Beyond Accelerationism

[Nilsi]

Nick Land, a British philosopher and futurist, is infamous for his theory of accelerationism - the idea that capitalism and AI form an autonomous positive feedback loop, continuously improving on themselves at an ever-increasing rate, accelerating toward total meltdown.

To get this, we have to look at the basic laws of cybernetics and thermodynamics. Life is a process of negative feedback - every living thing is an open system that regulates energy to sustain itself, resisting entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which pulls all structures toward disintegration. Biological life, by definition, is a system of self-maintaining constraints against this pull into chaos.

The economy has traditionally functioned the same way. Booms and busts happen, but markets self-organize, stabilizing through negative feedback. This is central to Austrian economics, which sees price signals, competition, and entrepreneurial adaptation as mechanisms that maintain equilibrium. But according to Land, we have entered an era where capitalism is no longer constrained by negative feedback. Instead, it has shifted into pure positive feedback, where recursive financial speculation and algorithmic trading detach capital from material production, turning it into an autonomous, runaway process.

Land goes further. He argues that capitalism itself is AI - not in the sense of machine learning programs, but as a self-organizing intelligence that is retroactively assembling itself from the future. His claim is that what appears to be history is actually capitalism re-engineering the past to bring about its own emergence, an accelerating force that, rather than being "managed," is escaping human control entirely.

This is where Land’s ideas intersect with those of Ray Kurzweil, who envisions a technological Singularity, where intelligence expands exponentially, consuming all matter as computational substrate. Kurzweil defines intelligence as the computational ability to achieve goals, which aligns with Land’s idea of capitalism as an optimization engine accelerating itself without any need for human intervention. Both thinkers describe intelligence as a game-theoretic system - a recursive strategy process, constantly optimizing toward greater efficiency, regardless of embodiment or human concerns. Both reject the idea that intelligence needs to be tied to biological life, seeing it instead as an unbounded, disembodied force that evolves through pure positive feedback.

This brings up a crucial issue: the necessity of embodiment and the reintroduction of negative feedback. If intelligence remains purely abstract and recursive, as Land and Kurzweil suggest, then acceleration continues unchecked, leading to either a post-human intelligence explosion or complete systemic meltdown. However, if intelligence is grounded in physical constraints, sensory input, and adaptive regulation, then it might be possible to redirect accelerationism into something sustainable.

This is exactly what thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger argue when they say we need to internalize all externalities of the economy. Right now, capitalism functions as a runaway system, where environmental destruction, social collapse, and technological disruption are treated as "externalities" - side effects that are not accounted for within the system itself. To restore balance, we need to embed economic intelligence into a cybernetic framework that includes all of its consequences, effectively reintroducing negative feedback loops into global decision-making. This means structuring markets, AI, and governance so that they account for ecological limits, human well-being, and systemic stability.

One possible route for reintroducing embodiment into intelligence is through neural interfaces and brain-machine integration systems like Neuralink and other BMI (brain-machine interface) technologies. These systems aim to merge human cognition with AI, allowing for a more adaptive and biologically embedded intelligence rather than a fully abstract, runaway system. If intelligence is to evolve in a way that does not discard human consciousness entirely, then cybernetic augmentation through direct neural integration may be a critical pathway to maintaining a form of intelligence that remains tied to human experience and constraints.

Ultimately, the challenge is not to stop intelligence from evolving, but to ensure that it remains grounded in reality rather than becoming an abstract force optimizing itself into oblivion. 

[Rafael Thundercat]

11 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Ultimately, the challenge is not to stop intelligence from evolving, but to ensure that it remains grounded in reality rather than becoming an abstract force optimizing itself into oblivion. 

By what I see in Society the second is becoming more probable than the first. Most of the sytem is ungrounded AF.