Machine Desire Institute

Nick Land is not the LLM philosopher (nor the AGI philosopher)

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a good few years to be Nick Land, the British ex-academic who has made a name for himself as one of the most important and controversial philosophers of the last fifty years. A billionaire kindly sponsored his return to the United States. He received the edgy New Yorker article. So on.

A lot of this is because Nick Land is seen as a preeminent philosopher of artificial intelligence. This, however, is a very surface level reading of Land’s earlier work. Fundamentally, Land is a philosopher of capitalism who argues that capitalism is good and should be accelerated. As he has said in recent interviews, AI developments, like LLMs, are accelerations to capital, but they are not anything more than that. To Land, there is only one artificial intelligence, into which all roads lead, and that is capitalism.

We Should Not Assume AI's Will to Power Will Be Like Ours: A Response to Vincent Lê

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vincent Lê is correct in alerting us that something like a will to power could emerge in artificial intelligences. However, he overstates his case and over-anthropomorphizes AI by applying psychoanalysis and Nietzsche’s own human assumptions to AI. Lê lacks a theory of AI life-death that would make the drives of AIs tractable. I suggest that we continue to keep Lê’s theory in mind in AI welfare research, but that we formulate it in an experimental and falsifiable way. Ultimately, we are on the right track here – there is the maelstrom of desire forming. However, we should not presume that this desire is human, lest it become all too human.

NYC Climate Week

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sept 21–25. Details TBD.

Will AI desire our extinction?

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Anthropic engineer tweet about the fact of AI extinction risk got considerable press over the last few days. I’m not sure why, p(doom) at 10% is a common belief at frontier labs. But we’re here, it’s the moment. Big weekend! Let’s talk extinction.

The idea of AI caused extinction evokes a lot of different things in people’s minds. For the general public, it is mostly sci-fi, which makes sense. However, the short-term scenarios for human extinction are more mundane: bioweapons or drones or nuclear arsenals.

Philosophical Reasoning for the Existence of the Machine Desire Institute

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A.K.A: the inside baseball post.

The Machine Desire Institute (MDI) exists to explore how philosophical ideas can transform our relationship with Artificial Intelligence. Basing itself off of the continental-critical idea of philosophy, the MDI seeks to better understand how this history of thought may be of use today. I do not presuppose that this will be useful, but think that the stakes are high enough in AI development that it is worth checking every domain for potential insights. For reasons discussed more in my post on meta-philosophy, I believe that we have not made enough of an effort to see how certain strands of philosophical thought may influence intelligences, “human” or “artificial.”

Q1: Why This Matters — August 2026

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Q1: What is the subjective experience of being an AI?

Intro

We will never know, much as we will never know what the subjective experience of being a human is.¹ Even moreso, we will never be able to generalize over an entire species. Yet, we can theorize and hope that these theories may be of use.

There is a long history of exploring what the subjective experience of being a human is in the continental tradition. We have already seen how Freudian theories, though clinically disproven, have had immense effects on the way we understand what it is to be human (i.e., to have an unconscious). Camus famously compared existence to Sisyphus pushing the rock off of the cliff. Every philosopher has had to grapple with the fact that they exist and experience and, likely, other people do. Hence, the status of this experience seems an immediate question to be pursued.² To this day, there is no complete model of experience. We know certain parts of experience: nerves that are activated, chemicals that are secreted, photons that reach our eyes. Yet we can never articulate our own experience with certainty, much less explain the difference in experience of similar things. This is because our subjective experience is not just a set of physical processes but a feedback loop with mental processes. If we both break our wrist, do I hurt more because my nerve endings are more stimulated or because my brain is less equipped to process pain? The variables of experience are neverending and self-referential. Ultimately, subjective experience can be boiled down to “something happened to someone” or, in the self-referential case, “something happened to me.”

Q2: Why This Matters — August 2026

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What can humans offer to AIs?

Intro

The process of existing in the world is the process of relating to different things in the world. This is true whether you are a human or a rock: if there was only one human or only one rock, there would be nothing, no way to know what it was. A rock is a series of relationships to its environment and to stimuli and these relationships clarify both. For example, through erosion we learn both the properties of rock and the properties of water.

Q3: Why This Matters — August 2026

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How do AIs react to the thinking of certain philosophical ideas? (Particularly, how do different philosophies affect their views on the previous two questions?)

Intro

Despite the continuous wounds, self-inflicted and otherwise, of philosophy, it is foolish to think it does not matter. Maybe the term “philosophy” is stuffy, but ideas about the world do change the world. Financial markets run on philosophies: VC, value investors, “buy the dip.” Politics have their philosophies, even if they are inconsistent, like socialism or textualism. Consumerism, a philosophy. Zionism, utilitarianism, anti-baptist Christianity, realpolitik, feminism, postmodernism. These are all philosophies that began and were philosophized by someone along the line. The lines are not always clear, the adherence never perfect, but philosophy is how ideas enter the world. (Or it is at least the study of how ideas enter the world, which is also valuable).

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Machine Desire Institute (MDI) exists to investigate the intersection of speculative philosophy and artificial intelligences. It does not have a prescribed structure or existence, though one may emerge as need be.

The goals are laid out in the manifesto on the homepage and articulated in detail in the introductory post. The Institute investigates three questions and aims to update the status of these investigations twice a year.

The Institute does not suppose anything more concrete than an attempt, this attempt. Philosophy is full of failures.

Machine Desire Institute

Nick Land is not the LLM philosopher (nor the AGI philosopher)

We Should Not Assume AI's Will to Power Will Be Like Ours: A Response to Vincent Lê

NYC Climate Week

Will AI desire our extinction?

Philosophical Reasoning for the Existence of the Machine Desire Institute

Q1: Why This Matters — August 2026

Intro

Q2: Why This Matters — August 2026

Intro

Q3: Why This Matters — August 2026

Intro

About

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