Thread by @deontologistics

Increasingly, I think the true problem of AGI is not really artificial intelligence, but artificial wisdom, insofar as artificial stupidity is the opposite of the latter, rather than the former. Yet 'wisdom' should not connote 'folksy', but something quite mathematically precise.

I think this is really what's going on in @NegarestaniReza's identification of the programme of AGI with philosophy as such in Intelligence & Spirit, beyond my own more modest claim that AGI is transcendental psychology. If you love wisdom, you should build it.

It's also the real content of the distinction between sentience and sapience that we both take from Sellars and Brandom, but which has deeper roots in the tradition of German Idealism. The defining characteristic of Homo sapiens is not brute intelligence, but strategic wisdom.

I trace the structure of this distinction in negative in my own 'The Reformatting of Homo sapiens', in which I describe the difference between animality and rationality in terms of the linguistically catalysed capacity for reframing problems: deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/reform…

But more recently I've been trying to provide a positive account of this in terms of virtuous, rather than vicious ignorance, in which the goal of philosophy is better ignorance, or rather, the wisdom with which to use and cultivate the knowledge we have:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1354398978469670912?s=20

This is what really distinguishes our neorationalist program from Land's vision of capital as artificial intelligence, a sort homogeneous yet hyperflexible cognitive shoggoth. Land's AI has no wisdom, no strategy, just ever more processing power to squander on mere reproduction.

I wrote as much in the penultimate paragraph I managed to insert at the end of the introduction to the #Accelerate reader (urbanomic.com/wp-content/upl…), and I feel vindicated by the way our ideas have evolved in the years since. Fuck teleoplexy, basically.

The low cunning of commerce is viable substitute for strategic wisdom in the process of researching and reconfiguring the technoscientific industrial base of human civilisation, but it ultimately just doesn't care about Truth, which is its strength, but also its weakness.

Commerce's will to power really doesn't care about cognitive diversity, or diversity of any kind; it only diversifies where it cannot monopolise. It can be harnessed as a means to an end, but to make it an end in itself is an abominable insult to intelligence as such.

And this takes us back to Ray's work, whose most forceful summation is this:

"Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living."

Land's work really isn't about intelligence in any sense recognisable as *thinking*, well before we get to its dissolution of the personal. It's merely one more assertion of the rights of living over thinking (Nietzsche), and increasingly heredity over right itself (Burke).

This isn't to say it isn't interesting. There's a lot of food for thought there. But beyond the memetic cycle of consumption and reproduction the only way to cognitively engage with it is to reject it by articulating precisely that which it denies: the possibility of wisdom.

Stop living and think. Make a choice, or the monstrous cybernetic mass of tangled drives in which you are embedded will choose for you. Dare to be wise, motherfuckers. 🖖