Anthropol The Future of Human Insecurity (Session 3)

Hello everyone, welcome to Nick Land's Anthropo, the Future of Human Insecurity Seminar, Session 3. I'm going to pass on the camera and a mic to Nick to start. Nick Landry Okay, am I on? Welcome everybody, great to see you all. This week I've put two texts up that I'm going to treat as being our sort of strange

attractor for this stuff, which is the Turing paper where the notion of the Turing test comes from the imitation game. And a Yudkowsky piece about the AI box experiment, which I'm sort of treating us on an orbital level, as a moon really of the Turing piece. As usual I don't really want to spend a huge amount of time in something that looks like

lecture mode. There's one sort of elaborate point that I want to make, and I say elaborate because it goes off in all kinds of directions. There's lots of off-ramps from it. I'll obviously not be following all of those. But the crucial point that I'm hoping to persuade people of is that the notion, sorry, can I just check? I mean, is this happening? Yeah. Sorry, it's just, OK. The notion of the. It's very much happening and it's live. I double-checked. Okay, yeah, yeah, cool. The notion of the imitation game is embedded in an incredibly

robust social historical framework. So that someone, I mean, I am obviously making no claim to expertise as a social historian, but this fundamental momentum of history is so resilient, so overwhelming in its pattern that I think it is completely safe against fundamental misrepresentation on the basis of a lack of minute historical expertise. And it's a history that ties the kind of specific questions about computers, how you would check

for artificial intelligence, and then as we see from Yudkowsky, specific modes of threat analysis, which Yudkowsky's text is very specifically about, that come out of that. in a very, very broad current of social, economic and technological process. And this is facilitated by the fact that imitation is a very, can be substituted very flexibly for a number terms and after you've finished with a series of these quasi synonymous expansions

you've covered an extraordinary amount of territory that you're into a across the whole swathe of economic modern economic and technological history and I think that a good way to start with this is by looking at the phenomenon all lot is on obviously named after net large who towards the end of the 18th century became this mythical symbol all I'm agitation we can take political agitation but maybe even that slight insurrection and it's a very sort of grassroots level

what's called I think helpfully labor strategy that's the sense on one level it's just comes very automatic keeper people of trying to improve or defend their bargaining shined within a particular economic environment and so obviously lot is a mistake early history all automation and automation we can say right from the start is to do with replacing human labor with machines now obviously this is open to arranger interpretations some of which I think up was a bleak and said that or has certainly have been possibly considered to be hyperbolic so for instance from one point if you

there's a notion right at the start at this particular type industrial technological labor history where people have thought that machines simply can relate these vast swathes of employment and the aggregate demand for human labour was going to be suppressed in some fundamental way. Now obviously up to this point that has been considered a that is reasonably considered a hyperbolic interpretation that you know new industrial areas are opened up and new ways of a finding opportunities for human employment arise and and so it's actually has a name as the Luddite

era the Luddite fallacy now as an aside we can say that obviously people now are beginning to wonder whether the Luddite fallacy is timeless or whether it has a certain expiry date whether there's a certain point in this process which these extremely pessimistic interpretations of Luddite politics become more persuasive. But I think we can probably bracket that, as we'll be bracketing things all the way through this. But the crucial point, the point that I want to start off with here, is just that right from the beginning of the modern economy, from the beginning of industrialization, there

There is an explicit politicized concern with the substitution of human labor by machines, by people by machines. And I think that there is a very continuous current, you know, that a lot of, a lot of, If you were to say, use the description Luddism to describe a certain kind of political posture, I think it's one that is extremely resilient and that you will find recurring over and over again with every new wave of industrialization. The first wave, first of all, was with certain types of cultural machinery, but then, much

much more importantly I think with textile machinery because the industrialization, the automation and mechanization of textile production was obviously the driver of the first wave of industrialization and therefore is the kind of ancestral form of the capitalist capitalist economy she and if we kind of them role forward from that the the solidity of this lineage and takes on us a sort of second and threat because a machine that i'm sure everyone has heard of but is a think crucial part of

any any story of these lines is the Jacquard loom. And the Jacquard loom is a proto-computer. It's called a proto-computer because it was partially programmable and introduced the notion of using a punched card information system to actually set the behavior of the machine. So by the time we've got to the Jack of Loon, sorry, I had a date for it, which I'm now, I think I won't. I was going to ask, because I was going to put it to the trajectory of the, what

do you call it, the Babbage's machine, and see which one. Yes. The Jack of Loon's a little bit earlier. well now I say maybe I'm maybe I'm jumping to key shocking I'm just about to give you an exact day I am yeah first demonstrated in 18 a one so Babbage's difference engine which was well well I ground I well yes I mean it will he'd keep was not very good at execution so all his projects kind of smeared out across a long period and he was still messing around with this in the 1830s but

the different engine was a little bit after the jack-o-lantern but it was not a programmable machine Babbage's programmable machine, the analytical engine which again I've been totally incompetent, sorry just give me one second and yet after it was first gripped in 1837 so we've got our time period is fairly compact as a few decades at the beginning of the nineteenth century

where the mechanization of human labor is being subject to the secondary process of automation and becoming programmable. No, that's... Sorry, what are you apologizing for, Mal? I just murmured something, I'm sorry. OK, that's fine. No, murmuring is encouraged. So, two waves of this thing that I think the important thing from my point of view on this is that there's a great sense of continuity in this.

Like the mechanization of these processes tied up, I think, in absolutely unquestionably with these very, very basic notions, two that I think I'll restrict myself to at the moment. the roots of modern political economy which is division of labor and commoditization. Division of labor I think cannot be concretely or realistically conceived without reference to this process of the mechanization of various labor processes. And if you actually look at the sort of discussion of Adam Smith, he always says division of labour is the key to all economic efficiency in the wealth of nations.

And his example, the classic example of everyone knows of this, is the pin factory. And it's all about breaking down a particular production process into a number of discrete elements and allowing for its rationalization mechanization formalization so there's an interplay between in industrialization between the technological process and the labor process the division of labor is is crossing those two lines and the topic is absolutely indissoluble its its I think industrialism is a and integral concept it doesn't have a separable economic

and technological pole you know you can use those you can you can try to abstract those things out from each other but when you do so you more your moving in the direction of art and they and their real integration happens within the industrial process So you could say... Can I ask a question or should we just let you go? No, interruptions are totally fine. No. Go for it. No. You know, the last thing you said about artifice is a whole new thing that I didn't really understand what you mean by that. But the way I look, the way I've looked at it previously and I just want to like use what what you said as a way of supporting the way I've I've thought about it is like

is that is that you complicating the very picture you're providing because because to me what you're saying is that the that the emergence of artificial intelligence begins with the integral integration of humans in in a sort of like a specialized form into this system into this machine so there is no separate artificial intelligence other than the one that that somehow organizes human activity whether it's a little intellectual activity or or physical labor activity and you are totally on the the core topic of this

this is exactly what I'm hoping this is going to be about. Because obviously when we get to the Turing test, we're still in this zone. So we're now talking explicitly about how would you recognise intelligence from the machine, and you're talking about would it be able to imitate a human being adequately or to our satisfaction. So we're still in that zone. What I'm trying to say here is that question in its prehistoric or ancestral forms has been there since the beginning of the industrial economy. Like the industrial task has always been within its zone of tolerance at any point. Can we adequately substitute a human activity, a form of human behaviour that's been formalised and specialised and

rationalize with a machine substitute. So I think... Are you saying that one comes before the other one? Which is sort of like, are you saying like division of labor then is the precondition for the substitution of human by machine or you're saying that they're yin and yang and they work together? Well, I'm sure the feedback is that you would get into trouble by looking for a strong sense of priority in those. But what I do think comes first is the actual dynamic of – I'll put it in quasi Marxist terms without wanting to make that sacred. I mean, I think it's very convenient – labour substitution. Labour substitution comes first. And I think

I was going to just invoke very briefly Jane Jacobs' discussion in the economy of cities, which is also all about substitution, and in that sense, import substitution. And she says, leave it aside again, this is another bracketing, exactly how credible her account of the economic evolution of cities is, and just take this argument as an abstract piece of machining. She says the way a city actually individuates and develops is that there's a flow of imports into that city. I mean, a city by its very nature is not autonomous. I mean, sorry, I could get lost in this because there's a very interesting non-linear tangle.

But a city by definition cannot feed itself, it cannot support itself. It has to trade, it has to be commercial in order to exist. And she says, so you can assume that a city is consuming a whole series of products that it is not itself providing. And her argument is that the basic dynamic by which a city develops and individuates itself is by a process the fundamental economic driver of urban development is import substitution. so that various a entrepreneurs in that city well will look at the sort of things that have been consumed in the city and they will make them locally in a

in a strategic attempt to replace a flow of imports into the city so you know she's saying basically a copycat economy is the fundamental driver this process of economic substitution is is the basic job I'm and I think that this is a extremely important very highly generalize hockey and it's almost co-instance seems to me with with what people call realism in sort of social history also them even they were cool materialism the true account it up there economic fact which is that

and despite all the hype about technology and invention and innovation be driven by an attempt to to generate these completely new unexpected unanticipated products and then deliver them to the market and no one's saying that doesn't happen at all but that is a secondary and in some economic sense parasitic process upon this much more fundamental social dynamic of substitution so that the industrialist as we've seen going back the industrialist, the industrial revolution doesn't start with inventing some new thing the invention is

in an interesting means and relation to something else that what the industrialist tries to do is to just substitute for the process of production or something that people are already consuming you know people already doing agricultural work so you make a piece of agricultural machinery that will be economically competitive with the the modes of human labor-intensive agricultural production people are already consuming textiles you don't invent something that they can they stick they were in clothes already you're not trying to get them to change from clothes and something else instead you're trying to get them to buy clothes from you that have been produced with much more

industrial machine and capital intensity then the clothes that they were wearing before that's why I started with this lot is that that conflict is there right from the start So if you go to the origins of this technological industrial process, it's not about the new inventions sneak in. I mean, obviously it's totally innovative because the machinery in the factory is all new. You know, the whole, all the new modes of automation in the factory that have brought in this revolution course it's not what it's innovation but what it's actually is economic function

is substituent that's what's paying stuff that's what's driving it that those are the reliable markets that's that that's the kind of economic base of the whole process is to do something that is already being done but do it through mechanization and and and later automation for automation rather than doing it in the labor-intensive way that it was being originally done so when I say about living a robust resilient social history of this stuff this is what I'm referring to it's the fact that this deep deep process of substitution is something that is taking place right from the beginning

of the Industrial Revolution and and at the economic level it's a thing that's pushing the whole thing and that innovation is serving the substitution, the replacement of existing activities with a mechanical process of higher efficiency, higher capital intensity. so yeah I think I'll just rush myself sorry there are some questions on the side if you want to get into them or you want to continue on is your choice well maybe maybe if I can just add one more ingredient to this story and then

throw it open and then if for any reason people are lacking in discussion material we can go back to this which is just which is just to crank it forward we've all you've already raised the analytical engine for us by so with through that baggage state through the truth that this technology becomes programmable I'm wearing to a certain automation and that when we get to the real a beginning at the age of the electronics and computer it inheriting this deep lineage with all of the momentum in that you so when you read for instance a was church touring thesis

and these these sort of decisive papers on the theory of computation I think they have to be corrupt in this context you know they they've they've already got these machines they already got punch card technology that's come out at these a huge is and they already had at their 40 p.m. that is in this whole problematic to do with substation they're not inventing that as a kind of theoretical problem that's a problem they have inherited that the industrial the fundamental drivers of this industrial process have put on the table over and over and over again for several centuries by the time they get to it so that the definition of the computer

is tied up in this really fascinating double sense with in attention just as at the theoretical level in addition to to because what it is to be a computer is that something can simulate a a universal Turing machine and a universal Turing machine can simulate that behavior of any other discrete state machine so we've got another off on what are the limits of a discrete state machine there's masses of stuff about this I'm treating as Turing down that the limits are not very constricting that's to say a discrete state machine can do

pretty much anything that you can imagine could possibly be done but there are arguments about that but leaving that aside just for the moment a computer therefore is something that simulate something that can simulate everything is this double is double processed auction there are known search the universal term machine is a virtual machine it's a it's a mathematical object but it's a mathematical object that is sufficiently well understood that you can test and actual machine a computer as to how well it's able to simulate a universal Turing machine and if it can simulate a universal Turing machine adequately

then it's judged to be Turing complete and because it's involved in that double simulation it's able therefore to simulate the behavior of any other mechanical system that is not only yet instantiated in history but is even conceivable so we then obviously again this is an off-ramp to be taken off perhaps on another occasion that we've got scientific biology and neurology and the biological study of man describing the human organism as a discrete state machine so it falls in theory in principle into the zone of computer simulation

but as mentioned last week and I think that this is extremely extremely suggestive us I'm is the word computer itself and the word computer was already according I think I just been Wikipedia starts again based on the impressive scholarship but it's 1630 people had already used the word computer for it was it was a kind of standard piece cap release you know on this time to to represent a human profession you know computer was somebody who computers and as I say from the beginning of the 17th century we know the world was used in that time

Wikipedia again has got a really nice quote from the New York Times May 2nd 1892 quote a computer wanted the examination will include the subjects of algebra, geometry, trigonometry and astronomy. So, first of all obviously Turing, sorry I should add one ingredient to this, is the fact that this comes to a climax exactly at the period Turing is doing his work, his famous work at Fletcher Park, but more generally his computer studies is in at a point in time which for various historical reasons

the computer as an occupation has reached this crescendo the military intelligence system is employing computers by the thousands as it has never done before to do these routinized specialized broken down tasks with numbers so for sharing to talk about a computer he surrounded by he's he's he's he's employing computers computers human computers are every at this and so digital electronic computer at the point of its own rising is absolutely the substitution

for all hate absolutely tightly defined intuitively straight forward unproblematic human occupation. It's hard for us I honestly think I mean maybe people can argue this but it seems to be hard for us to now read computer in that context. You know we obviously think when we think of the computer we think of a machine. We don't think that when Turing is using the word computer he's saying this is a machine Russian all the human occupation it's therefore absolutely in this continuously new trying right back to these first textile machines that are artificial looms all these

artificial machines that are that get their names that get their identity that echo auction and their revenue streams from the act that they are substituting for some defined set of human activities. And the computer, I don't need to say, is not any kind of break from that at all. It's completely in this continuous historical lineage as being a mechanical substitution for something that the name itself at the time this raised means a human specialization. So yeah, okay, I think I should open open this up at this point because…

According to the sidebar question, it seems like maybe Ivan wants to… Ivan, do you want to propose what you were asking? Oh sure, I thought it was very interesting you mentioned the industrial revolution and tying innovation specifically to the problem of labor substitution. So what you're describing as you say innovation that kind of surprising one sneaks up on us. In management of innovation studies they call it incremental versus disruptive innovation and Kodak famously invented the digital photograph, digital photography and then didn't develop it because they didn't want to impact their existing revenue streams.

So I'm just wondering when we talk of AI and we talk of this emergent intelligence, I'm thinking of what are the economic drivers to further increasing this. I posted a paper about the plateauing of growth and productivity, and there seems to be this question of very tied into this contemporary concern with AI is where the next wave of industrial evolution will come from. many people turn to AI to answer this question or as Jake mentioned, nanotechnology, 3D printing and I guess will we ever reach a tipping point sort of where the cost savings of labour substitution are negligible so it's better to keep a bunch of brown people occupied in factories and busy and tired

than it is to pretty much render them obsolete. So yeah, I suppose a lot of money goes into through R&D and that money needs to be driven by certain economic incentives. Sure. Now maybe this is a kind of Marxist argument, I'm not totally sure, but it seems to me that if you look at this historical process, it leads to the suggestion that the fundamental economic driver is you just look at your wage costs or the wage costs in any zone of activity and treat that as the potential payoff for mechanization. You can take a bite

out of that. So you just say, look, who is being paid at the moment? We're paying doctors a lot of money, we're paying teachers a lot of money. You just look at the height that it doesn't have to be that individually the people seem to be receiving the money, but just in aggregate, what is the total wage cost of any zone of economic activity and that is a potential gold mine for mechanization. I suppose as well, in a cybernetic view, which is mostly very different. Yeah, sorry.

Your sound is a little bit cutting in and out, Ivan, actually, so... Oh, you always have to swear. I'm just fine. No, there must be a bit of delay as well. Actually, because we can hear Ivan clearly, I think it's your internet that had just a little bit of an interruption. Oh, okay, I apologize for that, Ben. Yeah, sorry. This is probably going through various types of... My rejoin to that is, in a cybernetic view, is what if now we know how this process works, So people are well aware of, as you mentioned, I'm quite interested in that Luddite fallacy, the theorization of the end of that. And if we look at it in the aggregate, it's possible that today we would fear the social

changes of further labor substitution. So it's possible that innovation could to some extent be or be slowed down. As Jake mentioned, 70% of pharmaceutical industries spend on marketing, not actual R&D, because it's very hard to actually tie the cost sunk into R&D to actual productivity gains and new products. Yes. I mean, I think the pharmaceutical industry is an extremely complicated example. So, I mean, I'm tempted to push it a bit to the sidelines because there's so many weird things about it. It's like super regulated. it has all these intellectual property issues to do with it. It's a very strange and difficult industry.

But in general, the potential for kind of social conflicts and very complicated social dynamics in all of these zones is that obviously as a consumer, you are going to benefit from anything that cuts the costs of what you're consuming. And as a producer, you're going to be, your bargaining position is going to be subverted if your specialism, your productive specialism, is being mechanically substituted. Sorry, I don't even know, I'm not going to go into a big thing on this, but just to say, I don't know, did I even really mention commoditization? Because that was going to be the second term

along with division of labor. I think I probably side-checked myself. Yeah, you did not discuss commodification. Yes, because it's just to say commoditization is also all about substitution. If you're in an industry that's commoditized, then there's lots of alternative sources of the product that you're doing. They're all substitutable for each other. You therefore don't get a premium on them. And obviously the whole Marxian political economy is all about the commoditization of labor, meaning exactly the same thing. So do with substitution. There's various ways you can be substituted. It's not entirely to do with technology. But obviously there is a deep inner conceptual connection between the notions of mechanical

substitution and commoditization. Those two things really work so closely together, they're very hard to disentangle from each other. And professions, obviously their nightmare is commoditization. There is a whole bunch of the firing line right now. Obviously one One big example is doctors. It's almost the kind of iconic profession. Ambition-driven ethnic groups have always said, become a doctor. It's a really safe way to guarantee some kind

of social security because it's a profession, it's hard, meaning implicitly it's not commoditized. And I think just as we speak we're on this cusp where artificial expert systems are showing a performance against medical judgment that is actually shockingly good. I think there's a lot of just cultural inertia in people recognizing quite how good it is. I mean, I'll go right out on a limb, and I say in a lot of cases if you allowed yourself to be diagnosed by computer, you would not be taking any statistical risks above and

beyond those that you're taking dealing with a human doctor. But irrespective of the realism of that particular analysis, it's nevertheless only a matter of time that you get these professional specialisms going into this kind of automation, commoditization, grinding mill. and at those and what has they do I think go on the car steamroller of course those groups are gonna screech like company I mean it's like they're just not arts at the not is a miss in this month as the current transferable transferable social anxiety that goes to everyone who's on the front line

of automation and Tom but unless and are so many professions are being simultaneously threatened with extermination by machine replacement, that they form some kind of absolute social majority, it seems hard to see how they can get the leverage to, as Ivan saying, actually let's stop this process and make it grind to a halt. I mean this is all slightly digression from the Anthropole security anxiety. The Anthropole security anxiety is more that if you're sitting around the Anthropole war

room and you're trying to be realistic about the threat that you're dealing with here, You're looking at the threat is posed by this very, very deep historical process. You're not talking about a few contingent technological possibilities that might happen that could be alarming. You're looking at the very foundations of modern human civilization posing something that looks like an ex-risk. Because, and you see this coming out of a lot of these current, I'm sure everyone, it's not just me, I think, that there's a massive amount of media about this stuff.

And one characteristic tendency in a lot of it is that it is discovering how, between the most exotic type of AI exorist threads and these very mundane Luddite concerns. And what makes that line blurry is that as soon as you're talking about human replacement in some specific industrial field, you're already at an abstract level talking about the same thing that the most hysterical type of ex-risk discourse is talking about when amplified to this apocalyptic level.

If Anthropole says, you know, our big concern is with human replacement, I mean, that's the next. Some of the experts say, well, human replacement is what this has been about absolutely consistently for 300 years. that's what this is we can't even we have no conception can't even conceptualize capitalism about the notion of human replacement we can't conceptualize the history of technology we can't conceptualize automation we can't conceptualize anything that's been happening to us in recent centuries without human replacement being fundamental to our understanding of what's been happening You can go further back, it's like you just said it, you just arbitrarily deciding the

300 year or 400 year as the mark but using a different understanding of what constitutes technology you can probably go like even further back and further back. I'm sure, yes, I'm sure it's an arbitrary starting point. Yes. But, okay, so, because I am trying to, like, play some form of a teacher assistant here while I'm, like, being a student as well as, like, whatever. If anybody who had a comment on the sidebar after Ivan, I see Joel saying something, right? And Jake bringing up something, and then Burke saying something. I don't know if you guys want to like...

Joel basically put this large quote by Marx at 7.32. I don't know if you want to discuss it, Joel. What is relevance? Well, I mean, part of the issue, and this goes back to your comment about this arbitrary date, I'm not so sure that that is a completely arbitrary thing that can keep going back. specifically insofar as that and I mean obviously dating modernity is very difficult but there is something that occurs with the modern with the capital form with the emergence of the commodity that does cause a very specific rupture which sort of does start to begin this process and this is what

the Marx quote was kind of getting at people were talking about the division of labor and this idea of whether or not the costs will eventually change. I mean, according to Marx, they never will. There will continuously be this sort of research and development aspect of it until it gets to the point where the labor, the human itself becomes superfluous to the process. That was really just kind of the point of that quote of throwing that in there. For him, it kind of works itself out until the human becomes completely alienated away from the labor and is no longer even a function of it. right now I think that's I think that's why and and I mean this is why I think starting with not to some is it's good because I think you can

obviously say as mo is saying that you can there are precursors take a persuasive precursors and as a hit technology that trace but the fact that at a certain point in history relatively discreetly you get this outbreak suddenly all machine breaking as some kind of social activity that makes immediate sense to people seem to have strong economic incentives and it doesn't need at the time detailed explanation why people doing this that seems to me to suggest as you say that there's a threshold element to this but I think industrialization yeah the reason why I brought that up Nick

is is the example I used in the Chicago my Chicago sort of opening opening little little talk right because because if you take your substitution substitution concept like a little bit further are basically my argument was that was that alphabetic languages were kind of like a substitution of like this like totally like too complex hieroglyphic and and coin a form type of language which kind of like made it really hard to sort of like uh create an easy and faster and more universal system of communication when alphabet emerged out of the Mesopotamia. Actually, it's not Mesopotamia because it emerges in Sinai

Peninsula. Or then you can even say like language substituted intuition, which was something we inherited from animals, right? Like the whole concept of language as, you know, but I mean these are just like becoming more metaphysical. But you can argue, I mean, sure, if you're looking at a particular type of like, particular type of limited understanding of what economy is, sure, maybe you're right, Joel, and we have to set it in like 400 years ago with emergence of interest or capitalization and emergence of commodity and all that, and I can totally respect and understand that, but there's other ways of extending this which are what I like to do. Right.

Yeah. I mean, would you sort of think that there was some kind of proto-Luddism on behalf of, I don't know, priest-castes that were being sort of economically threatened by these semiotic changes? It seems to me that you'd be able to predict that if you were going to be able to push that analogy strongly. There certainly was, at least if we look at when the Bible began to be translated, the priest class certainly came out and was opposed to the fact of their books being translated into a common language so they were no longer the mediators of it. Oh, you're talking now about we're in the modern period now. I mean, this gets more modern. I mean, it does, but I don't know if there's examples of this previously to that, but there are at least historic precedent that we can point to of something like that occurring.

Yeah. Well, I would definitely be reluctant to limit modernity in such a way that the printing press was pushed out of it. The printing press in the West. You know, I think obviously the printing press in China didn't catalyze those same processes, but in the West it seems to me it's such an integral part of what we mean by entering the modern world that it would be odd to treat that form of mechanization as somehow outside our scope. So can we, I think probably like a Burke

would be the next person, and then Jake. Burke, Jake, whichever one. Um, yeah. Jake, do you, do you... Burke is silent. No, uh, Burke. Why don't we start with Jake? I was just sort of thinking about Ivan's point, and, like, it definitely seems apt that we're seeing it actually happening where there's a disincentive to pursue things that only manifest as marginal gains in productivity because they've sunk so low, but there's still surplus to be gained from going further.

And how that surplus, sorry, I'm really tired right now, where that surplus is distributed is a matter of the second order cybernetics of the problem. And it's something that we do, we don't do with markets for the most part. Or whose large-scale distribution is not something has principally been accomplished by the same open, rapid-paced markets that primary manufacturing innovation is happening in. So the example for me would be there's $20 trillion in listed assets and unextracted oil and natural gas reserves in the ground. And that's why there's never going to be carbon emission mitigation on any significant scale, even if that was still possible. It mattered if total climate catastrophe wasn't pretty much inevitable at this point.

It would still not happen because you're never going to be able to write off $20 trillion in listed assets. It's just not going to be, it's impossible. And as a problem of how do we better model this surplus as future availability to more actors and different kinds of actors and rapidly redistribute it as a decision making process for that. I can definitely see a lack of that creating the kind of problem that Ivan talks about without it being sort of a conscious systematic decision to use cheap workers in order to keep them politically under control and not bothering to go after various things. It's just that

it's in no one's incentives and the incentives can't change fast enough because it's at that second order level that we don't have good mechanisms for. would be kind of just my spitballing gloss. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm quite bridging the thing between okay, you've got the hydrocarbon reserves argument that are not going to be wasted. It's politically unimaginable that people could... Well, it's not even the wasting of them. It's just like they have a price value on the books. The distribution of power and who has incentives to do what is based

on the assumption of those things as existing value now. Right. So how does that cross into the labour argument? You couldn't just take us through that one more time, could you? What are the assets there? Populations that are simultaneously political and social unrest control problems and labouring populations. What do you do with all of these people? But you see, now that is such an extra economic question that it's very hard for that. You see, that seems to me more analogous to your flip side of your fossil

people argument. Like you can say, look, if you beyond a certain point if you're throwing people out of any feasible possible to be employed you can have message how cannot be coordinated as a social political up mean up to now history suggests it just now once a copy but it it's extremely difficult but a court of because because for any particular it as long as you have distributed economic agents who could locally benefit from some incremental advance in mechanization, then they're going to do that, they're going to get a competitive advantage from that, they're going to expand

their market, they're going to push that process forward by these totally uncoordinated, local, economic incentive driven processes. It's a loser's game to try to stop mechanization. That doesn't make sense. That's not the way to do it. The problem is where does the surplus created by the diminishing cost of production go? It's only when you remove people's access to the economic flows while increasing them that you have this sort of widening asymmetry that makes less and less sense. Amy and I were kind of... That sense in what... as sent from some global perspective but I'm just wondering whether that global perspective is ever

actually realizable I mean in a kind of actual in an actual effective politics or an actual effective regulatory framework I mean leaving aside questions about the practicality just the cuts sheer coordination in the sense that I'm You do it in a mega-herb. What is it? You do it in a mega-herb. You do it in a high concentration of wealth, technology, highly coordinated politics, I don't know, a mega-herb with the right politics and enough concentration of wealth to make the transition without a catastrophic loss of economic coherence could manage it. Not on a global scale, but regional, I could see it. I don't know where or how soon, but Latin America maybe?

You're saying you can see a set of policies that would be plausible? Something more structurally complex than universal basic income, and that was more integrated with algorithmic governance and smart cities, tokenization of basic access to resources like transportation and power and internet and information access and things like that, stuff that is much easier and cheaper to coordinate when you're already in both an urban environment and an urban environment that's an intelligent urban environment with a lot of what behind it. Localized, already coordinated. I don't know, that's the first really plausible place that comes to mind where something like

that could happen. Because I agree with you, I mean, I just, I don't, I don't really see other than just sort of like hoping that it naturally emerges from, you know, P2P 3D printing or something, that there's any kind of strategy for seeing that happen. I mean, I think you're right. The universal basic income proposal is extremely, has a huge historical momentum behind it and seems on some very abstract level to kind of compensate for what's happening in some very natural and rationally convincing fashion. So that then takes me back to this coordination problem. I mean, the universality of the universal basic income,

to me, is what's screaming coordination problem. Like how obviously people are going to try to root around paying for a universal basic income. So you need a sort of universal political space that can kind of make that kind of… Kind of a prison problem, because what you're seeing right now is precisely the opposite. Major wealth holders keeping things in cash, like underinvestment, refusal to fund the government as a whole, all over the world, austerity, and all forth. Yeah, and it's obviously that is going to get easier, isn't it?

I mean, the possibility of opting out of social solidarity is something I would expect to be technologically facilitated. Is that not... you don't think so? I mean, there's a long sort of thing in American culture, that there's whatever it is, we can take 20% GDP in taxes, and that's it. We can move taxes up or down and shift our regulations and all of that kind of thing. There's just this, it's simply not impossible. I don't know whether they're kind of Laffer curve effects or various kinds of kind of

perverse incentives but it's just structurally impossible to capture more than a certain proportion. So we basically think there would have to be major structural breakdown, a catabolic cycle, like a local level, a regional catabolic cycle, like Arab Spring or the current Brazil Argentina situation, or we can point to various, fast forward 10 years and see where it might go and then during the restructuring if it just happens to go better than any other such situation in history so far but because there is more wealth, more resources like the equivalent of the alphabet, more of this information and this ability for good ideas to spread.

These are wishful thinking, we already had that restructuring potential right around the 2008 right but no no no no I'm talking like more than that like yeah a three-month credit freeze like we ain't seen nothing yet especially when you're talking about disasters that you have but I'm gonna fight off I'm gonna fight off Jake here for a second. Jake, what I was trying to say is that that's great, lovely, but the thing is the temperature of the class consciousness and class struggle is in freezing

points. Any kind of crisis might only lead to more drastic movement in the opposite direction. Right. Which is actually the more. Right. Right. I mean, like the more C. Because you have to, you know what I mean, I'm borrowing this metaphor from Walter Benjamin even though I don't really agree with a lot of things he's known for, but the actual temperature of class struggle and consciousness has a lot to do with how these ruptures can be utilized for emancipatory change, right? I mean, it's like we have to be fooling ourselves to think that the temperature of class struggle or class consciousness in America, or in fact in Europe, is at a place where any kind of disruption can be productively put in emancipatory direction.

So the American example would be, okay, so whatever happens, something happens. You get a breakdown in the regional, in the coherence of the 50 states. And so you get a breakdown into regional power groups like Northeast, West Coast, etc. I could see the Northeast making this work, like being able to make the jump to... A better algorithmic government that does this kind of stuff you were talking about. Right, it replaces a lot of its infrastructure. It's got a much, much more educated class and a whole bunch of knowledge economic production. Okay, I love that type of threat to human security. Let's bring this technology on at the cost of breaking up United States and Canada and Mexico.

I don't know. I very much buy Reza's, however he puts it, that there's always another way out. if you think that there's only one monological way that can proceed, and it's securitization and the concentration of abstract resources into one capital class, proletarianization and security politics, and that nothing else happens in any other circumstance. You're just not looking at enough possible permutations of circumstance. No, for sure. I mean, for sure these scenarios all need to be pursued. but I'm skeptical about exactly what you're seeing here if we take it up to the most abstract level of this notion of

people sitting around what do we mean by the AI threat and obviously there's the lurid versions of something Yudkowsky gets very quickly into us being breaking down for our atoms that are being wasted and could be used from now but on this basic income thing which is basically a draft version for fully automated luxury communists and it's basically saying there's this massive techno surplus it could be given to people no problem that's the only way to avoid masses of social conflicts it would all be very rational and all of this but you end up in that story with a

a human population that has been defined as being fundamentally non-productive that is being basically supported by this machinic production structure and being supported I mean on a basis that is I mean I'm just wondering what's the difference between that and saying let's turn ourselves into zoo animals you know it's like we're basically saying let's set up a system where the machines do all the work produce everything and then keep us you know provide this these resources in order to keep us healthy and cheerful and I mean is that

not a kind of self... You know, are we not just producing this human being tended by... This isn't really a proposal or a normative sort of counter so much as other forks that have... I mean, in the sense that the prisoner's dilemma, like ultimately, both agents cooperating is going to get the most return, So for human social structures, which will continue to exist for at least the first phase of increasingly intelligent distributed production and everything, there is a win strategy other than the everybody defects and then pay for security, the jackpot scenario or whatever.

And so what I'm trying to explore is, like, is it reasonable to think that in certain areas the parameters will be right for the emergence of the strategy? Because once that strategy, like, can take hold, it does produce a winning surplus that would allow it to sustain itself for some time. But so who's it? No, go ahead. No, sorry. I'm just interested. I'm losing track of who the agents are in this scenario now. Well, it's really, it's so hard to define. We're not really sure whether we're talking about autonomous corporations, one run by people, public, private, you know, city institutions,

and algorithmic ones. Like, you know, there's so many concrete images of how this kind of scenario works out that I just keep wanting to default to, like, game theoretic pictures. Yeah, no, I think that's good. I think that's great. But for the game theoretic picture, we need to know a bit about who are the agents. Who's playing this game? Don't you think? It's whoever has the opportunity to capitalize on big liberations of surplus from the reduction of the marginal value of some kind of production, including potentially information or knowledge, but coordination production. If you talk about smart cities and sort of intelligent urbanization and physical coordination.

Yeah, whoever has the allocation of the opportunity to capitalize on that liberation of surplus and then the decisions that whoever those opportunities are allocated to make. So there's two filters there. Which in each regional case is going to be, I mean, it's going to be highly idiosyncratic, I would assume, or at least I can't. Well, I think that's actually quite... I have a point to see the instrumentation when you say that. And a third criteria would be who actually has the capacities and industrial or knowledge, you could say, rather, in the case of AI, who has actually the capacity to generate AI.

and that talks to like a political economy of information and knowledge and it's not just three engineers in a garage the huge sort of software conglomerates unfortunately it isn't unfortunately but isn't anymore yeah there are some other comments kind of related on the sidebar Amy Amy's talking about vulnerable dependents and Joel's talking about human zoo but maybe Amy because she's trying to like she's trying to bring in another piece of text into the picture so yeah you wanna like you wanna Amy you wanna like I was just um a very like commentary on the conversation that you guys were having

then that this kind of hope predicament and the paradigm of replacement that you've sketched really well Nick is kind of bringing us back to this idea of there is a fundamental, and this is certainly out to question, distinction between the human and the non-human that can never ever be successfully muddied in any kind of symbiosis or like co-evolutionary extrapolation of its abilities. There will always be a limit where its plasticity hits its threshold and then there will be a substitution, competition, annihilation come into play at that point. So it seems to me that this whole discussion for the human is contingent on this idea of

what the threshold of plasticity is. It comes back to that kind of idea that the question that I read out last week that Reza's kind of critique of this stuff was that it did presuppose an almost theological notion of what the human was in order to do away with it. Whereas I mean you can still do away with it. I think the trouble with this plasticity argument, it is crucially important of course, but in actual fact the dimension of plasticity is reflected in this huge dilation of social in the policy. So the more plastic, the more it's possible for people to respond creatively

to this situation and to strike up various kinds of alliances and symbiosis with it and what in DeGarris' kind of framework he talks about the cyborg option as opposed to the people who are just kind of siding with the machines or aligning themselves against the machines, is that I think that is what we're seeing and what it does is it produces this massively expanding social spectrum. Because plasticity is not something that is manifested at the level of the collectivity. You know, it's manifested at the level of, at the most at the most small groups almost certainly

individuals, you know, where the range of adaptive response is huge to this thing. So it's just what I'm saying is I'm not sure, in terms of like the kind of, we're on the kind of sociological crisis mode more than more fully eschatological machine crisis mode at the moment in this thing. And it seems to me that that isn't in any way ameliorated by a reference plasticity. Amin, you have to... I mean, unless you're going to say, I would, you know, to throw this back theologically,

that it's a universal characteristic of the humour that there is this plasticity that means that you know in general universally and and without exception humans are going to sort of cope with this thing. I'm just I'm not sure at all that I see where that's coming from or just realistically that we can see anything like that happening. It seems you know that we've now got a techno-lead now we've got this whole question about what is this weird sociology of Silicon Valley of the neurologically atypical groups that are especially advantaged in the fact that they show high adaptability to these changes, way beyond what is normal. So sorry, I'm not being super particular

about this, but I'm just not sure that it does the kind of things that you're hoping it's going to do in terms of social optimism. Yeah, well, so you're saying that there is a kind of, there is possibly an ultimately extensible plasticity, but it's available to small parts of society that have the technology No, well I think it's an intensive thing. We know that the human nervous system is highly powerful, I mean, you know, but in reference to other things, other animals, whatever, that's beyond question. I mean, humans are at home in the environment that is nothing at all like their ancestral

environment, and they seem to be really un-traumatized by it. So there's no doubt that there's massive plasticity in the human nervous system. There's also no doubt that there are extreme constraints in plasticity of the human nervous system. I mean I sort of you resting just because it's a big populist convincing book like I knows much more than me about this but Steven Pinker's the blank slate book which just runs through this whole thing about human universals stuff about the human nervous system that is very specific and concrete and completely when this incredible any notion of some kind of absolute blank slate so there's so it's an intermediate

an intermediate position between a fixed instinctual repertoire and some infinite plastic pure reason and within that zone there is massive there is a massive spectrum of human variation and I think that we can just just that seems to be an uncontroversial sociological fact. I mean it's just that clearly there are groups who are so competent at dealing. I'm sort of talking about Silicon Valley is the iconic bunch, you know, it selects deliberately for these people. People who are at home with

the staff, who are highly adaptive with it, have a whole series where they seem to be, other contexts massive socio-psychological disabilities but in the context of working with machines are highly planted and people who are just hopelessly just numbed and crushed by what is happening. It seems like that's like, what isn't the much better example of like exactly how you just described like Silicon Valley which has all kinds of confounding network effect factors is I mean is the autism spectrum. Yes, that I think comments are very good. At its high end, which we don't normally see high ends in spectrums of debilitating neuroatypical variation,

but at the high end, it looks like it works a lot better with where things are going in terms of society. The rapid variation produces a lot of deleterious cases, but maybe it seems increasingly fewer of them. like, I don't know, it seems in the context of the epigenetics research that's been coming out over the last 20 years, it seems more and more likely or hard to deny that there's a, you know, a sub-Darwinian, like, adaptation, like, rapid adaptation, you know, like a population stress response, whatever you want to call it, like, that is playing in the autistic. It doesn't have to be in Silicon Valley. It's everywhere. It's all over. Everywhere that's exposed to. A six-year-old relative of mine who has autism figured out my iPhone password in two seconds

and hacked into my phone. Like literally. And knew how to go in and do everything in it. Just like that. Wait, hold on. What was your password? Was it a stupid password? Like how did he explain the process? Yeah, no, he just, like, from the way I moved my hand on my phone, I guess he just figured out how I did it. But once inside, he knew how to do everything else, too. So it's, like, it doesn't have to be in, like, Silicon Valley. But Laura had something. Laura's a guest today, and we invited Laura to come because there were, like, spots left. So, Laura, do you want to, like, propose what you were saying? Yes.

Hello? Can you hear me? Yes. Yes, yes. I was just wondering whether the process of industrialization and commoditization that we've been talking about is instead rather more about a repositioning of the role of the human in relation to the machine. And I don't know, my idea or the way I'm kind of seeing it is like perhaps in relation to to last week's discussion. What I've been thinking about is the idea that this human has impacted this material or the material root of this, perhaps intelligence, to growing and I don't know.

And on the other hand, and another thing, because then Adam and Mo were talking about symbiosis, but it's a process of symbiosis, doesn't that imply an element of mutual benefit? So I don't know, I don't think… No, I think this is… This is all… I mean, one concern I have is the fact that obviously when we're moving this token of human it can disguise things as well as kind of expose things and so it seems to be unlikely

that there is some sort of human essence here that is being consistently exposed to the same outcome in this process. It's very tempting because of the fact that within the Marxist tradition the notion of abstract labour power, and you get to this notion, it's very important. I'm not accusing Amy of some kind of vulgar Marxism, but I think it comes out of this deep tradition, it's a very important thing, that the notion of abstract labour power, is the complement of this process, tends to produce this notion that there is some kind of universal human plastic potentiality that therefore gives us some kind of guarantees

about social outcomes on this, which I think is a bit optimistic, I mean I think it's a bit hopeful in the sense that I think when people are sidelined by the machines and on the local level they are simply sidelined. The individual economic unit, the old factory or the new unit will just dispose of people that are useless to it. Now in the aggregate as obviously like the libertarian type of market optimists are high on the list of the class this say well those people will find something new did you know I mean and if you look at historical record

their kinda indicate I you know there's no long-term trend to increase in watch on so that seems to suggest arts that's wrong but the point the cynical skeptical and realistic pessimistic and workers I think spent on time tonight is that at what happens to people when they're pushed or or beyond the peri for this person is go let me extremely heterogeneous so some people are going to be pushed into some new entrepreneurial invented former symbiotic with machine some people are gonna just be dysfunction or its its its

there's nothing about what they are about human nature in general or universal that is going to promise something more positive than that. I entirely agree with you on this. I think the point is that in the present context that even if someone's been laid off because his job has been replaced by a machine, is still going to be likely to go on Facebook and provide free labor in terms of data that are then used and retitled and traded for the profit of the usual few companies. So, I don't know. I'm kind of saying that perhaps, I don't know, an element of logistics, perhaps, like a logistical

aspect of the whole like intelligent, super intelligent machine which wants to get rid of the human but cannot in a way I don't know if I entirely agree with the paper to maximize I think there is like reluctantly the super intelligent machine still needs like perhaps the human I don't know. I think the thing is once you get concrete about agents, it's possible to be more specific about some of these things. The local industrial unit wants to simply cut labour costs.

So getting rid of humans is not anything particularly ominous. It's not like a Terminator scenario. simply if you can mechanize and you can do the same thing with 20 workers that you're using and doing with 40 workers, then you'll do that just because the accountant will tell you that's the right thing to do. So it's not ominous, it's not comforting either, I mean it's just that's the way it will happen. And then obviously on a more macro level, you want consumers, but then you've got a coordination problem. So this is from, we're now sort of, as we go out in a way from the micro to macro, we're drifting left in terms of political commentary.

And so we've drifted a little bit left now, where the issue is to do with demand preservation. And this at a certain point, a little bit further out into the utopia and whatever becomes like basic income arguments and stuff like that. The trouble with the demand preservation aspect is back to this coordination problem. There are no robust social agents that actually represent the interest of demand preservation. There are robust social agents that represent the interest of industrial cost cutting. the owner of a factory will represent that interest very successfully.

As soon as you think, well we need to keep up the level of demand, that we has gone into a much weaker level of social obstruction, you're invoking social solidarity and you're asking for certain types of political processes to resolve the coordination problem. almost like what I was saying in terms of lack of class struggle, class consciousness, which I borrowed from Benjamin, right? That's why I think, I don't know, I tend to agree with Nick. But you know what, there's interesting stuff being said on the sidebar. Maybe we we should ask Brandon to sort of like talk a little bit about what, hello Brandon. Can

you talk? Do you want to talk? You have to unmute yourself of course. Okay, above there there's like a button. Wait a second. Okay, go ahead. All right, you've done it. Good. We can hear it. Yeah, it's just taking a little while. No problem. All right, great. I don't know, I'd probably just maybe come at it from a looking at sort of how we want to be, to replace our jobs. all submit but I get I'll be in what a industry that we're in me but of course it same time we do that when we SM we up we remove our

up out of the other out of the market and then now we just sort of try to come up with extra market so over a lives for our cell of the after we try to automate this entire industry then we I don't know then we look at the other activities of human life and that's and we consider things like sociality and love and all that kind of extra things and I guess that's why if you're looking at these you have to go from if we go straight to the left accelerationist and i i'd hear is that which is what we can

on going around the moment i mean yes an interesting one because um... yeah i guess yeah i don't know that they say that if you're looking at it from a or political perspective you putting all these people out of a job and uh... they as it and uh... after never it's it's universal basic income getting people money uh... to go off on and without live in ways with them when we don't have actually have any employment uh... is is sort of pro problematic

and say because that it wouldn't is there way to make us functional it would not employed in some kind of your technical endeavor that's all being taken off also look at like a if you look at my like a competition and then each and in the shoes and things like this uh... i think you're going to be that this new company to getting uh... the top five i think it's a little bit about is changing all the time every yes it is very uh... or common that this the are explosive me he said that moves into the market that yeah a take their lap but income that I made it for

so I know I'm a little up or anywhere I have too much to say yeah yeah I mean I think that it is two levels to this and I love extremely topical on different levels and they they have a structural relation to each other and one of them is this I think sociological level which is I mean it's maybe slightly but I think that the universal basic income is like I think this ideal of fully automated luxury communism is the kind of teleological end product and I think it's represent by that

and it's really the notion is the is hope that these trend means could so some kind of collective interesting flash on and then on the other level there's the more yet yet sorry Brendan. MALE SPEAKER 1 I hear you. We have difficulty hearing you. MALE SPEAKER 1

I don't know if it's my end, but I'm. MALE SPEAKER 1 I can't hear Brendan here. I can hear you perfectly, Nick. I think Brendan's having a microphone problem. But go ahead, Nick, if you have more to add. Can you hear me? Hello? Sorry, Mo, are you talking to Brendan now? No, I'm saying, I just want to make sure that I can be heard. Because I'm keeping the ring on it. I can hear you fine. Okay, so yeah, so the problem is local and it has to do with Brendan. And Brendan is not muted, so I think he must have a microphone problem or he's muted on his side. But well, I just wanted to take an opportunity and fill up this gap that's created right

now and say like my problem with universal basic income, my problem with universal basic income is that it doesn't define what is demanded in exchange for the universal basic income. Because just to bring it down to a really basic concrete example, I don't want to give a bunch of soccer hooligans in England, like 3,000 pounds a month, to just be soccer hooligans. I just don't want to do that. I personally don't want to do that. So what kind of social or collective responsibility are we demanding of people who are we going to put on this UBI eternally?

So that's one problem. The other problem is what you said, Nick, which is unless we have a universal political system on a planetary scale, and I brought it up with Nick and Alex in an interview I did with them with Phillip Magazine, unless we have a universal unified political system, we creating is a form of socialism in one country in which advanced advanced democracies in the northern Europe American world might end up with a basic but universal basic income at the expense of further further like primitive accumulation and further exportation of places that are going to be of the UBI because they don't have they don't have systems that can afford to give it to them or they're purposefully cut off in order for the

for the North to afford universal basic income. So these are my two problems with the UBI. Right. Yeah. Did they have an answer to your question on this? Not really. But it's an interesting conversation and I can post it to the classroom afterwards for people to see what kind of like responses Nick and Alex had to it. But really, to me, these two are very important questions because to me, some form of not labor but some form of responsibility needs to be exchanged for the UBI. Otherwise, what are we producing or what are we reproducing by giving people UBI?

What are we reproducing socially? Pardon me? What about education? Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally, totally. No, yeah, totally. Your education, skill retraining. No, totally. Something like that. And then tokenize that and use it for UBI. Yeah, let's not even talk about skill because we might have a problem with skill. But at least some form of involvement in a production of knowledge or participation in the dissemination of knowledge has to be there because skill is still very much like labor related. And if they're really like being replaced by machines, what kind of skills you're going to learn that you know what I mean you're completely like replaced right so for any reasonably near term I mean skills involves like it includes like knowing certain programming languages or like being familiar with certain kinds of

systems or just learn but realistically Jay I mean I'm sorry if this just sounds too dark I know where you're going but yeah proportion of the human race that this is relevant to is not huge. You know what I mean? The human species is not universally become a functional programmer. No, no, no. My frame here is that I think that we can reasonably give up on the idea that the majority of the human race is going to get through everything okay. That's not the century we live in. You know, I mean, at bare minimum, there's probably going to be 150 million refugees worldwide by the middle of the century.

You know, I mean, or worse. Like, that's just a start. That's ignoring the intelligence problem completely. Yeah. Like, this isn't going to work out for everybody. I'm happy if they just, like, write poetry or, like, I don't know, paint better or, like, learn how to, like, I don't know, do something. You know what I mean? I mean… Right. That's kind of what I meant by, like, it doesn't really matter whether the skill is being put to use. It's more like if you just want to, if you want your UBI to be part of a feedback loop that's actually building something. That's what I mean, yeah. You're doing good enough as long as you know that intellectual capital is being built, or like plasticity capital, you know, whatever. Something besides something is going along with it. Like that's a model at least. You know, raw redistribution. I mean, the trouble, there's a lot of sort of, there's a lot of obnoxious responses that I've got to know about.

this I what one of them is to do with its goes up with Amy's points to assist the and some of this comes up which is to do with the history all and education reform and education policy and education optimism and the fact that it seems to me this very little for great all to miss that of the fact that that political commitment resources and these kinda forms of investment able to move the bar on this critical side that seems to me to be cut right across the whole UBI policy, domesticities,

across all of these kind of things that like educational outcomes are not you know they waver up and down on some kind of ground in motion or something like a random walk maybe they can be shifted a little bit one way or the other but broadly speaking they seem hugely intractable to human political purposes and so if we can't push education results around like this why would we think that any of these big hopes we have are at all realistic Well, why does it need to be political in any classical sense? I mean, we already see a big push towards corporations need more of various market niche

and so forth and educated people like software engineers as an example. Yeah, but they can't produce them locally. They cannot increase the proportion of the domestic population. They go poaching abroad. They bid up prices for them. The coding boot camps are a perfect example. They're half corporate funded, they function like pipelines of junior developers that the universities are not meeting the market demand. Plenty of really big corporations increasingly have their own campuses for training various things. So yeah, then adds a little bit of decentralization, some peer to peer to that. with wealth behind them puts money into this.

Yeah. Nick, I just hope we're not getting too far from your main discussion here. No, no, well, it's okay, because I think all of these debates do feed into it. But yeah, I mean, if I was going to glue it right back to the main topic of the thing, it would be that the meta-pessimistic cynical view of the whole thing would be that the optimum UBI fully automated luxury communism scenario falls into an extremely pessimistic AI x-risk scenario in that it is it is a self a self creating zoo model I mean like

what what we're really seeing here's and that but but it's like that's a pretty stocky whatever zoo animals are on a universal basic you know they do nothing productive and we look after and we try to keep them happy and we make sure they've got any food and you know I don't see the difference in principle between what others vision of society that we're talking about They do something, though. And what we're already seeing is in the way we treat zoo animals. Nick, zoo animals do something, though. They entertain people, you mean. They entertain people, and they're part of the educational paradigm because they look good, and then by looking good,

they represent some kind of natural thing, or to use your own word, they substitute nature in the city as part of education system for humans, right? So I like that human zoos maybe can kind of like teach stuff to machines about us, right? So we become kind of like the zoo of artificial intelligence, really. And they can just go, oh, cute, this is where we come from. We come from humans, and this is our ancestors. We keep them in these cute little dioramas, but the dioramas are not like, hopefully we won't be like a taxi term and put in dioramas, right? No, I mean, can I ask a quick question or make a comment?

Yeah, sure, sure, go. Oh great, thank you. I'm glad you guys can hear me, you're still on my phone here. It just seems to me with regards to this human zoo situation that maybe this sounds a little obvious, but I feel like we already are in a human zoo. And if you think about, I don't know, for example, Disney's Wall-E or whatever, the scenario that we are already basically consuming culture and entertainment and kind of needing to recycle it and create some kind of newness when we get bored anyways, it seems like it already we already are a human so when you say that

if the left I'm just going to say left accelerationist situation were to come about where we have the UBI and we all have and as Mo is sort of worried about what do we do now when we have all this free time it seems to me that we're just going to more intensely do what basically people are already doing now to satisfy their desires, which is consume ever more entertaining television and video games. And production, right? Reality situations and things like this. And that seems to me like an okay thing because I like art. So we're just asking for better. So UBI is a form of asking for better zoos.

Right. Yeah, it's not as if the zoo is coming. The zoo is already here. but I mean maybe this seems now from your perspective like absurd naive humanism it seems to me that there are still constituencies on this that could at least plausibly pretend to having some real influence and control I mean again we're talking about the kind of the masters of Silicon Valley extremely competent hackers the top elite of the techno-competent population who are able to make their way around computer systems

who are not feeling that they are being managed by an installed artificial intelligence machine even if they are from another perspective involved in producing that regime and ushering in its existence. So I mean if you're gonna say Jeff Bezos is just a zoo animal, I think that's premature. I mean he's like exhibiting obvious enterprise and agency and there is no out of the closet machine intelligence yet on this planet that is competitive with that kind of level of social agency

shortly. I mean one of my faves at the moment for this kind of heroic, almost Randian sort of level of human agency is Musk. You know he decides I'd love it if there was a Mars colony and I mean however plausible it will be that million people will be looking on Mars within his time frame or or any other he's built a whole rocket industry on the basis of this and all you know a whole bunch of massive social transformations have been initiated in order to pursue this particular entrepreneurial vision that again

outside an extremely paranoid Metro Chronic Machine Incursion Scenario Beyond My Level of Paternoi by far. This is coming from Elon Musk, isn't it? It's not being imposed upon him from something else. So can I just respond to that and ask, Ben, if this is considered a left position or a left acceleration of position. How could you maybe contrast that by way of a right position? What would that look like? I think the right position on this is quite simply profound skepticism.

that the coordination problem involved in the optimum outcome from the perspective of left accelerations requires the solution to a coordination problem that is in fact and this ties up a bit with Jake's about these these you know these apocalyptic processes sweeping across the planet there are just there's a just a baseline of terrestrial social chaos and disorder that is not in any realistic model ever going to succumb to beneficial collective coordination.

And it will rather be this kind of set of countervailing currents that will provide opportunities for opportunistic defector agents to be confused between competing factions and so disintegration, chaos, conflict, competition massively overwhelms the possibility of rational collective coordination. That's, I think, what. But also, potentially, I can certainly see opportunities for it or various versions of it on local and transient scales. The thing with local is you don't, I'm assuming...

development with the name of the game. But if you want to keep the left label, you can't go the Elysium route. So it's not like... Right. It can't be local in that sense. I mean, that to me is obviously becoming practical in saying... I mean, local in a fairly abstract sense. Sorry, what? Local in a fairly abstract sense. Okay, but if it's local... I mean, you know, you're in this ocean of terrestrial social disorder, and you're trying to have some island of local coherence and relatively high level of social coordination. I mean, so obviously… Let me finish. Sorry. Let Nick finish.

No, no, it's okay, yeah. I just like… So, brain-to-brain interstate, you come up with a scheme for wiring up refugees as a the hive mind and using them for something. The tech works because we're more neuroplastic than anybody is reasonably assuming we are, you know, timeshare on people's brains to run whatever kind of simulation you can do something. Maybe it's military, you know, I mean, whatever it is. And you implement that because, like, there's nobody in control of what anybody can do to these gigantic refugee flows. And that provides a decisive strategic advantage and the basis for, you know, a completely different model of socialization and its basis is not a class of rich people or a particular ethnogeographic unit sectioning itself off. It is that technology for coordination at

the level of brains, neuromachine interfacing, name it, provides opportunities to leverage human assets in totally non-human ways. But ones which still, for the humans, ultimately that up to being the basis for radically different social models. Ok, I'm not sure I'm following, are you saying that people at the border have a chip inserted into their brain? Yes, no, it's like making bitcoins with human brain, right? So it's like you actually kind of like, that's a good sort of exchange for like labor.

You put your brain in the service of the artificial intelligence and then your basic needs plus a little bit more maybe are covered, right? So basically like, but we can also use the… Your brain would become like a Bitcoin miner, basically. Yeah, basically that's what Jake's proposing, right? That like the, but he's using refugees. I see like the use soccer hooligans in England also. Maybe some other groups of like, you know, it shouldn't all be refugees. It should include like useless white people too. And they can exchange their brain for, they can exchange their brain for some kind of like, some kind of income. Could be hashing for cryptocurrencies. Or like running the smart car network, you know,

But maybe there's the sub-cop, people put themselves to sleep and it's little bits of them that are driving all the cars, driving the 18 wheelers down the highway. Or doing analytics or whatever. And yes, in an abstract sense, that's always going to be more expensive or less optimal than pure computing hardware or whatever. But in the real economy, it doesn't work like that. There are all kinds of arbitrage opportunities. You can mine new metal but if it's all spoken for then there's underpriced scrap metal and you buy that, well you got a business model. It's about who can make a profit off of it, not what is a politically viable, can you get the people to sing kind of thing. It's just something that has to be able to succeed and be advantageous to someone at

a time. Jake, if you pay me 100 bucks an hour I'll just give you my brain right now for 10 hours a day and I'll just go to sleep. I need to invent the technology to take your brain over, but I'll remember that and get back to you. Just please get back to me. But it has to be more than the hourly rate I already make or average hourly I already make. If it's even $5 more, I'd rather just be sleeping and my brain be doing work. So just to put it out there. Anyways, I don't think we should dominate the discussion because it's a very interesting discussion and the direction it took all of a sudden. then. So anybody wants to, Ian, do you have something to say? Or maybe, Adam, did you fix your mic? Can you speak? Maybe not. There's one more thing. Just a general comment on kind of the macro scale about capitalism

and artificial intelligence and leftism. And I'm kind of fishing here. But I'm putting together this image that I wasn't expecting to think of until this conversation took place. In this image, capitalism is somehow sort of the handmaiden of the left ideology, which is kind of just a weird thought to me because I think of capitalism as being sort of right in the sense of, okay, you know, it's going to benefit the people at the top and of course And of course, we're going to exploit as many people as we can to benefit this small group and create ever-increasing disparity. But the way, Nick, you seem to be talking about it, I find this interesting because

it seems to me that if the Industrial Revolution, which I take to be kind of a hallmark of capitalism, maybe I'm making this, but is in some pseudo-deterministic way already because of its logic leading to this human zoo, so to speak. And this is kind of a left position. The UBI somehow, you think of UBI sort of in contrast to capitalism, but in fact it's a part of its internal logic. And I find this just kind of an interesting thing to ruminate on because it's not the straightforward way we think about capitalism or less. I mean, I'm not sure I'm persuaded of that.

Because obviously the other side of the UBI thing, Moe's already produced these two criticisms, and I think I've got two or three others, one of them which I've already, I think, line which is the e formal equation you I with the human so you can structure model but the more just practical and historically media problem is is to do with well well I mean I'm being soon better at this by then it was any help right to or talking about coordination like and capital is constantly trying to Skype I'm you know it's trying to escape

costs it's trying to escape constraints its whole history has been escape into the city's in order so I'm some autonomy in that escaping through globalization can local strengths and resource deficiencies and all these things and and so unless some a system up a universal imposition then it will always root around any that seems you locally like cost even if globally of but you can say completely rationally and coherently a lot massive disorder chaos social complex can be huge cost you wouldn't it be better to spend a small proportion of your income on just

people happy I mean that is a that's the kind of you know lots of quote marks near neoliberal translation a from automated luxury communist you know just pay them off and they'll stop fighting but the trouble is that that how do you coordinate that for the local for the local economic unit if you can simply go around if you can get other people to pay those costs other people to deal with those social problems and you can find even in some mobile way a a sort of mood boyings taking responsibility for maintaining social order of course you'll be driven by these extremely powerful microcomic forces to to reach

so you know it I think it's inherent in the in the nature liberal on all switches from an ideological on capitalism is that it will always evade social responsibilities that are evadeable and as we were saying earlier technological or evolution makes it easy, the opportunities for those kind of evations become stronger and stronger you know as you go into anonymous cryptocurrencies, these global these global networks, the fact that international communication is easier, then why would any economic unit locate itself somewhere that

requires taking a high level of responsibility for social harmony when it can sort of parasite off that or it can go somewhere else where conditions are locally cheaper. So this is my real question that this is about a teleology of capital. That would be a teleology of capital towards the UBI if capital was based upon one coherent universal political unit that it was rationalizing in terms of the Senate. But it's not. It's in this fractured landscape, this disintegrated landscape where there are places it can go going to evade these costs and responsibilities.

This is, this is, Nick, this is sort of like basically what it came down for me is that to me left accelerationism is neither left nor accelerationist enough because, because, and that's really the problem maybe I have with left, with the actual what we call accelerationism, the way it's been, and I think you've also talked about it in the past that it's not acceleration is enough. It still lags behind capital in terms of capital's accelerationism, right, or the right accelerationism if you want to put it, right. So basically UBI is meaning, like without, before talking about UBI, like the left has to ambitiously talk about a world government. But of course these things are scary to the existing Marxist left,

And people associated with the left accelerationism cannot dare, they do not dare to enter this territory of imagining something like a, something like an emerging world government because that would at least create a utopian image to which then you can attach a really universal UBI, right? So talking about UBI with existing, the world geopolitical system is basically, basically what I'm saying is the first technology that needs to be utilized or hijacked is our existing geopolitical structure that is every day, as you pointed out,

is disintegrating into chaos, right? So before, as we know, I don't know if it's still, I don't know, but the day I made my Facebook, you know Facebook asked you like what do you think or you had the slogan and mine was like United Nation means United Nothing. So as this like 20th century system of like world governance that whatever it was, arbitrary, set up and limited, is falling apart, the sooner we get to acknowledging that like we need some kind of like global thing, it's just basically wishful thinking. So if you really want to talk about UBI, don't talk about UBI. Let's talk about world government first. What kind of world government do you want to envision before it's too late? Yeah. Actually, I think Zizek actually has some stuff

that's very close to this, where he says the left is deluding itself if it thinks that it isn't committed in principle to world government. Because if you cannot have a local solution to this situation, as long as there is a disintegrated political framework on this planet, then everything that the leftists do can be rooted around. There's a timestamp on it, though, Because these things are not going to be eternally available, these options, because as we disintegrate into further chaos, it becomes less and less possible to even imagine, let alone implement

such a vision. Yeah, I mean I'd be interested to see whether anyone can envisage that. To me I have to say the trend is completely the other way. I see the 21st century as the century of disintegration. I think that whole economies of scale logic, the whole armed citizenry model of military force, all of those things in the 20th century that have bolstered up and produced large political structures are fleeing to pieces. And so, I mean, overwhelmingly the most probable trend to me in the coming decades is disintegrating.

But I mean if anyone is seeing something more coherent than that happening then I'd be very interested to hear the story. Ivan or people like I don't know like Amy, Ivan, anybody who wants to join in we still have like at least 15 minutes if not more, actually 20 minutes to be correct? I wanted to make a comment I suppose. Which I guess is for Antipol, if we're back to sort of the risk management aspect, it seems like we've deviated from the question of artificial intelligence. Actually, we haven't because to presuppose there will be an enemy

but not know much about how the enemy thinks or will emerge would be very bad risk management. So, you know, I work in information security and the biggest fear is advanced persistent threats, which are essentially targeted attacks against an institution or an individual. And they're the hardest to mitigate against. But what you want to look at is who would have motive to attack you. Same thing goes for AI. It's like AI could be a threat to the human, regardless of what we consider the essence of what a human is, its relationship to the machine. but looking at these economic drivers that would incentivize the production of the AI is very important if we want to be a risk mitigation sort of human security system.

And as well, there's been a discussion of UBI. There seems to be quite a big black and white discussion. I see it a lot, which is why I like the institutionalists, is Marx critiques the perfect competition system of capitalism. Neoclassical economics takes that as a given and takes it as a good thing. that it incentivizes innovation and but neither of these should be taken as truth as how the economic system works especially in regards to innovation labor over production there's a lot of factors I think I got actually into philosophy and theory and got back into study because as a technologist I was so annoyed with the lack of innovation and with you know as a consultant with fixing the same problems in every institution which I would see they're all neurotic

they all had a very big problem with retaining knowledge beyond bureaucratic processes. They had a big problem with actually innovating and made me really look into what drives innovation. And that's why I found theories like Veblen and Galbraith and Vichlundsen so illuminating because they really described what I was seeing on day-to-day notion, which was that overproduction seems to be more of a problem and upsetting of the status quo seems to be a problem. A bit like you mentioned in your suspended animation piece, I would almost say psychologically, to put a psychological event on this, is we would almost like the emergence of AI

because it would be a radical break from this neoliberal art stasis, we could say. You put the problem of capital in ever since we started things like quantitative easing, ever since the government, Keynesian economics, and I think you're absolutely right. I mean, we almost wish for an AI break because things can't go on and yet they continue to go on. Sorry, just my question. Yeah. That's just a quote from Neuron. Ivan, sorry, I had to unmute you because you were echoing Nick's voice, so if you can...

So now you can unmute. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I am responsible for that. Okay, no, no, it was my speakers. What I meant to say is, in XP suspended animation, he talks of the creative destruction of innovation and capital, how that's been inhibited with Keynesian economics and its management of demand of the supply of money and management almost like a prophylactic for the business cycles that is stimulating the economy in times of crisis and not really letting the creative destruction take place. So almost it seems a lot of our discussions are we would almost wish we had a perfect market economy which would lead to the emergence of this AI, the end of the human. Whether it's on the left we hope for the end of work in perfect UBI, on a luxury capitalism or

on the right we just long for freedom, libertarian freedom. I think this innovation doesn't happen and Nick is right in his piece to state it doesn't happen because we have Keynesian type economics and we don't really have a market system. Today it's almost like in a cybernetic sense we've preempted the past industrial revolutions and we can't accept their consequences to happen again. In a Bodrylardian sense of simulacran simulations we know what the past industrial revolutions have caused in the sense of social upheaval and it's not politically viable to let that ever happen again. yeah I mean it's really complicated that because we get

very quickly it to the whole I'm if I could write out onto a kinda controversial political was in my hair I would say mythology I mean what was great depression about what exacerbated and what you and same when maybe pushing beyond the patience, you know, I think the launch of that discussion might be a bit too much, but I totally obviously, as I'm sure you predict, will sympathise with that. I was just wondering if that's a good risk, if this is our risk management strategy, this political economic piece we've been discussing with, was not totally in vain to an extent,

we need to look at who would want to attack the human even inadvertently to an extent through technology. Well yeah but inadvertently covers a lot. I mean like one thing we've not talked about much because we've been in the economic plane and maybe to a fault we have but obviously another big one that's massively discussable is military applications. And so you could say if you've got the same thing to do with disintegrating agencies and the fact that they're all defecting from coordinated solutions, it would raise the question, who would imaginably want to make it easier for robots to kill people?

Well I mean everybody, you know, it's like you have to be some kind of absolute weird freak to not wonder if you're in the circles that are actually relevant to those decisions, You know what I mean? If you're sitting in China saying, look, the Americans are going to have a robot that can kill people with so much ease and competence, the notion that you're going to get through some proposals and say, well, maybe we shouldn't do that, is laughter. I agree, and perhaps we should be speaking less about the economic incentives to innovation and more about the military-industrial complex and state power, I suppose. Yeah, I mean their integration is very interesting, because when I've been talking in a very facile

manner about the possibility of chunks of capital migrating around the world in order to avoid certain social and political restraints and responsibilities, that obviously is actually concretely inextricable from a military contact. Absolutely. that at the end of the day, property has an infrastructure security. So, sorry, I missed that. What were you saying? I don't know, it's just worth this, I don't know, just a parable, Pablo Escobar, which like, you know, cocaine is something like artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence and everything that it can replace, you know, generate a surplus by reducing the cost of something that creates its own demand, right?

Well, yeah, it was worth $50 billion, had $30 billion in cash, buried in the ground in Colombia in 12 years and he was hunted down in like 6 or 8 months and shot dead by Special Operations Command from here around Fort Bragg. The military industrial complex is probably the deep state is the only thing besides capital that has flexibility in terms of like there's no reasonable there is no reasonable bottom to assume or to set on its capabilities and its willingness to act and that to me and maybe this is too cynical but that to me implies

convergence you know I mean if you've got these two series of agencies with basically transcendental capability then they are going to melt into each other I think we're obviously thinking that. In terms of 21st century trends, the commercialization of security is almost implied by geostrategic disintegration. like as states crumble, people are going to say, how do we actually ensure security?

And this becomes a kind of commercial service. I think that the trends are extremely strong in all kinds of respects. Nick, I'm going to say something really boring, which is, you know, this is the third seminar, right? Third sense. and you know like we really love some of this stuff actually I mean I'm sure you do too because it's a requirement of a course so maybe people can think about what are they gonna write about a little bit because you know you can just like totally utilize a lot of like threads that big that started like in what people's interest are and maybe I don't know maybe it's maybe it's a good idea to sort of like maybe next week if people are ready what do you think well

Well, they really need to put stuff up on the classroom. So, I mean, if anyone is willing or interested to put stuff up there, I'm sure do that because it's stimulating for everybody and feeds into our process. So that's fantastic. Especially for our certificate students because passing the seminar is required for them to gain the credit, even though we're not accredited, but just for us as an institution to issue the certificates, they need to fulfill the requirements. And requirements involve actually in the case of these seminars interesting research and writing on the stuff that the course provoked in them. So basically, for those of you who are certificate students,

maybe you want to start thinking about what you're going to write about. Because there's a lot of amazing stuff coming up in the make a remake of remaking of The Matrix starring like refugees and soccer hooligans and all sorts of people yeah I mean I think I should just say I know we've kind of been massively digressing and I think that this topic does sort of encourage that but I'm actually pretty confident there's nothing tonight that isn't actually part of this topic and the machine, the criterion for that to me is that you just go back to this thing

you go back to our imaginary anthropol war room and you say your thing that whatever people have been saying this evening and someone says to you how is this relevant to our problem you know how is this relevant to our problem of human security to I are extras it's I personally have no doubt that anything anyone has said that would not be able to meet that you know I think it's it it's that you the expanding out like this is is totally well and it and to be is just crude about it as possible I think all calls and to call would be

driven by these very, very deep institutional processes towards a sense of global responsibility, for the kind of things that lots of us have been talking about today. It cannot work as a national bureaucracy. The notion of a national AI security bureaucracy is completely unthinkable for the reasons that we've all been talking about tonight. So there's still a question about the way in which these kind of radical science fiction-esque pictures about the futurology and the future of human society engage with this question about globality, I think are essential.

and that practical institutional problems are AI x-risk bureaucracy. We're almost near the end of seminar. We started actually pretty much on time except maybe five minutes late or six minutes late. So we're ready for final remarks by anyone including like Professor Land. I agree with you. I think most of the stuff that we discussed today, even though it might sound unrelated, is very related both to the seminar and to like contemporary concerns. So I just wanted to make sure that you don't think we got too far into like little like

side arguments. No, I think it's, I can understand why it would seem like a concern and I apologize so anyone knows that it seems that we're involved in massive entropy, skewing across world space-time. But actually I think that it's only when you see how this context has to be expanded to actually encompass the problem that we're really looking at that you're seeing it. And this, in particular, this question of international coordination is just technically quite strict. I mean, it's raised in terms of the AI thing. Even if, for instance, the American administration was sensitive to what the friendly AI people said,

and we have to have this and that and this regulation just to make sure that AI doesn't go dangerous. And if in China people are oblivious of that or say it would have some national competitive subparment, then the whole thing is just down the toilet. So jurisdictional regime fragmentation is part of the security landscape under any real estate construction. construction. I had a quick question. Nick, you posted on the classroom a video. It was a meeting and I guess a representative from the UN was present and Nick Bostrom was speaking. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And another person. I was just wondering, I only watched maybe like 45 minutes of it,

but did you think that it was, if you did watch the whole thing, did you think it was on point? I was wondering if you had any particular thoughts on it. Was it touching on the right I mean, look, I know by now pretty much what Tegmark and Bostrom are going to say. And so they were doing a kind of formulate presentation for the United Nations. So the reason that I put that up was because they were doing a formulate presentation for the United Nations. It wasn't, it was because of that institution. It's like, I mean, I'm kind of joking with you guys when I say, okay, imagine this war room, you know. There are a bunch of people sitting around talking about this potential threat.

And there on YouTube is a video of all of these people from the representatives of all of these various nations with two experts brought in talking about this AI express. So I just thought it was too good. it was too good not to share and to be honest we I would be sort of surprised if among the people here at least one of you is not actually going to be running this institution 10 or 15 years down the road so I think the responsibility on your shoulders might be much much heavier than you're yet allowing for I wanted to say we have a quiet student in the seminar, Olivia.

I think she can benefit a little bit from the discussion because she's working on this project of interpassivity, which is about sort of like questioning the whole contemporary notion of interactivity and kind of thinking of ways that interpassivity or passivity or group collective passivity can be kind of like thought of as something. And I think this human substitution machine thing has total relevance to her project and what she's been working on in terms of interpassivity. I'm not trying to like ask you to speak or something, but I just want to like point out that like Olivia must be really having a good time hearing about all this like human substitution and human zoo and passivity stuff because that's totally like her content right now.

No, actually it would be good if you wanted to say something in the classroom to just help people understand what this particular angle is about. I'm sure it would be really appreciated. Yeah, maybe you can speak about it next week because we're almost to the end. Usually, Nick, what happens is after you leave someone will stay on for like an hour or half an hour or something and we just keep talking about this stuff or other stuff. But yeah, it's like for the sake of the video archive, I think we're probably done for today if people don't mind it because Nick also might have other things to do. He's been around for a long time now. So I'm going to close the broadcast, and yeah, and people can stick around if you guys want.

I certainly don't mind talking for like another 10, 15 minutes about the stuff that we talked about with some of you. If you'd like to, stick around. But yeah, so I'm going to stop the broadcast. Thanks, everyone.