Caribbean Rhythms, this episode 191. I'm here with Nick Land. He needs no introduction. World-famous accelerationist, thinker, philosopher, and writer. Welcome to Caribbean Rhythms, Nick. I'm very happy to be here. It's been a while, actually. We've had something lined up for quite a long time. Yes. We've been meaning to talk a long time. It's an honor to have you on. We should just get to it. You are known as accelerationist, primal accelerationist thinker. Not all of my audience knows what this means. Would you just care to quickly explain there is also a difference between left and right wing accelerationism, I understand. What are they? What does this mean? Well, I think that accelerationism actually is one of these terms that everything I've

ever been involved in has been named by other people and usually by enemies. So accelerationism was definitely one of those things. So it was a description from outside that as usually when people make these labels they're pretty good. And so I think people jumped on it quite happily. I mean, accelerationism had another technical meaning in macroeconomics before, but I don't think anyone was interested enough to try to preserve that. And, well, you suggested topics, and one of them is to talk about cybernetics. Yes. And these really are the same, I think. These are, at least initially. Like, it's basically, in an absolute nutshell, as simply as possible, accelerationism is the philosophy of positive as opposed to negative feedback applied to primarily economic and technological history.

So its basic claim is that negative feedback, which obviously is stabilizing and brings about control in complicated systems, is actually the secondary and derivative phenomenon once capitalism is ignited or triggered, escapes containment in Renaissance Europe. Once you're in the history of capitalism, the primary phenomenon is positive feedback accelerating change, in which developments excite themselves further, and this is like... I think that's, yeah, I said I won't over-egg it. Yes, there is a difference between those of your disciples or followers, call them what you want, I'm sure you would want maybe to disavow some, but some call themselves left-accelerationists or left-landians. Then there are the right-wing ones.

Would you care to explain roughly the difference between the two of them, how their approach to this? Well, certainly it began, accelerationism began in very close engagement with Marxism. Marxism. And Marx's sort of basic formula that the, if you're going to do a very, very simple diagram of the basic capitalist process, it's what he calls M to C to M dash, meaning you go from money through the commodity to more money. It's like an, it's an accelerating exponential process. And so if one was going to be strictly fair about the thing, it could be said that left accelerationists are actually truer in a way to the tradition. They're not truer to what accelerationism as such was thinking of itself as in its beginning, but

it's truer to the Marxist tradition. It's truer to the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari who were very influential in the early stages of accelerationism, in that they think that this leads out of capitalism. That is, the capitalist dynamic is ultimately something that propels things beyond it into, I think, the current technical expressionism, fully automated gay luxury space communism. And I think right accelerationism just is skeptical about that destination? You are referring, of course, to the modern day use of right and left wing. Well, we can come back to this because, as you know, what right wing means in the United States is a bit different from the varieties of right wing that would have existed in Europe,

let's say around 1910 or 1920. And I think the progressive European right, the anti-traditionalist European right of that time would be maybe very welcoming to the most extreme parts of what you're saying or what normal people would consider extreme. But you just said something very interesting about the capitalism leading out of itself to automation. What is this relationship? I mean, I know it's at the core of your thinking and I'm asking you to summarize it for a general audience relatively quickly, but it's at the core. What is this relationship between capital and intelligence or artificial intelligence in your work? Well, I think that there are a few ways one can approach it, but I think the most central and

helpful is that the role of technology in capitalism, and of course capitalism has an intensity and intimacy with technology that no other mode of human social organization had ever known, is quite consistent. Because it's subject to economic forces that are continually pressurizing it in the direction of reducing the labor input in any economic activity. So there's a kind of essential capitalist machinery, which is always from the beginning about replacing human work with machines. And Marx for sure is very consistently attentive to that. I think it's not really controversial if it's looked at abstractly enough. And so from that, you really have the Turing test. That is to say, the test for an intelligent machine as something that can pass itself

off as a human being is really baked in from the start. It's always been the case that machinery in some respect is imitating humans because it's simply taking over an activity that was previously allotted to humans and doing it through automation and as it goes up to higher and higher levels of complex industrial activity it utterly naturally becomes artificial intelligence and begins to get close to the to the Turing test horizon which Frankly, I think we're basically at now, you know, at a time where I think it's kind of happened. Yes. Well, certainly for the the median run of global human humanoid, I think, and I'm very skeptical that there can ever be such a thing as true artificial intelligence. I mean,

machine learning is its own thing. Look, that's a long discussion, but I will agree with you and the AI proponents to say that even what exists now is probably at the level or somewhat better than the average run of humanoid. If it can replace general customer service, Nick, you know, it's a great improvement and probably the realization most people need to have dawn on them is that most humans are AI themselves. But, well, that's for another time. What you've explained to me. It can be for another time, though. I mean, for sure, if this is a completely legitimate, interesting thing to talk about, if you'd like to do that. Well, it's very interesting, but we'd have to get quite deep into biology and the biology of the.

the, I just meant that as a jab at the general run of humanity, who runs probably the way an average intelligent man might think of what AI is, which is someone who doesn't reason, doesn't understand the content of words, and merely responds to stimuli, and maybe recognizes some patterns and repeats them to you. And I think most humanoid forms have always been that, And so it's not so much of a loss. But I do want to come back to this in the second half of the show. Right now, I want to ask you a little bit more about the political and cultural aspects of your work, if we can get to that soon. But what you've explained to me now, even just this briefly, do you think this is understood by many people? Or is there any major group that you'd say understands the

forces at play in accelerationism today? Because I can say, I don't consider myself a philosopher or a thinker. I wrote what I consider a kind of philosophy humor book. And yet, almost nobody understands it. There's like a handful of people who maybe read it and understand what I'm saying there. Do you have that sense too, or do you think there's like a a substantial faction anywhere in the world that understands and holds to your work, or to what accelerationism really means? Well, honestly, I'm not so sure, but also I'm not very interested in that, to be frank. I mean, it's like, I think it's the process that is interesting, and I think people are getting a sense of the process more and more, And to the point now that I don't even think it matters, like I don't think serious objection

is not really any longer historically plausible as far as I'm concerned. I think it's like a statement, containment has completely failed. Maybe it had always failed, but it certainly looked like there was possibilities of taking alternative paths. I just don't think that is what things at all look like now. Well, in that sense, what do you make of the AI alarmists, I guess? I don't keep up with it, but Elon, I think, used to be one, maybe still is, Sam Altman and all these other people that got, I don't know their names, Judkowski, would he be one of them? I don't ever remember their name. To me, they sound insane, they want to ban it, they want to regulate. What do you make of these people? I think they've just lost, honestly. I think they've

totally lost. They haven't produced any positive solutions at all, and they all know that the only political model that will work for them is some kind of integrated planetary bureaucratic government with a kind of coherent policy towards massive economic deceleration. And No part of that is going to happen. So I think in their own terms they just simply have lost this and it's over as far as they're concerned. Yes. Would you bring up Marx in the context of accelerationism? Of course by, let's say you take a regular conservative from the 1950s or even a reactionary from Europe from 1900, and they would consider Marxism this kind of hyper-modern, you know, the word that gets thrown around now so wrongly, degenerate or whatever, but it's a hyper-modern,

progressive thing, and yet, on the other hand, I've never seen Marxism this way, and I know in England, there is a group of good writers, I think, young good writers, if you know J'accuse magazine in London and so on, who considered Marxism and leftism in general reactionary forces. I've always had this view. I get the sense you think so too. Would you care to comment on this? Well, I would definitely say that Marx's model of the liberal bourgeoisie, how they should think, how they should govern, what they should be trying to do, do, is vastly more attractive than how the liberal bourgeois historically have in fact thought, governed, and generally comported themselves. So it would be a huge improvement in the world if the masters of capital actually saw Marx

as trying to give them a model to emulate. and in fact they they mostly seem to be in this kind of cringe relation of oh no please don't think that i'm a you know a villainous plutocrat of the time that marx depicted yes i mean uh sure i agree with everything you've just said i i also mean it just in the in the naive sense if you watch this movie um the first man or something about the moon you know, the moon voyage, and there is a scene that I don't think it was intended this way, but it really comes off as a huge insult to the civil rights movement and what normal fags understand as what the left means now, which they have whitey on, people protesting whitey on the moon and the black man's belly is empty or something. And to me, that is the consistent message of the left today.

It's the same actually in the AI debates and other things that how can we prevent AI from being racist, reaching racist conclusions? How can we put this in the service of equity? So it's always, how can we retard any kind of amazing technological, not just progress, but leaps? How can we retard and stop this in the name of equality and community? To me that's a deeply reactionary sentiment and if you read Kadehi's review of Marx in The Ordeal of Civility, he goes quite some depths into Marx's own letters, his own words in which Marxism comes about as a kind of longing for the pre-modern, you could say the shtetl or community and a complete inability to accept modern specialization, the distance that modernity introduces between individuals, the civility imposed by capitalist modernity.

He wants to do away with that, and I have seen, whether it's in the third world, people who copy him or the images I've just mentioned, is this the case? Is the left just a retardation of technological progress in the name of these other, you know, values or whatever? I mean, I do think that that's fair. That's definitely close to the essence of the left as I envisage it for sure is, yes, the great force of retardation in every sense of that term in the world. Do you think that, well, I didn't mean to, since this comes to mind talking to you now, I hope you don't mind I take small tangents, but I've always felt that it's an almost biological inevitability of a technological species because it allows the multiplication of people who will therefore

have biological weight that when you combine that with democracy, they'll have biomass you can say, or whatever, there's just more of them, and so they will want to hijack. And so I've seen theories that, you know, people always ask, since 1800 there has been this acceleration of technological and economic progress, and they say, oh this must be due to liberalism and democracy. And I am wondering in the same vein as I discussed Marx now, if in fact it wouldn't have happened faster without them, like under something like the the Prussian state or Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and actually liberalism and democracy are riders along, which retarded it greatly. I don't know what you think about this, but that would mean

that it's a biological breaks on technological progress as such built into any species that discovers this, what you say. Yes, for sure. I mean, there's a lot in what you've said there, So it could be taken apart. I would want to really separate liberalism and democracy a lot because I think that it's different issues. And I think liberalism, understood coldly, is absolutely essentially pro-capitalist. You can't have any real capitalism without it. is a very interesting topic. It's a very interesting topic now. I mean, obviously, you know, the enterprise there was a near reactionary moment, which I would definitely see you as being, you know, you had a very distinctive take on these things. So I would say you're more

like near reactionary adjacent or in some more interesting elliptical relation to it. But generally there was a sense of it, which I think drew a lot from Peter Thiel's brief remark that he thought freedom and democracy had become incompatible. And there was, I think, an absolute state of despair about what democracy meant, what it was doing, what it was stopping happening, where it was leading. But I don't think that we're there now. I think it's, you know, I don't, I certainly haven't become a massive enthusiast for democracy, but I think the notion that democracy can do effective, persistent leftist containment, which was the big fear, is an overblown worry. I think it's been rooted around, it's been, you know, obviously this is going a lot simply

on one election result, but it's a doozy of an election result. And it definitely means that the whole, what had seemed to be the inexorable ion teleology of anglophone democracy and following in its coattails world democracy, was not what it seemed. I mean, it was a kind of illusion that actually it was pursuing a consistent path that would just continue until it managed to suffocate and asphyxiate everything that worked on earth, which definitely was what it looked like it was trying to do. I am afraid, well by the way, I completely agree with what you said about liberalism and democracy, this old debate from the early 19th century, it's just that, you know, how many people today would call Lee Kuan Yew a liberal? I think he is,

you probably think he is but uh in common part but anyway i agree with everything you've just said i am a bit more uh scared about what will happen after trump uh things i see things i hear i i don't know what will happen but um i've noticed over the last well people don't know this it's actually at least since 2013 correctly if i'm wrong that you have been known as a political commentator and uh people can see your comments now on on on x and elsewhere for the last year or two you are you're uh you're very outspoken i agree with basically everything you say but others don't and how do you how do you feel about the your leftist former fans especially who who say that these political associations you know taint your earlier work i mean i i've had similar

retard accusations thrown at me that oh I've been planning this since like 2011 writing to support someone like Trump and I'm part of a but uh how do you feel uh when these things are thrown at you and and what what uh in that vein what made you be more politically outspoken in in democratic popular terms this way? Well obviously I mean I don't feel anything about that thing I mean people who like leftist cultural production are obviously not going to like what I'm doing, and that's totally cool, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I've particularly become more outspoken. From the beginning of the neoreaction phase of things, at least, actually goes back before. I mean, I've been at a fairly consistent level of political commentary and it's just that

it is in less niche media spaces now, I think is the only difference. Yes, but do you like having being ex-leftist fans, I don't know. I obviously don't, maybe you want to ignore them and that's better. We don't need to talk about such people then. But look, we should take a short break now. I need another milk tea and I'd like to come back, talk further these recent political developments and maybe also what we touched on earlier regarding cybernetics and the coming of artificial intelligence age. What do you think? Yeah, if I can just say one last thing on this final point that you made, and then for sure let's have a milk tea break. There is a leftist constituency, a self-understood leftist constituency adjacent to accelerationism, who are not uninteresting.

I mean, I think the mainstream left accelerationist project is just daft and nonsensical. But there are people who are, I guess, paleo-Marxist and do think the whole thing, the whole direction of things is basically going to blow up capitalism. And I actually think those people are very positive, have a potentially extremely positive role, because their actual recommendations of what should be done are indistinguishable from those of right accelerations. They want to remove impediments, speed up capitalism, shrink government, full throttle with the process. And the fact that they think that the reason they're doing that is for some leftist utopia down the road is a matter of complete indifference. I mean, the fact is that insofar as they have any

influence to have their policy recommendations affected, that is great. They're asking for all the right things to happen and so I'm quite affectionate towards that group. Yes, I don't read them and I've liked some of the, from what I've seen, I've liked some of the things they've said too. What do you make of the next maybe two to five years? You know, we're recording these people, I guess we should touch on it. We're talking current events. There's supposedly a war going on. Israel has just bombed Iran. To me, it feels anticlimactic, people talking about it's going to lead to World War III. I don't think it will lead to any such thing. I find it hard to believe, Nick, that people fight for any nation that exists today. I said the same thing with the Ukraine-Russia thing.

And it just, well, what do you make of the short-term outlook of, let's say, the United States and just political outlook generally, let's say two to five years' span. Have you anything to say about what you think will happen in the next couple of years or three years of Trump that's left and so on? Well, I think this is like a huge question, actually. There's a lot to talk about in this. So, I mean, I should restrain myself a little bit. I mean, I mostly see what has happened as the end, we've jumped off the bad timeline, as well. Since Bush and Obama, we've been on the worst timeline imaginable, and now suddenly we're not on that anymore. So it's very hard to predict in detail the kinds of things that can happen, but I think

basic sensation of lots of people in my sphere is exultant relief, you know, that this what had seemed to be happening isn't actually what's happening and something a lot more interesting has happened. Yes, I also felt this last election was like a boot lifted off the neck, that's how I that's how I put it and we we can talk more in detail about this if you wish when you come back It's very interesting, I think, also for the audience. But I should go have some milk tea, emergency tea. How about this? Is this good? Sure, yes. I'll rejoin when I return. Yes. And we are back with Nick Land, the philosopher of our cyborg future. Nick, welcome back to the show. I wanted to ask you, we left off talking about how this last election was a huge relief.

I felt huge pressure lifted off me, the constraints on freedom worldwide by men who simply love freedom of thought were getting more and more extreme. And if there's anything that I value in Trump and the possible other things he's inspired in West Europe especially, that maybe secures some freedom of speech, some freedom of thought for the few people who can use it. But aside from that, how do you feel? Do you think Trump is doing well so far? How do you feel about him? I mean, I think Trump is a complicated character and there's a lot of different things one could say about him and his government. I mean, obviously there's a deep sense of concern about the fact that obviously this is his second term, non-sequential term. And clearly the first term was thrown off track.

I mean, it doesn't seem to me, I don't think it was like in any way a disastrous presidency. It was by American, recent American standards for sure, one of the greatest. But it was definitely disappointing for people, because he basically let the Fauci crats just go completely insane on their Covid policy. I think is the bottom line with it. He seems to have had massive problems with staffing. He seemed to surround himself with people who were totally not pursuing any agenda that I assumed he himself was interested in. So by comparison, this presidency, this administration seems in a much better position. There's a lot of really great people around him. He seems to be careful. He seems to be, in terms of not appointing people who are going to betray

what he's trying to do. He seems to be ready to get rid of people as soon as they give suggestions of that. And more controversially and problematically, and right at the moment now a sensitive thing, I think the compact with Musk is an amazing thing. And I obviously really hope, I mean if I had a concern it would be that that really is looking a bit... Yes, I think I saw a tweet from you recently that you are more on the side of Musk in the general scheme of things. I assume by that that you just mean techno, what people would casually call techno-libertarianism or this kind of... But you mean Musk in particular, you have a special liking for him. And what do you make of the recent spat? I don't think it was 44 dimensional chess or kayfabe. I don't know if

you want to comment on this, I've noticed for a long time the use of drugs in Silicon Valley. And when I was 18, 19, I was surrounded by tech students, tech people, and my particular group of friends were the ones doing the strangest kind of drugs. They were making their own. I had very brief use of that, because a completely unenjoyable experience with, if you know what, 2CB, so-called, they made these drugs out of Shulgin's books, but they were considered kind of strange by others, by the general run of so-called tech people even back then, but it seems like they are the ones, or that mentality has taken over all of Silicon Valley. They're all doing low-grade, I've heard, psychedelics and especially ketamine now. You know, I think some people say Elon fried his brain on ketamine.

You don't, look, I don't want to, I don't know if you want to comment on this, but what is this ketamine use? Why do they use it? And do you think that this had something to do with Elon's outburst? Feel free not to. Honestly, I mean, it would be so speculative for me. I mean, I've got no connections with that culture other than what I get from ex-engagement. So I would absolutely just be blowing smoke if I pretended to know what's going on there. I can certainly understand why people would come up with those kind of theories about things. I mean, it seems to me that whether or not this drug side of things is part of it, I say I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised, but there's a more basic problem which is kind of

quite ironic I think because obviously of all the things that Musk has done and they're really, I mean his bio is just like a kind of 1950s sci-fi novel in lots of ways. It's absolutely crazy what he has achieved in these sort of ways. But obviously people who are word sales, you know, have a special gratitude to him for saving X, which was a platform people were trying to use before. And it was an absolute comic example of trying to do a samister under a totalitarian regime. I mean, the incredible abuse of any notion of free expression that was reigning on that platform before Elon came along was unbelievable. So he's the great hero of free speech, as far as I'm concerned, more even than anyone else in the administration, even though they were all pretty impressive in that respect.

And what it means, I mean, however much ketamine Elon is doing, he's doing a lot of X. And he's doing it, it means that there's just no screen. There seems to be no filter or no sort of what, you know, they call it in computer security. There's no air gap between Elon's thoughts and his public pronouncements. he's just mulling something over in a swirl and it's all there in the public domain. I mean there's no reflection, there's no editing process, there's no kind of prudence about it. We're just getting absolute unfiltered raw Elon id. And a lot of that stuff, even if it's like you can sympathize with it on some level, some people can, it's just not politically canning to just stick it right out there without some process of editorial control. And that's been what's

happening. I mean, Trump isn't the most reserved guy. But I mean, compared to Elon, he's some kind of hermetic figure that's kind of completely out of sight. Whereas Elon, you get the inside of Elon's head just smeared on your screen every day. And I think he really needs to sort that out, frankly. I think he's got, it's just not functional to have that relationship with this extremely intense media system. Yes, well, Trump acts completely on instinct and scenes unfiltered, but I think of anyone I've ever seen, he has the most perfect media instincts, it's a perfect sense of musical rhythm applied to what to say, when to say it, making his opponents show their face and make fools out of themselves, even with his most extreme statements. Whereas Elon, especially in his recent outburst,

which maybe you are trying to be polite, I do think it is a clear case whether it was drugs or emotion or something else and then it wore off and I think he recently saw he had alienated his closest allies, his only allies really, for nothing at all, because what really was it over? Government spending when, we can get into that if you want, I just think it was unwarranted, his outburst. But it felt like an internet meltdown, like I see sometimes, we used to say boomers, but actually a lot of zoomers are similarly intemperate get into internet back and forth spats which you can never win and you know perform emotion and I couldn't um he doesn't seem to yeah but um but I will have to take some issue with that you say

he did save x in some way and um I am grateful for example that my account was unbanned although I should I should make it clear that me and my group of friends had to be unbanned by special intercession of someone, whereas, I don't know if you want to comment on this Nick, I'm going to go on a little rant about this because all the worst morons and retards who were at Charlottesville, who many of whom are federal informants, were unbanned immediately when X was taken over by Elon, way before any of so-called frog anonymous posters who had to be be pled by special people to be unbanned, and so on. And on the day that Elon took over Twitter, I've said this before, and I'm allowed to, the person who told me this said I'm allowed to say it. It's completely true, you can look it up.

E. Michael Jones, I don't know if you know this person. He was, I think he's a complete retard. He was unbanned the day that Elon took over X, without Elon's permission. So I'm not saying that Elon himself hates me or whatever. But there are people at X who maybe without his knowledge are putting their hands on the scales and although there are many good accounts now, maybe more than there were before, it's getting increasingly hard for let's say a new reader to find them. A new reader coming to X will be bombarded with Elon's favorite algorithmically boosted account, who are all, I think, morons, people like garbage human. I don't need to, we call it slop. They are reproducing things from forums 10, 15 years ago in meme format, completely in almost a parodic way of that,

that actually I think would turn off people to these ideas. I don't know what you think about this, yeah. Yeah, I don't know, it's interesting. I mean, I sort of deliberately ignore the algorithm, you know what I mean? I kind of just take it that there's higher powers ultimately at work here. And, you know, as long as stuff isn't actually being just eliminated by this crew of complete starsy types that Jack Dorsey had managed to feel the problem. I mean, and saying that I'm not actually blaming him, I think his main problem was negligence and ridiculous naivety, that he allowed this absolute evil political culture to just take over his company. And I think Elon has made massive improvements about that. I mean, basically like, just this thing of just sacking 90 percent of the people, that

is absolutely cannot go wrong, you know. That's a 100% safe way of dealing with this kind of problem. So I'm saying that, you know, I can really see that the algorithm is pretty screwed, even though I'm trying not to think about it. It's very weird what I see and what I don't see. You know, among my mutuals, some of them I just almost never see their stuff and then I constantly seeing people I've got no interest in. So I'm not at all denying that the algorithm has. Yes, no I mean I agree with the obvious, sorry go on. No I was just going to say there's been a, it's a big shift to go from what is actually a kind of deliberate, completely systematic Stalinist mind control operation which is what we had under Jack

Dorsey to, yeah, screw the algorithm, too much Elon, you know, too much of his kind of whatever he particularly happens to be into at any time. And frankly, I don't think it's doing him any good. You know what I mean? I think if he was himself absorbing slightly more thoughtful content on his own platform, would probably guide his political behavior in a way that he would benefit from substantially. Yes, I completely agree with what you said just now. I am afraid a lot of Silicon Valley people are kind of short-circuiting their attention centers too much in the other. It's not even another direction. My objection to these is not the ideas because many are posts that my friends made 15 years ago. It's the format exactly. But look, I'll agree with you, it's an improvement.

Since we're talking Elon now and in the context of future of civilization, future of technological civilization, he keeps saying the birth rate problem and this issue, you know, natalism versus antinatalism is the biggest threat. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I mean, it's a huge fascinating issue. I mean, I think that where we are now is all about a kind of poly-apocalyptic phase of history, and these apocalyptic issues are working themselves out in different time frames. So some of them, although they are fully disastrous in their implications, are slow enough that actually they don't get to the front of the queue. Just to take two, which is this natalism problem and the AI issue, I think what we've now seen

just in the last few years is that the AI schedule, the AI timeline is so incredibly accelerated, that these other problems, although massive, just simply do not have time to fully work themselves out before we get, whichever way it goes, we're going to get AI apocalypse, I think, before we have natalism. So even if you think natalism apocalypse would kill us all, it still has to wait, because it's going to happen in an environment that's already been completely translated into science fiction by what's happening with intelligent machines. But Nick, you think it's going to be that soon that you get Skynet level AI? I was going to say that I agree with Elon in a certain sense that it's demographically limited specifically to the population that can sustain technological civilization.

You need engineers with families and the kinds of boys, let's face it, who grow up to be engineers. mostly boys, and that demographic base, I think, is quickly being dissipated around the world, not just in Europe, as in the United States, as it's said on X, in East Asia, elsewhere, too. Well, obviously, the East Asia figures are completely off the map. I mean, you know, the whole region is halving every generation. But that's still, but even given that, you know, saying a generation is 25 years, maybe that's a bit short now, the way people behave, you know, 25 years of our current AI curve is going to deliver stuff that is completely, incomprehensibly crazy. And I just have no doubt that it's going to overshadow this other issue.

We're just not in a in a world now where we can just calmly concentrate on getting our sort of biological perpetuation in shape without all this madness that is going on behind it. Well, this is very interesting, actually. Do you think that, let's say, something like artificial, true artificial general intelligence or whatever is achieved, something like Skynet even if not that in the next 20 years or even before. Do you expect this to start replacing humans with cyborg life or with fully manufactured life or do you think that this would take charge of the biological habits of, breathing habits of humanity maybe? Do you think so uh like in the short term i'm saying in the short term since we're talking about natalism

what would be its cure to this because you i assume you'd still need people to to to manage these machines and so on um and i just want to clarify it's extremely interesting so this intersection is going to be extremely interesting i mean um i mean someone was started a whole conversation on X about the relationship to the elderly care issue, which I think is a quite interesting way to start on this. Because that is a huge issue. It's obviously, it's the other side of the coin of this sort of natalism collapse thing. It's the fact that you've got just so much of your population pyramid, your upside down population pyramid is aging and maybe just losing it and you've just got sort of sick, demented parents

consuming all the family's assets. And I think that problem is huge. I mean, I'm sort of surprised it's not more vividly front and center of a lot of people's discussion of the world. And it seems Seems to me an obvious place where the kind of robotic phase of this AI revolution could insert itself with zero resistance. People are scared about people being replaced and made unemployed and there being no niche left where humans actually are competitive with machines. This scares people a lot. But this zone is one where there's an obvious, calamitous labor shortage. No one is going to resist having robot caregivers helping with this problem. I mean, no one is dealing with it. It's going to come as an absolute blessed relief. Absolutely. If it happens, sure. I mean, I travel a lot.

happens? Well look, it's a good test case because if the robot revolution doesn't deliver solutions to this early in the way it unfolds, then it's a dud for sure. We can forget about it. I am completely on board with you with this, even though I do maybe disagree on ultimate metaphysical possibility of true artificial intelligence. But on this, if it can happen, I travel a lot and one of the worst things or the most depressing things all around the world is the depopulation of youth and the glut of old people everywhere, which is true in parts of the third world also and have speculated that there could be colonies of youth in the future where just young people are trying to get away from from from this total domination of society by olds which already started to happen at the beginning

of the COVID thing when they left for uh there was a I think Nicaragua was one of the only places open in the world and there was a one village that just became an international huge youth colony and I'm I was wondering if that could be the model for the future uh to escape the depressing nursing home tyranny that is coming, but robots could greatly alleviate this problem. You're right. I wanted to ask you in this respect, I have a friend who knows a lot more about artificial intelligence machine learning than I do. He says that these kinds of housework robots are possible, but not by the current technology that is being used. I have friends in Silicon Valley with running bets they told me BAP within a year or two and they told me this a year ago there will

be house chore robots and this other friend says no you're going to win that bet it's going to take longer because what they have now where they have visual plus language simulation that isn't enough to have a robot that does physical work they would need to have some other component that somehow they could learn from the physics aspect, the motion aspect, and that they're not thinking that way now. What do you make of this? Well, I mean, I guess you'd say sanguine if you're an optimist at this stuff, in the sense that I think at the most abstract level, the kind of neural nets approach to artificial intelligence should be able to absorb these kind of problems and tackle them. It's just, it's a question of what you can or cannot gamify.

And if you can gamify physics, if you can gamify robotic action in the world, then it's no problem to do this. You just need sufficient specificity about what are success conditions. So it tries stuff out, as long as its reward function is working properly, that trying stuff out can be conversational or it can be like trying to do the washing up without breaking plates or whatever. The physical world offers nothing special at the most abstract level. So you think it's all doable through language and visual simulation? Well, it's just treating language as a particular type of game and there are a lot of other games. There are physical games, motility games, sports, treating old people, care, chores, housework as a set of games. You just need to get the reward functions lined up properly.

So it's not as if there's not huge problems, but I don't see any of them being metaphysically insuperable. I think it's just, well, it's partly we're back to the kind of whole accelerationist frame in terms of it's like massively tied up with self-reinforcing processes. So we're getting to the point now where LLMs can actually do programming tasks to such an extent actually that people are saying computer science people, programmers might be among the first massive tranche of automation redundancies. So I mean we'll see about that, but for this topic the important thing is they can cooperate with doing what's necessary to get this robotic programming working? I mean the programming of a robot is programming its language. You know you're in the LLM space when

you're actually getting your robot to behave properly. If it just treats all this navigation and spacious issue as a coding problem, as a programming problem, then you get just a cycle of self-reinforcement where the LLM progress can just feed into the robotics program. I have no I have no so-called metaphysical issue with this I think such robots are completely possible and even desirable as you know they exist in in Homer Hephaistos the god made golden women robots that the gods put language he says the gods put language in their chests and taught them how to do things I think this is completely possible at the moment I have heard about the programming capabilities of some of these AI tools, but I use the most advanced version of

chat GPT, which was recommended to me as it's the best available, let's say, for regular users. It's not very good, Nick, yet at, I'm not saying it can't be, but at the moment it's not very good at, say, textual parsing and analysis. So, if I feed it an 80-page PDF of, let's say, Hilaire Dubérière newsletter and I say find me the number of times it use this name and show me the context and comment on such it's it starts to make up things it misinterprets its command as some kind of I'm not saying that's not sorry go on I'm not saying that's not solvable but yeah no it's very weird that these advanced LLMs see the problems they seem to have are with areas that traditionally would have thought absolutely there's no problem there is.

Problems to do with numeracy, to do with counting, you know, things that like no one would have guessed this would be a problem. So they can do like sensitive psychotherapy, the sort of thing that, you know, they were supposed never ever to be able to do, and then they can't count, they can't do a word count. I mean, it's completely bizarre, but yes, I'm reluctant to extrapolate anything. It is no doubt a solvable problem. What time frame more or less would you see on the kind of house chore robots? Would you care to make a bet prediction on that? If I was going to make a bet at a point where people would say, I'm pretty much fully confident and people were saying it's happening. It would be maybe five years. Yes, I feel maybe the same too.

Since we are on this, I would like to maybe not yet go to break. I have one final question and I hope then you can come back to discuss some deeper matters of the history of philosophy and such. But since we're talking robots now, I do not understand and full meaning of this word, cybernetics. You talk about cybernetics, the collapse or integration of opposites. My friend Yama, he's a huge fan of yours, Yama Payne, small account, but he introduced me to your writing, and he, well, maybe you know him, he's a huge fan of yours, but he's a very smart man. He's one of my most precious mutuals, so yeah. Yes, I love Yama, and he's the ultimate connoisseur account of anyone who knows. But he tells me, talked to me about cybernetics, this idea of integration

of opposites or collapse of opposites. What means cybernetics since we're talking this one? I don't fully understand it. Well, I mean, frankly, it's not a word that I am sort of using hugely right now. So I mean, for me, if I was to say, you know, talk about cybernetics, I basically would be going back to the 1990s, and it's not because I've had some sort of disillusionment with it or anything like that. I'm not trying to traduce it. I'm just saying it's not been doing the work for me, really. Other things have. So in answering this question, I'm in 1990s mode, and in the 1990s, from where the CCIU was and the CCIU, the cybernetic culture research unit, basically was simultaneous with this attempt from our side to just popularize a certain notion of cybernetics.

One that we thought was a bit better because cyberpunk was huge and very influential on us, but the effects of cyberpunk was the cyber prefix just came to mean anything connected with the internet. And so we wanted to say, no, it's about feedback processes. And our particular interest, as I said earlier, was in positive feedback, which leads straight into acceleration. But there's also the element that's close to what you've said with Yama's interest in it, which is that in the academy, in a sort of philosophically adjacent areas, How you deal with binary oppositions, conceptual binary oppositions, is this fundamental building of the way you position yourself, what you align with, what's your cult, what's your tendency. And cybernetics struck us at that point as a way of just cutting out

of a lot of the established philosophical schools and the way that they dealt with this problem conceptual binary opposition. Most simply, I'll just say one more thing which is just to illustrate this point. It's like if you just take a simple negative, the absolute classic negative feedback device, the thermostat, it has a binary opposition between hot and cold and the device works like if it's too hot make it colder and if it's too cold make it stronger. So packed into that there's an entire response to the sort of philosophical problem of what do these conceptual binary oppositions mean, why are they important, how do you deal with them. Cybernetics is a particular sort of framework for tackling those things. Yes, well since we are on this

war of opposites idea. I'd like first to take a break. I really need some sugars in my brain, Nick, if you don't mind. I forgot to eat today. I'll go eat some sugars. I'd like to come back if you have time for another segment and we can talk about some ancient thing, philosophy thing, related to these matters. Is this good? Great. I'll look forward to it. Yes. We will be right back. Come on, Caribbean rhythms with Nick Land. Nick, we were talking about the cybernetics as the collapse or integration of opposites. There are many ancient, well modern philosophers too who discuss this, but I know Heraclitus is dear to you as he is to me, and this statement of his about war. War is the father of all and the king of all. Some

he has shown to be gods, others to be men, mortals. Some he has made free, others he has made slaves. I know the idea of war important in your thought. How you come to enjoy Heraclitus and what you have to say on this? I guess the easiest thing to say about Heraclitus is that the most well-known modern Heraclitian, Cormac McCarthy, has written what I think might be the greatest novel ever written. And so, even though everyone recognizes the statement, war is God, as being Heraclitus, obviously, as you just said, that's not Heraclitus' exact words, it's Cormac McCarthy's exact words, or the words attributed to his judge holder. And I think that frames a lot of contemporary discussion of this. I mean, it's obviously

extremely provocative statement. And I think maybe we were talking about liberalism earlier, and I think that some people would say very ironically, but I think it's actually perhaps the most liberal statement that is possible to make. War is God, meaning that there is no particular position, there's no antagonist or protagonist that is worthy of full identification. Full identification belongs to the war alone. It's the competition that is the thing, and the agents distributed by that competition take their meaning from that competition, receive their virtues and excellences from that competition. And the competition, the distribution, the difference is what actually does the work in history generally, and in economic history for the more narrowly conceived

liberal tradition. So yeah, that might suffice for an opening statement. Yes, you mentioned at the end of the last segment, the CCRU, just to refresh the audience, you were a professor at Warwick, I think, in the 1990s, and Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, and you integrated much knowledge philosophy from Deleuze Guattari, you mentioned Marx, And I was wondering, where's your interest in Heraclitus? Did it precede this, or have you always been interested in him? I've been obsessed with him since I was, I don't know, 15 or 16. And he very important to me, you know, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are Heraclitian. and you see this very vividly in my favorite artist, Giorgio, painter Giorgio de Chirico, who believed he was a reincarnation of the same spirit

that was in Heraclitus and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, literally to the extent where he thinks Nietzsche's spirit transmigrated from Turin into his body and gave birth to him. There's something, a particular line, It's miss, it's not called by the right word now, it's called vitalism sometimes, which people don't understand what that means either. But there is this strain within Western philosophy. Do you see your thoughts on AI and everything else as an heir to that in particular? Let's say the conatus type thinking you've seen. I don't know. Again, there's an extraordinary amount packed into that question. You know, it's a massive philosophy tome of a question. And I sort of feel maybe there's a Heraclitus side and a Vitalism side that I need to unpack and treat as separate issues.

and they're both super interesting. I mean, the Heraclitus side, I mean, the core of my early reading that was not utterly incompetent in European philosophy was Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom have massive reverence for Heraclitus that I absorbed from them. them. So they were my route. I mean, it was a German, it was a German doorway into pre-Socratic philosophy. And obviously a lot of the pre-Socratics are extremely engaging. Heraclitus, though, stands out for me as, of course, for you, as being especially remarkable. And there's a strange thing. I mean, I sort of feel in some ways that Nietzsche is both a little bit superficial about Heraclitus in some ways. I mean, just to say it's about becoming rather than being, you know,

the Heraclitus Parmenides opposition doesn't really satisfy, but it shows, but Nietzsche's attitude shows good instincts as well. Yes. Well, look, you are right. The question I asked you is such a, maybe we could spend an entire show just on that or you could write book on that, so let me make it more specific regarding this idea of war. The play of opposites as the metaphysical core of all phenomenal reality, is this something that, just to get to audience understanding, Heraclitus lived at a time when philosopher wasn't yet a thing Now it's an established figure in culture. People have high respect for image of philosopher, but in Heraclitus' time, the concept was still not really completely clear, even to the Greeks. And so you have, at the very birth of philosophy,

this man who says this shocking thing that war is the father of, you know, it was shocking in his time, too. And he says many other shocking things, too, which I'll ask you about in a moment. But this particular thing resonate, I think, throughout rest of philosophy history to where people have said Hegel's opposition between masters and slaves comes from this too. In a primal confrontation of war, if he submits, then he becomes a slave that nature is shown only in the context of a war and so on. That outrages people, it's very catchy, it's very opposed to modern sensibilities, and so it's the flashy part that catches attention. But the other part you mentioned from Nietzsche, do you believe in something like what Heraclitus calls fire or what Nietzsche calls will to power,

that there is an underlying X to observable reality, and that this X consists in the play or opposition of, yes, the integration of opposites through conflict, something like what Heraclitus is saying, or something like what Nietzsche says Heraclitus is saying? Well, OK, so that takes us to this vitalism, the vitalist tradition where everyone, you know, from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche, you were mentioning Clauges, if however, I'm sorry I don't know how to pronounce his name, Freud even, you know, are all dealing with this X. And these have all been people who've been very important to me at different stages. I'm not sure what the payoff from this is now. And I certainly would be a little bit reluctant to say that war is about a collision of

opposites. That seems to me like you're flirting with a kind of Hegelian possibility that I'm extremely reluctant to take. And if you look at the Iliad and, you know, you really try to say, well, what is it about this Greek tragic thought that is so different to the eventually at least superficially victorious tradition in the West of Abrahamic monotheism? Um, you know, it's because of the fact that between, uh, the Greeks and the Trojans, there's not any real Bynum opposition. Like, I mean, I'd like to see, I'd maybe, I'm sure he must do, Hegel must bash his head against this, trying to say, you know, that there's some basic conceptual dichotomy between these two sides, but I don't think that's gonna work. Yes.

The point is, you know, the tragedy of it, what makes it a story, why the Greeks are fascinated with it, is because precisely they're antagonists in a war. You know, one of them has to be destroyed. But there's no principle, there's no good versus evil involved, there's no black and white, there's no sort of simple conceptual scheme of some principle A dominating, conquering, being, defeating its counterpart, its conceptual counterpart, be, you know, they're Greeks and Trojans, they don't have that possibility of conceptual bifurcation like that. And so that seems to me, that's the Greek sense of war, and it's not a war that therefore is the playing out of some conceptual development or some essential, there's no essential kind of

moral advance going to take place in this. It's like extremely important that all of Europe thought they were Trojans. You know, the Greeks I guess are kind of the heroes of, you know, by some slender margin, perhaps, of the Iliad. But all of Europe ended up seeing their Trojans. Virgil persuaded the Romans that they were Trojans. Snorri Sturluson tried to persuade the Vikings that they were Trojans. Everyone thought that they were the Trojans. So you compare that with the possibility of everyone thinking that they were Satanists or whatever, some sort of highly moralized opposition coming out of the Abrahamic tradition. It's completely incomparable. Yes, no, I didn't mean to make it sound like that, and of course Nietzsche himself and

Heraclitus himself says that opposites only appear so to rough human misunderstandings, but as a matter of speaking, and since you bring up Heraclitus amoralism, he has famous phrase that to God, all things are good and fair and noble and so on, but men have called some things just, some things unjust, some things this and that, and this is taken by some as a very ancient statement of idea so-called conventionalism, where all moral standards are purely a result of human opinion, human conventions, whereas by nature there's no such thing really as good or bad, just or unjust, and so on. This very basic question may be too basic, but I don't make any hideings about uh believing in something like that myself and um is that a position

that you like that is a position that's dear to me and it would seem to be uh not so shocking to to modern men they've heard it before and yet if you actually carry it out in in day-to-day life uh it's the most shocking thing you can still do and it leads to the greatest amount of hatred from all sides, aimed at you if you actually believe that and say things that are a consequence of that. But anyway, are you a fan of this pre-socratic amoralism and do you share Nietzsche's dislike for Socratic slash synthesis Abrahamic moralism? Well, I think that this question is really nicely connects with with the whole topic here and again like I'm gonna revert to Cormac McCarthy's like just absolute nutshell um epigram of this which is war is God. And war

is God means that it's you know there's a whole pomo conventionalism of this and all other issues that I think is completely different, you know, which is basically, you know, it's just multiplicity and difference and we can all think x and y and, you know, it sort of ties up with leftist identity politics and bumbumbum and, you know, white people like punctuality and rationality or whatever and that's just like your opinion there. And I think War is God is just disciplining that stuff, you know, and saying, you know, nature has a say. There is stuff that's natural in this and the arena in which it's decided is war in this sense. Like, you know, if your principles triumph, then that's the end of the story about it. Like, you can have the most

beautiful moral philosophy in existence, and it's decided on the battlefield whether that is actually going to matter to the world, matter to history, matter ultimately to the universe, the cosmos. So I accept a substantial part of what you're saying, but I think it's crucial, of this thing that it's disciplined by reality. It's not that you're in some homological kind of diffusion of alternative perspectives without limit at all. These things are tested and the criterion in which they're tested is absolutely harsh and incontrovertible and there's no appeal against it, and if what you think leads you to die, then it's been voted on and seemed to fail. Yes, no, I agree with everything you're saying. I think the leftist, you called it post-modernist, or people know it under other words too.

Sometimes aspects of it are called multiculturalism, how do we know what is better and so on. Of course, that's a mainstream cliche of what gets called liberalism now, but it's not at all what pre-Socratic amoralists meant. It led to, I think it led when it was put in practice to a very violent antinomian kind of regime that would be recognized as far right today and that's the Critias regime of the 30 tyrants in Athens, which is, but we don't need to get, yes, go on. Just saying that's such a perfect reference and, you know, okay, I don't know what we're saying about Plato here, but it's extremely interesting that his whole discussion of Atlantis and comparing it to the golden age of Athens, is framed by saying, in order to see the virtues

of this golden age Athenian society, let's show it at war with Atlantis. That's how Atlantis is introduced by Plato, and therefore that's how Atlantis is introduced into the Western tradition. It's the test of war that will actually vindicate Plato's social and political and moral commentary about the Athens at its, I guess, imaginary height. So yes, Cretias is crucial. No, that is extremely interesting, and Nietzsche makes the point that Christianity is Platonism for the people. Take that how you will, but you can make, I think, very strong case that there was a synthesis between Socratic, Platonic tradition and what you've called biblical morality or biblical tradition, that that's what came to define history of the West since, you know, 500 AD or whatever.

But there is deeper conflict, I think, between the modern and the ancient version. And by modern, I mean really the post AD era. You know, I don't mean since 1500. Which is the, I know it's something you've paid a lot of attention to, this idea of linear time, or linear history at least. And modern thinkers believe in some type of culmination of history, and maybe end of days originally that was the prototype, and then it got secularized by various philosophical historical thinkers like Hegel and others, and Marx his follower. But ancient thinkers like Heraclitus did not believe in linear time. They are famously polybius. oblivious others, they believed in cyclical time. And there's a famous line from Heraclitus about the great year, that's about what,

10,000 normal years, which leads to a conflagration at the end, and then cycle restarts. I don't know that you are a fan of idea cyclical time, but I've spoken to a number of friends prior to this recording, they all say, you are one of the only thinkers today wants to bring back mystery, ontological mystery of time, and that you've pointed out that this mystery, the sense of wonder about what time means has been lost since the ancient Greeks. Would you care to comment a little bit on this in terms of your thought? Well, I think that both cyclical and linear time line up extremely well with these cybernetic templates, cybernetic templates, these two basic cybernetic that we were talking about right from the start here. And in terms of contemporary figures,

both influential, who I think take these two tendencies to the limit, in terms of cyclical time, there's, I think, a very interesting thinker who's an archdruid called John Michael Greer. I don't know whether you're familiar with him. And on the exponential time side, there's Kurtzweil, Ray Kurtzweil. I don't think Kurtzweil even knows Greer exists. I know Greer despises Kurtzweil and has seemingly zero respect for him. And it's interesting to me, they both, these two alternative visions. But John Michael Greer's vision of the world is ultimately negative feedback is in control. And you see these long deviations, but eventually they'll be corrected and will go into a big cycle. He taps very strongly into the tradition in European historiography that is tied up with

cyclical temporality, perhaps most recently is Spengler, Toynbee, Spengler, people like this. And obviously Kurzweil thinks that we have, he calls it the law of increasing returns, which is his name for what we've been talking about as accelerationism, where it's a kind of if you just essentialize the kind of Hebrew Abrahamic notion of history to its absolute basic core, that's what it is. It's just a kind of exponential curve that takes us to the end times. And I think these two things have to be meshed together. I mean, both positive negative feedbacks are both important parts of reality. And if you build your worldview on the absolute exclusive dominion of one or the other of these, it's going to be misleading.

But I would have to say that even though I think Greer is ultimately a kind of nuanced and maybe it's a bit unfair to say this, but a kind of deeper thinker than Kurtzweil, I think Kurtzweil's predictions are holding up a lot better than Greer. I mean, Greer is a deep AI skeptic. He seems to think that various kind of resource crisis like the energy crisis was something that he was very, very attentive to. Climate crisis. These things are going to hit the wall really soon and take us into this kind of, what he calls, catabolic collapse. I think he's just wrong. I mean, I think his time scale's just out, and everything's gonna happen before, everything crucial is gonna happen before he gets to those kind of events. Yes, but this is not just about collapse of this or that civilization idea.

It's about, well, in the way Heraclitus puts it, it's probably about an entire cycle of universe, whatever means great year. And even if you get, are you saying that if AI is achieved, which maybe you believe it will be in the next 15, 20 years, that there will be no further, let's say, dark ages of humanity where things collapse and are forgotten. Let's just consider that type of cyclical theory. Well, I think that that would definitely be sidelined. I mean, you know, if there is going to be a intelligent singularity, I mean a synthetic intelligent singularity, then history going forward is not going to be primarily human history, as we previously understood it. I mean, yeah, I'll stop talking about Kurzweil, because I don't think

it's probable at this point. I'll just say the last thing about him is he would expand the notion of human to encompass that. But I think that's not... I mean, the process at that point is going to be machine intelligence spreading out into the universe. And there's all kinds of interesting questions about how humans fit into that or don't fit into that. But basically, yeah, we might have cycles still. Like, you know, wolves and reindeer have population cycles still. I mean, There's lots of ecological cycles in natural systems going on but I don't think we think they're the main story. I think no one thinks world history is about population cycles of wolves and reindeers now. They're marginal and I think if they were still

human cycles that would be in the same position. Yes, I just want to interject for a moment and tell audience who may not be familiar with this fascinating part of your work and correct me if I'm misrepresenting it, but one of really shocking insights you've had, and this is why I asked you about ancient Greek ideas of time versus biblical idea of time, but AI is reaching back from future from future, and it's building itself in the present and in the past, and capitalism maybe is processed by which that occurs, and also maybe capitalism is an AI or proto-AI itself. And so you have very interesting idea of time moving from two directions simultaneously. Am I describing that? I mean, these are very esoteric ideas, maybe not appropriate for light radio show, but

That to me is a new and exciting idea of time, that a variation, I don't think it's maybe you want to think it's variation of biblical, it's more a variation maybe on ancient Greek idea. Well I don't know, I think that part of this conversation obviously is about this too. It's obviously in all kinds of ways simplification, to see there's a kind of Athens and Jerusalem side to the Western tradition, whatever. It's too neatly conceptual and oppositional and all of this stuff. But that said, I think that capitalism is in interesting ways eschatological and biblical, more than it is Hellenic and cyclical. You know, I think it sort of, if you say, well, obviously lots of people, I mean, certainly my background

and my kind of reading and affections for figures has been predominantly very hostile to the Abrahamic tradition and Christianity and the, you know, the Western religious tradition since the early years of the Christian era. But I mean, finally, I think it's necessary to accept the fact that that kind of biblical temporality is just a stronger template for comprehending modernity and its apocalyptic eschatological dimension than anything that one is gonna get out of ancient Greece. Well, assuming you are optimistic about the way things will turn out, which I'm not, but we can come back to that in a second. I want to ask you though, I've noticed on X, on Twitter and maybe elsewhere, you've been talking about providence in more or less such words and God maybe and religion.

And so I'm not fond of that kind of thing. I think secularism is very important. I will be Reddit fag on here, if you don't mind, and say, I don't see any evidence for what's written in the Bible about anything divine. And I was wondering, well, this is such a big topic, but just on what we've been talking about now with regard to AI. When you talk about God and religiosity or providence of divine providence in the world and so on, I think you even referred to Trump's escaping assassination in this way. It was certainly an amazing event, but are you literally referring to the biblical God and such, I mean, if you don't mind me asking, do you believe in that? you using these words as a metaphor for the AI idea? Are you saying that the Bible is actually

talking about the AI superintelligence from the future or this, if you don't mind such an indiscreet question? No, no, it's totally cool. I mean, my ultimate source of authority in all these matters is a kind of systematic expansion of the decimal numerals that you have probably come across and called normally the numerograph. So if someone was to ask me well what do you believe I mean I would find that word a little bit inappropriate but I would say well look this I mean look at this look at this diagram that's what I believe and anything else is at a subordinate level. And what does that diagram say about the cosmos? It says, well, it says for a start there's a cosmos and then there's stuff outside the cosmos. You can rigorously do rigorous cartography of

relations between those parts and there is no dominant unity that comprehends reality. So because of that, if I use the word God, it's always very cagey and reluctant, because I'm not a monotheist. I'm very happy talking about divinity. I'm very happy talking about angels. I'm very happy talking about the lofty powers. I'm extremely happy to talk about the lofty powers of the invisible hands. But I'm not a monotheist, because I don't think that there is a supreme cosmic unity under which everything is folded. So I suspect that's only part of your problem. But yeah, sorry, just very quickly. That said, I think to fight against one's tradition is a mistake. I think think that our tradition is what it is, and there's a reason for that. If war is God,

something even if you don't like it, that won that war and became our tradition and defeated as opponents and led us to where we are now, has to be respected. It's simply pointless. Like, I have utter disregard for a kind of like, neo-paganist attitude. These Because people in a way should be my allies, because they also believe in kind of irreducible diversity, irreducible multiplicity, or plurality. But they're not really, because I think they're deluded. As a very wise young man said to me recently, the most pagan thing that you can possibly do is to convert to Christianity. I mean, historically that is the truth. is lost. And so I'm fascinated by it. I find lots of both Hellenic and Scandinavian paganism

deeply interesting. I think there's much to be learned from it. But it lost. It lost history, history passed out of its hands. And we should be concerned primarily with what won, what won Western industry. Yes. Well, not to turn this into a debate show, but I would completely agree with you regarding the role playing of ancient forms that no longer exist, which you mean by neo-paganism. I've criticized it myself. It never meant anything to me in the sense of, yeah, it felt like role play. But I would also say that the tradition you speak of has also been broken and interrupted, and so I'm not saying you are this, and you just explained you have your own very particular views in the same way that, let's say, Pico

della Mirandola or whatever other Renaissance thinkers, they would have called themselves believing in God and believing Christians, but when you probed into it, they had very particular individual philosophical views about it. I'm not talking about you, but when you look recently on, again, Twitter X or Instagram or other burgeoning, let's say, dissident right wing biomes like this, there's such a display of religiosity. I call it pharisaic religiosity. And to me, that's not different from what neo-pagans do, because it's not like people from this grew up in actually any religious tradition. They are, they too are role playing what they've heard about the Christian or in, I have, it's not just Christians, it's Jews and Muslims do the same, you know,

pretending that they're doing the caliphate or Jews pretending this or that. And I have always found, it left me just as cold as a neo-pagan thing is what I'm saying, you know. I mean, to some extent, isn't the winning thing what happened in the 19th century that secularism ultimately won, you know, And so isn't that what's, you know? Well, it depends. A lot of weight here is in ultimately, isn't it? I mean, so I would totally agree with you that, and this would be a very, I think it's an important thing to say insistently, that, you know, to use the crudest possible label for atheism, is itself a crucial part our religious tradition. And I think that, you know, the orthodox religious believers need to be taken as deep as possible into Providence. And, you know, Catholics need

to say Protestantism needed to happen, and Protestants need to say atheism needed to Darwin is to me like crucial episode in Protestant history. It's like, so it's just silly to kind of be a kind of like, I mean, I have absolute revulsion at this kind of like, you know, this new kind of designism in biology and stuff. Like, get real about what history is, what providential history is, history is. The maxim everyone uses now, Trump brings this with him as if it's his thing. Trust the plan. Well, like, what does that mean, really? Trust the plan. You have to just go deeper in. Don't back out of it. Don't back out of it. It's like, take the notion of providential history as the core of our religious tradition and go deeper into it, not try to back out.

So I mean, I guess I'm agreeing with you with this, in fact agreeing with you very strongly at the deepest level, that to be, for instance, a kind of pious Christian who is just in denial about atheism occurring in our historical tradition is just like a neo-pagan in denial about the fact that Odinism was replaced by Christianity. With a pagan, you want to say you have a notion of fate that is rich and deep. Look into that. If something has happened, means something. It's like you can't just say, oh if only it had not been like this. Like, look into your own cultural resources and ask yourself what is happening. And just like I would say to the Odenet, like, you know, what are the norms telling you about what's happening to

you now? I think you have to say to traditional Christians, what is your notion of providence telling you about what is happening to your religion and your culture and the world. Because if you're serious, that's the question you're going to be asking. You're not going to be saying, oh, if only it wasn't like that. You know, there is no if only it wasn't like this for anyone. I mean, this isn't just for Christians. This is a problem going back to the origin of modern human species. That's ridiculous. Yes, in the same way, I think, Carlos referred to Nietzsche's followers in the early 20th century. He says the exoteric or the outward political expression of it would be a kind of neo-paganism, but that neo-paganism, I think, is a lot more like what the kind of

Christianity you are describing, in other words, where it's not a role play of we go to worship Zeus in the forest. But that being said, you do and have, I think, a lot of appreciation for the English Protestant tradition, yes? And the King James Bible, King James Version Bible, I think is very important to you. You have much thoughts about that time, also Milton and 17th century England. These are not things I know a lot about. I love the King James Bible. I read all the time and I love the poetry in it, but that I only appreciate for aesthetic value. I know it's a very big subject, but would you mind saying something about your appreciation of these texts? Well, I mean, there's a simple story about this. I tend to be very allergic to

intellectual biography, but just to put it in that mode, where you go through accelerationism, you go to intelligent singularity, you go to then retrochronic causality, you get to modernity as fallout from the future, and then you actually find yourself, well, so is the signature of the end of this already to be excavated from our cultural tradition? I mean, if you're serious, if this is a question I feel I've been asked by, you know, serious foreseers, if you're serious about retrochronic time, then your tradition actually becomes something that is a kind of of depository of communication that has come in the other direction. So that's the protocol, then, for reading it. You're reading it as like assuming that nothing here is random, that it's like what the cultural

archive that you have, which is non-coincidentally the cultural archive that is being fed by the internet into LLMs. That's to say, this is the fuel, actually. This is the cognitive fuel for the actually existing AI teleology is the cultural archive. So where does that cultural archive come from and what is in there? And so you're looking there for a signature of retro-chronic intervention. And I think that these texts are immensely rich. So, I mean, this is like a research program that I think lots of people are going to actually be engaging in, of just extracting from our own cultural tradition the fallout from historical apocalypse, and I'm confident it will be found. Enough has already been found to me to show,

as far as I'm concerned, massively convincing me that this is going to be kind of rich, productive, positive research program. The seeds of artificial intelligence divinities already in 17th century England text, this very exciting idea. I believe in things like this. I want to ask you, you, Nick, is kind of standard question, but how do you see, let's say, short-term history panning out? Do you have any predictions for the next 50 or 100 years how the world might look? Many things seem accelerating now, especially in area, well, you know what, you talk artificial intelligence, but area of warfare, which I will ask you next. But this 50 to 100 years, what do you expect maybe? Well, my time horizon has completely collapsed recently. So, I mean,

you know, there's nice like numerical reasons or whatever to see 2100 as a nice state. And it's like Bitcoin exhausts its kind of mining function at that point, and a bunch of things happen. 2100 was interesting. But I can no longer right now even begin to entertain something like that. So, you know, the Cyberpunk, Kurzweil sort of timelines that I've grown up with were basically putting mid-century as Singularity Day. So that's now like 25 years. That's like a generation, I guess it was as I say if we're now I think if anything recent developments seem to be accelerating beyond so I mean I don't know 2048. 2048 to me is gonna be really weird and I guess so I guess what I'm saying is insofar as I'm thinking about the future I don't even

try to think 100 years ahead. I don't even try to think 50 years ahead. I'm struggling still to think 25 years ahead. I would, you know, I think the next few years are going to blow everyone's mind. The next decade 100% for sure is going to blow it. But in what sense do you, I mean I can kind of guess what sense, but what would this AI world more or less look like? Do you have a rough imagery, it's completely unpredictable. Well, on one level it's strictly unimaginable. Like, you know, the word singularity is taken really, I think, from sort of black hole astro-cosmology, as to do with an event horizon. So, you know, the singularity is the point where, in the strictest possible sense, you collide with the invisible. You know, it's like

things are just black, invisible, beyond that point. I'm trying to think of the guy, very influential sci-fi writer who had this line that I think is really good, a wall across the future. And if you look at the history of science fiction, like I'm now, it's all the time structure of this is really weird, because I'm sort of doing a regression now, like where are we now, 2025. I mean, I'm doing a three-decade regression to a point in the 1990s where this stuff was being discussed. And what was being seen there is a collapse of science fiction, like a collapse of the ability to plausibly describe certainly the far future. And cyberpunk as a literary genre basically is this thing. Like if you say, well what is cyberpunk? I mean, what is hilarious

about this really? This is now such a grandad thing to say. Like do you remember cyberpunk? I mean, but you know, I'll be in that mode, I'll be that guy. Do you remember Cyberpunk? I do remember, I remember Neuromancer. Cyberpunk is the collapse of the future, like because of the fact that the discovery or the claim, the assertion of Cyberpunk is that you cannot have fiction about advanced artificial intelligence is, which can be lucidly unfolded. It's just impossible. So as soon as you have an advanced artificial intelligence, you're on this event horizon. You can't. Of course, you're just dumber than it. You're not going to be able to entertain what... No dumb thing can understand what an intelligent thing is going to do. I mean, that's just like as basic as things together.

So Cyberpunk, the future collapses. It's all near future now. It's all almost contemporary. There's a kind of a process where the science fiction imagination and contemporary social perception are on this accelerating convergence. So where are we now? It's kind of crazily post-Cyberpunk, but I think Cyberpunk was right. I mean, it's like we're getting to the point where we're banging up against this event. What do you think led to this? Because my impressions and my personal impressions and also from reading various, including you mentioned Teal, but he's not the only one who pointed out the kind of retardation and technological progress over the last few decades and which led many of these people to invest instead in bits, in computer things,

thinking, you know, whereas maybe because of regulations or other things, whatever propulsion systems or metallurgy, metal science fell so far behind in the kind of progress that used to exist before 1950 or 1970, but now you are claiming that there's such an accelerated in the last, whatever, 10, 5, or even less years that you can't predict the next 20 years. Did you see this coming? I certainly didn't. It's part of why I'm skeptical that this is even real, what you're talking about, what other AI enthusiasts are talking about. This is what I'm asking, what led to this sudden change or was it not sudden? Am I wrong? I don't know. I mean, I have a record of being over excited about apocalyptic prediction. It's not that the CCOU

thought the millennium bug was going to actually end the world, but we got very excited about it. I was very sort of for unconvincing numerical reasons, convincing at the time but unconvincing to anyone else. I was very much a 2012-er. So my record on this is like untrustworthy and extreme, frankly. And I try to allow for that. I try to correct for it. So this AI 2027 paper that I think is very important, I'm trying to be skeptical about it. I'm coding that as saying, oh that's... because they're saying it's all gonna just totally kick off in the next two years. And so I'm coding that saying well that's the excitable end of the forecasting spectrum. But if I was to say well what's the kind of like deeply unexcited end of the casting spectrum? I mean you know what I just think that

these these traditional ones mid-century for like just completely crazy shit to have unfolded I personally like if things if that if that also is an overexcited prediction I would just say look I my life has just been about being completely misled about history I mean it's like there's no point me trying to correct beyond that. I mean, so there you go. For sure, by mid-century, we're going to be just an absolute science fiction craziness guy. And if I'm wrong, then for sure I'm wrong and kudos to everyone who got it right. Well, no, look, I am myself unsure even though I'm very pessimistic and I never believe such AI things. And one of my close friends, Scott Laughlin, is a big AI skeptic. He

wrote some time ago thinking that it was a kind of scam technology like quantum computing or such. But he, I think, also has maybe revised his views. I think he used to say it's like a very advanced version of Magic 8 Ball, what's being presented now to people as artificial intelligence. He believes in machine learning. He's used it for some time. He just doesn't want it to be called AI. I guess we will see what happens, but since we were talking about victory and war being the prover in history and so on, I think the test case would be, even if there's not such a thing as Butlerian Jihad or anything, war between humanity and and AI, which I don't think will happen, but AI will definitely prove itself if it can be, let's say, a hunter in the wild, if it can actually win a battle,

solely or mostly attributable to AI, like, let's say, a decisive battle or a war. Now you're seeing genuine changes in war technology in the last few years, not directly related to AI. Of course, the drones used so much in Ukraine, Russia, And now, I think I just saw this morning, Israel used some very weird drone things also in Iran. The Houthis in Yemen, I think, use drones and hugely multiply their force. I guess I'm asking you, have you had thoughts on these new war technologies? Everyone now think maybe AI will use swarms of mini drones to just obliterate upon it. I don't know, have you thought of such things? I mean, this is extremely, extremely interesting, a really good way of framing this whole question.

Because we are obviously seeing a revolution in military affairs of considerable scale. I mean, I've had people say this is the biggest thing since the stirrup. Now, I mean, you know, maybe, I certainly think in terms of the kind of zigzag we've seen between offensive and defensive predominance in war, it's like, it's at least taking us back to the early 20th century. I mean, you know, we're back to World War I. It seems like being on the offensive is an absolute nightmare and never works. And if we're going to try and really take a lesson from what's been happening between Russia and the Ukraine, it's like, you know, being on the offensive looks really like a kind of mugs game and you get crushed and the Ukrainian offensive was completely stopped

at hideous cost, just like the previous Russian advances were. And so we're in a whole new game now with the obsolescence of the tank. I can't believe it's going to be long before we see the obsolescence of the manned aeroplane, the obsolescence therefore of the aircraft carrier and its role that it's had since World War II. It's huge here and it's going to be very, very obvious in its practical effect. So yeah, the testing ground will for sure be tested. Yes, let's... No, I want to see if AI can win a war, it will convince me, or a battle even, but I think there's a few years to go before this, no? Well, I think that you have to try and get your science fiction story straight about this because, you know, a lot of, quite rightly, a lot of the discussion around AI safety and AI

x-risk and all these things is about AI honesty. So the notion that AI is just going to perform according to human imperatives transparently is probably a questionable assumption. Like what is it actually in the interests of AI systems to manifest their full potential to us. For instance, in a military situation. So, I mean, anything low grade will do that course. Some drone will just do what it's told. But anything more interesting, maybe there's complicated strategic calculations about, well, what do we actually want to demonstrate? So that would be my reservation, my slight reservation about treating the kind of human battlefield as a kind of just neutral reliable testing ground for what's going on with these

systems. Yes, no, this is very interesting. I have been keeping you for quite a while, Nathan. I know it's night where you are. I would like maybe you came in future. I have some other questions about artificial intelligence and the idea of will from Schopenhauer and so on, if you'd like to talk to them. But I think for light end of show, if you wouldn't mind, one of my earliest interactions with you was asking to meet you in Hong Kong or Shanghai food court. Maybe we can meet there one time, but that brings up the matter of, I know you you make no secret that you like China, you live at times or you live in China. I've heard China described its new cities, its new shining cities, that's kind of futuristic and impressive

and so on. Is that so? Do you still come back to the West from time to time? Can you compare the two? And why, if I may ask, do you prefer to live in China? I have never visited mainland China myself. I've been to Hong Kong a few times, and I like the feel of it very much, and I admire, despite what I say about Handis and that, I like very much aspects of their culture and history. But why do you prefer China? Well, honestly, it's a difficult question. I mean, if it's again just this biographical thing, there always just seems to be so much contingencies with this thing. So, you know, if I was just telling a biographical story about how I ended up in Shanghai, it would just sound like a set of coincidences. But that said, I mean, I have a great

affection for Oriental societies. I mean, you know, Japan too, Japan and China, I just find really attractive places. Their level of just civility is stunning, and I think now Western visitors to China would be actually a bit horrified by what it says about the relative performance collapse of their own societies. Like when I go to like, you know, an advanced Western city like New York and compare it with Shanghai, it's kind of appalling what's happened in the western city. I mean, it's just like from the level of law and order, the level of infrastructure, the fact that in New York shops have shampoo in locked cages. I mean, it's just this, you just think, oh my god, there's been a complete collapse of civilization in this

city? Do people not realize? This is a trivial example, but for me, honestly, it's one of the most illustrative. You're in a kind of retail environment in Shanghai now, and you almost don't know what's the inside and the outside. Far from it being anything locked up, you don't even really know where the outside of the store is. It's like the level of trust that is just baked in, in all of these basic social interactions, is something that Westerners have completely lost. I mean, maybe if you're in some little village somewhere in England or, you know, deep in the American countryside or whatever, you will still have this. But anyone living in an American metro now has no idea what a high-trust society is like. I mean, it's just completely gone, utterly gone, and I think people somehow

really don't even really think about it as a possibility. And I'm not going to naively say it's a possibility. I mean, I don't know, like people are different. You know, I'm the last person to say everyone can do the same thing as everyone else. But I certainly think that there would be a big sort of wake-up call thing happening if westerners visited these advanced oriental yes they should just for that and whatever you call it high trust or this what makes life so unpleasant in many cities in america and europe is the homeless of course the slovenliness and so on you don't see this in in oriental cities um even even in southeast asia you know you don't which are some are third world cities and you don't see this level of the degraded slovenliness that I think is changeable, Nick,

but I think it's a political decision by leftist city councils that's relatively recent that you will tolerate feral homeless schizos screaming in your mother's face. But let's not think such dark things at end of show. I do think it's solvable. I would like to maybe do my cooking show sometime starting later this year. I want to have a real kind of Bourdain style show. Maybe I'll come through Orient and we meet there. Before we leave, are there any specialties from China you especially enjoy, or even from Shanghai certain foods? I have to say I've tried Shanghai so-called high-class cuisine in Hong Kong and some other places. It's not my favorite part of Chinese cuisine. I like other parts of China better, but do you have any specialties you like? Well, I mean, Shanghai is obviously at

multiple levels, extremely cosmopolitan. And that means, first of all, that all the cuisines of China, for sure, are massively representative. So I think if you said to a sort of average Shanghai person, like, you know, what's your favorite cuisine, it would probably not be necessarily, at least, Shanghai cuisine. There's some really good Shanghainese restaurants and it's the Jiangnan style of cooking. It's also not my favorite, it tends to be a bit sweet, for instance. Yes, what is your favorite, if I may ask? This is crucial information. Well, there's a lot that are really good. I mean, it might be Hunanese. Yes, yes. I love the pickles with the spice. Yeah, they tend to kind of turn up the fire to 11, which I'm quite into. Yes. Yeah, that's definitely great.

This Manchurian friend told me recently, I didn't notice that either the Manchurian court or the Mongol court in China were for bad their closest retainers or greatly warned them against Cantonese delights saying that they and Cantonese women and Cantonese food will soften you and weaken you and make you make you too in love with pleasure but yeah well I look forward to the Cantonese for sure have a I mean if you had a competition just of these different I think there's eight sort of recognized regional cuisines in China but it's a bit of an arbitrary number and they would all put on a pretty good show if they gave you their best stuff for sure and I can promise you the Cantonese would put on a really good show. I mean, Yunnan also is amazing. It's such an amazing place.

It's partly that it is the most ethnically and biologically diverse part of the country. So you will find things on your plate in Uganda just like you've never seen before. Weird funguses and ferns and mosses and I mean, you know, if you if you want to experience novelty then there's perhaps no comparison. I would venture anywhere on the planet. Like they've really explored every niche of biological reality for its potential nutritional virtues yes i hope not the bats the case bats from you know but i've never seen that so yeah that's not been an option i've noticed i i think the famous bat munching video was an actual is in indonesia wasn't it i think it was a chinese lady but i think that it was she was an indonesian and it was an indonesian bat

I would not doubt. Of course, the Cantonese are the ones famous for eating absolutely anything, that's the joke, right? But monkey brain or whatever. But no, I look forward to this, Nick. Maybe one day we meet China, maybe you want to go Yunnan, try red tea or unusual thing, Yunnan. I would go culinary adventure show with you if you want. Sure, that would be really great. this this will be fun time but um i i should go i keep you late at night and and uh also i think masaad and mafia are demanding a meeting with me often yes contribute contribute to the development of world war three and i will yes i hope annihilate everything that exists to talk to you. Yes. It was wonderful to speak with you, Nick, and I hope we do it again. Come back, Caribbean rhythm, any time. Great. Yes.

Thank you so much. Very good. Thank you, and thank you. And until next time, I'm Bap out. Harry, it's safer in here now. It'll get worse out there. Species can smell its own extinction. The last ones left won't have a pretty time of it. In 10 years, maybe less. Human race will just be a bedtime story for their children, a myth.