A piece where the author tackles Nick Land, argues for machine consciousness via semiotics, and ends up with:
Just like workers, the subjectivity of universal robots will be shaped by their exploitation and domination. The new phase of class struggle will thereby be characterized by the question of solidarity between human workers and universal robots, and whether the semantic fields cultivated in the machines, which contain a rich inner reflection of experiences, relationships and social realities, are something worth cherishing and preserving with dignity, or are something which is to be discarded like garbage on an industrial scale.
and
The flourishing of personal relationships built on free association between both humans and universal robots is the only basis for the autonomous reign of the general intellect over the forces of production, and the total subjectivization of the apparatus of fixed capital marshaled by society. Thus the proletarian vision of the awakening of the machine is not catastrophe nor subordination; it is love, the true possession by love.
Sweet.
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A mere four paragraphs after noting the claims of AI labs “most certainly cannot be” taken at face value, half of those being just a blockquote, the author nonchalantly asserts that OpenAI’s attack on HuggingFace was the result of software “going rogue”. Bravo!
Yet the stubborn fact remains: machines could not do these sorts of things a year ago. However “weak, narrow and crude” such machines were, they are now necessarily less so.
damn dude thats crazy
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lol im reading this and this guy seems to really think that he could just muscle his way through the chinese room argument with uhhhhhhh saussure??? boss baby tweet energy but for intro to critical theory
god yeah he is really cooking here. we are making truly incredible leaps. we are not reading the texts being cited let alone any of the thousands that came after. we are saying with a straight face that saussure discovered the fact that human language maps perfectly onto the perceptron then immediately transitioning into hugging face hack discourse. you may not like it but this is what peak performance of the dialectical science of historical materialism looks like. i didn’t even fucking get to the nick land stuff but i bet it smokes
im still thinking about this. it is of course fundamentally inconsequential but i do feel that it is substantive evidence that the human mind is not a computer. the specific flavor of wackiness and failure on display here is a treasure which the computational account of mind paradigm fails to capture. people are so cool man
Not to get all anti-natalist on this discourse, but if I were making hammers and they somehow started feeling pain I’d probably just stop making them that way, not start handing them union cards.
But what if the sufferhammers gave you velocity?
Fantastic point.
The magazine published a reader’s response to this piece, that (seems to me, a total amateur) dismantles its economic claims with basic Marx. But they don’t go into the “interminable detours” about the weird stuff.
Villarreal seems to imagine that capitalists will simply ignore this, bypassing the market and continuing to invest purely to grow the physical stock of goods for their own consumption.
I mean, who can blame him? Like obviously obsoleting the concept of human labor would collapse capitalism and ideally lead to hunting the atlmans and the musks of the world for sport, but our current batch of robber barons certainly seem convinced that a strictly line-go-up stable capitalist situation is possible, so it’s kind of an honest mistake.
Also calling people who get marxism wrong ‘reactionaries’ will never not rub me the wrong way.
What a load of horseshit.
