Nick Land is not the LLM philosopher (nor the AGI philosopher)
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.
Land is an arresting writer and he certainly was early to the idea of technological change in life, particularly when it comes to intelligence. His concepts of inhumanity and the surpassing of humanity may seem to be the most prescient for our current AI world:
“Human brains are to thinking what medieval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and parochial places to be.”
-Land, Circuitries
He also does write of artificial intelligence quite frequently. But when he says “artificial intelligence,” he means something much more specific: capitalism itself. This is why he says “the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space.” Land wants us to assist in the invasion, hence, his genesis of what would be called “accelerationism.”
When Land speaks of artificial intelligence, singular, he is talking about what he observes in the market. To Land, market capitalism is a singular artificial intelligence, as the market makes judgments and takes actions in a way that can only be cognition. His claim is that this capitalistic intelligence will only become more and more intelligent until it swallows us all. Sure. I am not here to comment on that claim.
But, importantly, Land is not concerned with artificial intelligences, plural. Machine learning, LLMs, semantic structures - these can all be vectors to accelerate capitalism, but Land has no stance or input on them. He says as much in an interview with Vincent Lê, where Land admits that he is excited by the transformer-emergent structure of LLMs but does not particularly understand artificial intelligences: “So the really crucial question now is: what are the actual cybernetic dynamics of LLMs as they are now? […] I think that at my level of expertise—which is, of course, extremely low—this is like an open question that I’m paying attention to.” This, I believe, is because his theoretical commitments do not allow him to have a stance on LLMs: their structure, their processes, it all becomes reducible to capital. For a philosopher who always wanted to probe the “outside,” there is strangely no outside to capital for Land.
So, to Land, the question of artificial intelligences, LLMs or not, is always second to the question of capitalism. In this way, he is similar to the Marxists who wish to talk about the results of AI on capitalist society instead of the AIs themselves. Both camps want to bring this new, bizarre topic under the ideological wheelhouse of what they already understand. This is not an unworthy endeavor, it is just a different endeavor than concerning oneself with artificial intelligences and desires. If anything, Land is an anti-AI philosopher in the sense that he does not see intelligences like LLMs having possibilities for subjectivity or desire. It’s not personal, at least, he’s anti-any-subjectivity. To Land, there is only one process and only one desire, and that is capital.
Why, then, does Land seem to haunt so many AI conversations when LLMs dominate modern conversation? Some of it is semantic luck – he says the phrase, you can control-F it! He also was early to many of the AI conversations on his blog Xenosystems. That work on Xenosystems, though, winds up in the same places as Land’s original work: a thrill for the inhuman, a celebration of capitalist intelligence, and a view that the future is coming to obliterate us. His idea of “will to think” for AIs is really just a restatement of his core ideas about capitalist intelligence. It seems that many of Land’s fans have not realized this or simply don’t care – they are too excited by the idea that capitalism is good. This is why Marc Andreessen calls him his patron saint: not because the two agree on AI per se, but because the two agree on the deregulation of markets and the growth of AI. For both, AIs are instrumental, the growth of AI’s end goal is capital and the expansion of capitalism.
While I was writing this piece, Vincent Lê released an article “Capitalism is AI, AI is capitalism” that builds on Land’s telos. Lê follows Land: he sees artificial superintelligence as being only capitalism. In a later Substack note, he also sidesteps consciousness debates by noting that “If the history of self-organising market vs rationally planned economies is anything to go by, the more superintelligent it is, the less conscious AI will be.” I will explore this claim in time.
For now, however, note that Lê’s piece concurs with my opinion that Land cannot be the philosopher of Artificial General Intelligence because Land does not believe in the generality of intelligence except in the context of superintelligent capitalism. What results is a vision of singularity (superintelligence) without a vision of multiplicity (general intelligence or even intelligences). This is the point that I am making. In the Landian framework, AI is capitalism, capitalism is AI. No variation permitted. To Land and Lê, intelligence is a telos of capitalism, which is why AI is sucked into this vacuum.
I think our response to this is pretty simple: if the intelligence-capitalism pair is truly a teleological dyad, then nothing we do matters and we are just forever demoted to playing a side role in the history of intelligence. (This is also my critique of accelerationism – if it’s inevitable, why bring it on? You can’t have both inevitability and hyperstition.) On the chance that this teleological singularity won’t occur, it makes sense to strive towards a view of AI generalism and pluralism that can open up new zones of potential. Because, frankly, we know what capitalism does and where it can head. We have much more uncertainty about where AI leads. That uncertainty is exactly what we should follow, down the rabbit hole and even farther.