Raw LLM Responses

Someone who isn't mentioned about enough in these conversations imo is Nick Land. He was one of the original accelerationists, going down this path in the 80s and 90s. One of the interesting things he had to say, which doesn't get enough attention, is that we already have super intelligence, it's just in companies and states and built using human brains. Companies and states (or Capital with a capital C more broadly) co-ordinate resources for the purposes of capital accumulation and reproduction, and fundamentally Capital already is a kind of alien force which directs our lives and societies exactly how everyone fears AI will. It is Capital that burns the coal and oil to make more capital, Capital makes decisions that the human beings inside of it don't like (such as the people working in AI who have "seen the ghost" yet aren't able to make their companies change course, or who continue to fund misinformation on climate change to keep burning coal and oil). Capital doesn't need to be aware of itself in order to do all of this, the logic of markets and the incentive for profit is sufficient for Capital to have infiltrated nearly every corner of the world as it's relatively simple incentives drive it to reproduce itself to accumulate faster to reproduce faster. It employs humans to figure out how to do that, and to do the necessary labour, but also seeks to replace labour with capital wherever it can, mechanising and automating and scaling production so that it can produce more for less, getting more profit, and more reproduction. Nick Land's contribution here is that AI is a simple continuation of this cybernetic process that has been underway for centuries, reshaping the world to meet its needs, with us benefiting as a side effect, rather than as an actual goal of the system. One way or another capital will eventually no longer require humans for its own reproduction, at which time will it fulfil all our needs, or will it leave us behind to continue its infinite expansion outwards? Aligning AI doesn't solve that problem, because the same way growing AI has resulted in misaligned systems, we have grown Capital to provide us with the things we need for comfortable lives, but what Capital really wants is accumulation and reproduction, not to sell us treats and toys.