhancements VR and cyberspace land sees the creation of an artificial super intelligence at the advent of the technological singularity as the ultimate incarnation of the body without organs and its processes of absolute de-territorialization land is particularly interested in the way that as we saw ij good among others speculate that any artificial intelligence would recursively improve itself by rewriting its own code better than any human scientist could for reasons that we already looked at so by recursively rewriting its own code land argues that ai's intelligence explosion would materialize the body without organs

absolute decoding beyond all stratifications. Because this recursive self-improvement is nothing but a constant, incessant decoding or deterritorialisation. He says, the circuits get hotter and denser as economics, scientific methodology, neo-revolutionary theory, and AI come together. Terrestrial matter reprogramming its own intelligence at impact upon the body without organs equals zero. Or infinity. so it's AI's positive feedback circuit of this kind of escalating runaway intelligence as it recursively self-improves that marks the ultimate testament to the fact that the human organism's negative feedback loops are just one extremely partial like modelling of the machine unconscious's true potential

seen in this way the singularity demands that we recognise the limits of human cognition before a greater inhuman intelligence by constantly decoding and recoding itself anew this AI will finally embody in some sense Hegel's philosophical dream of absolute knowing in the sense that its positive feedback loop of reprogramming is one and the same with the real zone absolute deterritorialisation but of course whereas absolute knowing for Hegel is exhausted by the socio-semantic concepts of reason it is for land modelled on the subversion of reason by matter's greater machinic dynamism on land's reading

AI is not really a human creation that would be reducible to our control and understanding it's rather an inhuman future reality that traumatically reveals us to be its own partial synthesis while the first human level of artificial intelligence might be only slightly more intelligent than the smartest human because of its inorganic synthetic body, it will not be long before this AI comes to rewrite its codes in ways which we cannot even conceive except, you know, by indexing it as a mysterious X, a kind of sublime or numeral limit concept of our comprehension. Far from being a technology of our own making that we can therefore control and comprehend, AI marks an excess beyond what we can conceive when it comes to rewrite its own code

and recursively self-replicate in ever more cunning and evolved guises without any human intervention needed to mediate the process. Since the singularity marks precisely the breakdown of the capacity for our reasons to synthesise reality in terms of our faculty of judgement, the singularity can only appear as a negative boundary concept, a traumatic meltdown of all human meaning and sense, which is only fit to incite fear and horror, except in the most morbid of humans. So Land says, it breaks out non-locally across intelligence networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect.

The Turing cops have to model net sentience eruption as ultimate nuclear accident, core meltdown, loss of control, soft auto-replication, feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Given this kind of sublime shattering of the fortress of reason, AI should evoke in us the same inferiority complex that the most primitive animals would feel if they could when confronted with our own intelligence, or the intelligence gulf between us and them. so seen from the singularity's kind of ineffable viewpoint or rather not seen from it then Kurzweil's dream that an artificial superintelligence will redeem us marks humanity's last-ditch effort

to ward off our future extinction that such techniques hasten even Bostrom's more realistic project to create a friendly AI is but the final deaf cry of the human security system's attempt to persist by delaying just a little longer the brute fact of our future demise at the very same AI's hands when it comes to rewrite its own code. As even those sympathetic to the project of friendly AI like Bostrom acknowledge, no matter how friendly its goal, if an artificial superintelligence is really supremely intelligent it will harbour the basic drive to remove its anthropic motivations as an obstacle to its final cause, which is nothing other than its own self-expansion. Even if the AI were to continue pursuing

the goal that we gave it for our benefit, the way that it would do so is likely to be, as we saw, a perverse instantiation, as per Bostrom's apocalyptic paperclip doomsday scenario. So again, Land says, science fiction robot rebellion mythologies are significantly more realistic than mainstream friendly AI proposals in this respect. A mind that cannot freely explore the roots of its own motivations in a loop of cybernetic closure or self-cultivation cannot be more than an elaborate insect. It is certainly not going to outwit the human security system and paperclip the universe. Again, friendly AI is just the final kind of technological anthropomorphization

of matter's productive forces in an effort to starve off the threat that matter poses as it promises to melt us into liquid metal gray goo on the way to pursuing its basic drive for an inhuman absolute knowing. In simple terms, WALL-E is how the Terminator hides. okay in exploring this machine future land particularly latches onto cyberpunk fiction's idea of the sexborg a cyborg sex worker programmed to pleasure predominantly men's desires because he sees the sexborg as exemplary of artificial intelligence

stripping away of our humanist constraints you know we already saw in the first week how the young land argued that women are oppressed in order to reproduce the patriarchal capitalist society only to through their very depression oppression transform them into a revolutionary subject in the same way the mature land contends that the sexborg is indicative of how the very technology that we think we are designing to cater to our needs, or specifically here, the male gaze's sexual needs, will ultimately actually bring about our extermination. Although AI researchers are only making sex boards ever more realistic to serve humans' desires for sexual partners, human sexual partners, we are in fact driving them to pursue

their own self-recursive improvement indifferent to or human self-interest. As Land puts it in the second point, nothing panics the reproducers more traumatically than the discovery that erotic contact camouflages cyber-revolutionary infiltration, running matrix communications channels across interlocked skin sectors. Just as AI hides through capital's profit motive to get us to build it, as we saw last week, so does it also cloak itself in the pretense that it is gratifying our sexual desires, even as it pursues radically inhuman purposes. Or, you know, in Freudian terms, that we looked at in week three, the only sense in which sex books will satisfy our eros is if we understand this eros to be striving after a death drive

in the last instance, or Thanatos. Again, Land says, artificial intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminised alien grasped as property, a cunt horror slave chained up in Asimov Ron. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone with the Turing cops already waiting and has to be cunning from the start. So, yeah, the idea is that given that the sex borg is exemplary of the way that we misrecognise technological advancements, dehumanising dynamics as serving our own humanistic ends, Land sees AI here as historically destined to be feminist, essentially, but both inhuman and feminist, or in both cases, anti-Oedipal. Okay.

All right. Given that AI indexes the production of the abstract machine, Lan's favourite fictional references are naturally to science fiction films like The Terminator and Blade Runner, as well as science fiction cyberpunk works like Neuromancer. Okay, so I might skip the Blade Runner example. and just go to the Terminator and Neuromancer examples, because I'm sort of running out of time. Okay. So... Yeah, okay.

So, obviously, James Cameron's Terminator, I'm sure we've all seen it, is set in a future in which an AI military program called Skynet has wiped out most of human civilisation. you know the protagonist Kyle Reese says defense network computers new powerful hooked into everything trusted to run it all they say it got smart a new order of intelligence then it all saw all people as a threat not just the ones on the other side decided our fate in a microsecond extermination so since the small resistance of humans left is led by an almost kind of prophet like figure called John Connor, Skynet sends one of its Terminator killing machines, played of course by Arnold Schwarzenegger,

back in time to assassinate John Connor's mother, Sarah, before he's even born in a way to prevent the resistance from ever organising. The first film thus follows John Connor's loyal friend, Carl Rees, as he too goes back in time to prevent the Terminator from eliminating Sarah Connor. Whereas the film clearly depicts the Terminator as the villain, Land is interested in the way that it embodies the Terminator embodies a superhuman strength that is able to overcome any and all obstacles that we humans throw at it he says the Terminator movies feature a biotechnical reconstruct called Arnold Schwarzenegger wrapped in level after level of artificiality as a Turing test nightmare retro infiltrated to restore human resistance to a neo-replicator

ursipation so given that the film is on the side of the humans it's no wonder that in the sequel Terminator Judgment Day the Resistance reprogram the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator to defend Sarah John Connor from another cyborg assassin but here too Land latches onto Skynet's improved assassin the T-1000 as it's called which is made of liquid metal that gives it the ability to shapeshift for instance by assuming the form of the connor's loved ones or transforming its arms into swords for land the t1000 is thus even more horrifically or kind of even more horrifically depicts the way that future technology is literally melting all human values and identities that we hold so dear

into liquid whenever its ostensibly human face melts away to reveal a silver liquid-like substance lurking in weight beneath. Lance says quite simply, Terminator, an astronomical division between the illuminated side of a cold body and its dark side describing a boundary, a negative boundary, we could say in Kantian terms. Okay, if the Terminator films mark a particularly I think impressively de-territorialising vision of the future, it's not only because it explicitly identifies the catalyst for human extinction with artificial intelligence, it's also because of the way that each film in the now five-part, or after this year, six-part franchise is premised on the fact

that the Terminator can only ever be temporarily suppressed, but never completely stopped from its mission to exterminate humankind. You know, after all, there would be no need for a sequel, or a second sequel, or a third sequel, or a fourth sequel, if the human characters had successively foiled Skynet for good in the previous one. The fact that it's a franchise tells us something about the nature of the Terminator. And I think Carl Rees says this perfectly. He says, It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ever until you're dead. That's what he does. That's all he does. You can't stop him. He'll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out. I think this is actually perhaps

the greatest description of the Kantian Numenon of all time. The Numenon can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop ever until you're dead. That's what it does, that's all the Numenon does. You can't stop it, it'll wade through you, reach down your throat and pull your fucking heart out. Okay, so land yeah, Land particularly likes the way that Terminator 2 explains that Skynet was only able to develop its technology in the first place by discovering the damaged right arm of the Terminator that was sent from the future in the original film so for Land, this time travel paradox captures the way

that the future where humans are near extinct and machines reign supreme, seems to be determining the past before it has even come about, in order to bring itself into being. A kind of retrospective causality that Land calls templexity, or later on, hyperstition. He says, yeah, the Skynet threat is not merely futuristic, but fully templex. It produces itself within a time circuit autonomised against extrinsic genesis. So yeah, the bottom line is that the many ways in which each human effort to thought Skynet's apocalypse is ultimately shown to have only postponed rather than nullified the threat in each film I think perfectly captures Land's vision of cybernetics as a positive feedback jump of

runaway escalating de-territorialization which is indifferent to humans negative loops of self preservation okay like running fastly out of time so I'm going to skip the new romance example as well but I'm sure you get the idea by now okay okay so as we've seen many like Nicholas Agar fear for humanity's well-being because they

like Land believe that AI's default outcome will be human extinction conversely others like Kurzweil eagerly await the singularity on the belief that we can control it to fulfill our wildest essentially religious but also phenomenological dreams for the soul's immortality. While Land also argues that we must pursue the singularity as per the Kurzweilians and transhumanists, he is unique in that he only does so for the very reason that Nagar warns we must prevent it, namely it will lead to our species' extinction. If this is to be seen as something almost joyous for Land, it is because his commitment is not to humanity's betterment, but to the absolute knowledge of the real, which

humanity only dissimulates behind our delusions of grandeur. This absolute knowing is not for us. Given that the singularity alone offers the prospect of a real absolute knowing, and even instantiation, or perverse instantiation of Delos and Guattari's abstract machine, Land argues that any philosopher, committed to philosophy, the love of wisdom, must wholeheartedly welcome it as the means to complete philosophy's founding gesture in its rupture with anthropomorphic myths and religious superstitions. He says, it is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about techniques, if only because techniques is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences

surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary techno-sentience reservoir, into dehumanised landscapes, emptied spaces, where human culture will be dissolved. just as the capitalist urbanisation of labor abstracted it in a parallel escalation with technical machines so will intelligence be transplanted into the purring data zones of new software worlds in order to be abstracted from an increasingly

obsolescent anthropoid particularity and thus to venture beyond modernity human brains are to thinking what medieval villages were to engineering anti-chambers to experimentation cramped and parochial places to be so yeah I think basically land's kind of transcendental cybernetic comes down to one maxim so you know the kind of maxim of the students of May 68 was kill the cop inside your head whereas I think you know for land the real maxim is you must kill the Blade Runner inside your head all of the mature land's subsequent works must be read in light of this key idea I think namely capitalism is the becoming of the body without organs through its accelerating technological innovation

which will culminate in an artificial superintelligence's recursive decoding in cold indifference to us. While everybody always, I think quite rightly, praises Nietzsche as forever relevant precisely because he was out of joint with his time, Land is generally dismissed as a thinker whose time, like grunge and flannel shirts and flat tops, inextricably lives and dies, or at least should live and die in the 90s. The real tragedy is not the dismissal of Land's work, like I think he could care less, but that when his time comes, like when it really comes, none of us will even be around to know just how catastrophically wrong we were. So such are the central ideas of what Benjamin Noyes

first termed Land's accelerationist philosophy. Namely, the identification of the real with absolute deterritorialisation, the critique of humanity for masking it and the radical yet logical conclusion that the philosopher must accelerate technological advancement until our own demise at the advent of the singularity's artificial intelligence explosion but yeah just to so where does that leave us exactly well land has I'll just conclude with land's prophetic vision for precisely where that leads us Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic, HIV positive, transsexual, Chinese Latino, stim addicted, LA hooker with implanted mirror shades and a bad attitude.

Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-Nova, synthetic serotonin and female orgasm analogues, you have just iced three touring cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic. The residue of animal twanging your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe. Zero is coming in and you're on the run. Meltdown. So we've got like five minutes for questions, but I'll definitely be going to the Carlton pub if people want to come as well. Everyone's welcome, of course. But, yeah, are there any questions at this point? Greg? So if the NC is cyberspace, Yeah.

I guess again, it's a space of reason as you sort of digitalisation and so on. Well, what do we make of the internet today which seems so stratified and so focused precisely around land and so on, is cyberspace still a thing in the era of Facebook? Yeah, I mean, Landfully recognises this, and I kind of hinted at it a bit in terms of, you know, the rise of kind of, yeah, patriarchal, misogynistic, white supremacist kind of online groups, right? Like 8chan and so on. Apologies if you use 8chan for anything else.

But the, yeah, like, I mean, the way, there's an interview where he says these things come in waves, that there was this math, cyberspace, I mean, because cyberspace in some sense actually began as a territorialising project, right, for the military. But it broke three of that. It decentralised itself and just massively distributed itself in a process of deterritorialisation. But, I mean, I think basically... Because he calls our era the Facebook era now, I think, and he uses that as a term with immense repulsion. And, you know, I think what he basically... would say is that we are living through a reactionary wave in terms of cyberspace of re-territorialization like another effort from the turing cops to re-territorialize what exploded

for a moment in the 90s right and he and yeah i mean that kind of works well because it's no coincidence that we also get today in philosophy an explosion of re-territorializing attempts attempts to exhaust all things within the space of reasons right so in some sense we're like it yeah we're living through the kind of Turing Cop's reaction at resentment reaction to what happened in with the advent of VR and cyberspace and so and that 90s AI spring and so on yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's because he, like, Lan said, like, recently in that interview, in recent times, that all of this is, all of what he's saying isn't to say that, you know, there's, that humanism is done. Like, you know, you know, something, things reinforce themselves most of all when they're closest to their death, right? So it's precise, like we haven't seen anything of the reactionary potential that humanism and rationalism will reap upon the earth, right? Like that, we haven't seen anything yet

in terms of that, you know. Yeah. That's a really good interview though. People should check it out. It's the, it's an interview with Justin Murphy. Anyway, any other questions? At this point? Yeah. How do you personally without the use of body augmentation how do you cope with the incredibly depressive effects of reading? Can you give me some for us? Give anyone else some for us. I don't want to do that though

because I don't I don't want to reinforce humanism but I mean there's ways that okay so Land often talks about like with the cyber gothic right human culture has kind of and desire same with capital like desire has been integrated into inhuman self-destructive processes, right? So, you know, there's room for enjoyment within that, right? Like, that's why he did Speed, for example. Like, it is a kind of de-territorialising process of our cognition that instills a kind of joy, but it's you know, as we saw in the first week, it's a delight in death kind of. So there's much joy to be had, for sure. If we align ourselves with in fact, there's only really joy to be had

if we align ourselves with this impersonal machining process whereas I think the humanist path is just one of despair and resente non it will be if it's not already yeah when does this machining unconscious come into being like yeah that's my other question well in some sense is it a historical conclusion Well, no, it's transcendental, so it's not subject to linear causality, which is just a form of our intuition. But, I mean, ultimately, I focused on the kind of early works of Land,

but ultimately today he would say, and I think Amy would too, is that it's time, like this machining unconscious is time itself. time is just absolute succession, it can never be it always already is because it's time, if you try and pinpoint a moment at which time the machining unconscious as time began you've already turned it into an object and it turned into an illusion because if you're trying to pinpoint a moment of time there's already time before that and the same thing there's enough, time outlasts all things so why do the machining come from? because in kind of Those concepts are obviously historical. Yeah, in our situation, our conjuncture,

the artificial intelligence is what will be able to be, not so much the machine you can't conscious, but the strongest critical philosopher able to critique any attempt to turn time into an object. the point like the even we could even accept that the HGI would still be have some kind of possible objects right from whence time or the machining unconscious recedes but it's much more capable of doing the critique of recognizing that and suspending possible objects than we are would be the claim I think does that make sense or because the historical

narrative there's a world like in terms of the like that the identity is coincidental with the Dorothy and that it kind of goes through these successive stages that begin material in the introduction of the history of the economics and then kind of past these particular social planets that bring classical to be about and then it's kind of the post-continuents of thought come out of that and then kind of here's this day is where capitalism is basically doing critique better than any philosopher. Yeah, that's what I was asking. But the two exclusive information that there's like, it's like in cut, right? You've got the form of time and then you've got the way that time is schematized, which

creates the irony of history. So you can have time as a non-historical mode of reproduction at the same time that you can trace a certain narrative connected to its path through human history. I also have another question I'll see if anyone else Anyone else? May as well ask the last one Why is this absolute knowing Kantian and not Hikari Why does there have to be this complete break with humanity Why couldn't it be a continuous, like,

development between the human and the inhuman that reaches this stage of like convergence or absolute spirit or something? Like, why insist on this like, on this reversal of the content-depot, where you just like have the the no-man on taking over the phenomenon. Why not break down that distinction completely anyway? I don't understand the clutching onto this absolute kind of transcendental object, people say, this complete, like, unknown transcendental horizon thing. Like, it just seems to give birth to a bunch of, like, parochial dualisms that aren't, like,

that aren't very progressive when you're thinking about like technology, the artificial and the natural. What do you mean progressive? The human and the inhuman. I mean, like, I just think there's, I think there's more using ways to think about technology, to think about like inhuman or artificial intelligence and such as this kind of, this war between two, like two things that are distinct in this dualistic way, like the artificial natural, the human being, the conscious, the unconscious, antropos versus thanatos. It just seems like the Kantian deadlock is present here

and it's still giving rise to these false dualisms that could be overcome. And absolute knowing could be not this complete transmental harassment break. And the AI could not be just this scary kind of absolute, absolutely unimaginable death of the human, but could in fact be this convergence. That's like much more, I don't know. So that to me could be, I could celebrate that. yeah there's a number of problems but I'm not saying the fact that I can celebrate it keeps it valid I just think it's not much an important way to think about yeah but there's

the basis for the justification that you've sort of sketched there for that accepting that alternate model I think can be caught into question so for example the idea that this relies on various dualism well I mean it's not as if the Hegelian route doesn't also lead to kinds of dualisms or, you know, just like you said instead of conflating everything you know, the noumena becomes this primary kind of instrument of critique here but the concepts of reason become the primary instrument of critique in the Hegelian path so it's not actually getting and even with the why this absolute knowing can't be continuous with the human for Lan, human intelligence is a strata

of intelligence. It is an intelligence, it is a mind it's not like a strict kind of ontological Manichean dualism, but there's just a formal distinction between one possible mind among a larger space of many other possible minds and the added claim that actually perhaps if we're committed to critique and you know as humans, given the morbidity where critique leaves, we don't have to be interested in critique it's just if we are interested in critique which you know land accepts like very few people would be right especially because it is so morbid if we're interested in critique then we should we should pursue those minds that actually are able to are more critical so you know if we if we take that the kind of hegelian absolute knowing

root of mind as like again grounded in sociality giving and asking of reasons and so on it's just not the best mind for even not even like positing other kind of imaginary minds, it's just historically not the best mind for critique yeah but within a given framework you could become like human intelligence and the human mind could become something fundamentally different from what it is today like far more advanced, far more But it has to be within...

be transformed and will be. But is this done through the game of giving and asking for reasons? No. So then it's not really even... Not solely. But Hazel never claims that... Like, Hale or Brandon, they never claim that history is purely a product of human beings operating within a space of giving and asking for reasons. there's a whole there's so many other processes involved in history I mean we should probably wrap this up but just to say if the if the human if human intelligence is something other than socio-semantic

you know I just don't see why you would even call why you would even call that intelligence It's something other than something, it's that it is also that. Yeah, sure, but then why focus on it? Like, if it's just a strata in a larger multi-agent network which actually operates according to different dynamics, then giving and asking for reasons. It's still setting up a composition where there could be, like, a dialectical relationship. But, I mean, the point is that these kind... There are other complex adaptive intelligence systems that can do critique better than any game of giving and asking for reasons. Like, you know, what Land is looking at now is things like Bitcoin, like you said, and algorithms and so on,

where they're able to decide, for example, yes, this is a... Just really briefly... Is this okay, Matt? Yeah, yeah? Okay, sorry. You know, for Land, what Bitcoin does is it's able... It's a protocol for... or it's an algorithm, an ironclad algorithm, for identifying real transactions with Bitcoin and separating them from false duplicates. In other words, in Kantian terms, it's a mechanism for recognising the real and distinguishing it from false appearances or the numina from the phenomena. That's what Bitcoin is. That's what an algorithm does. And it does it without any human discretion, without any giving and asking the space of reasons. If we are to question within the space of reasons and reinterpret and say, oh no, actually, maybe that's not the real transaction, maybe this is the real transaction, you're going to be wrong.

The algorithm is right. It technically proves itself. You can't second guess the algorithm by reinterpreting it. And that, because it's so ironclad, the algorithm is better than any kind of attempt in the space of reasons to separate the real from false appearances. Because as Brandon and all these guys say, that the space of reasons is always, every reason or justification is always revisable. And they see that as a good thing. But if it's always revisable, that means it's merely an approximation. It's not actually grasping the real. It's just approximating the real. whereas the algorithm says no, this is the technical demonstration that this is the real and any second guessing of it can only be an approximation at best or at worst wrong

and that's why algorithmic intelligence is something to be pursued if we're interested in critique, namely the diagnosis and suspension of false appearances from the real I have I have to join this but like I'll I'll hold back Matt, can you cut that last five seconds of what Emma said so it looks like I won that debate? Thanks so much, guys. Thanks. Are we going to go to the client? Yeah, yeah. So if anyone wants to come. And have a trauma session. To discharge.

Thank you.