Future of Intelligence in the Age of Intellectual Scarcity

Instructor: Reza Negarestani Date & Time: Sunday, February 24, March 3, 10, 17 2 PM EST

DESCRIPTION This Seminar consists of polemical arguments against three apparently dominant scenarios concerning the rise of future intelligence, whether in the domain of artificial realization or in the realm of political thought. Each session of this seminar presents an elaborate criticism of a series of ideas put forward to unshackle intelligence—technological or social—from the yokes of humanism and rationality. To this end, we shall engage with the deep game theoretic account of intelligence (Land), speculative risk and uncertainty (Malik, Roden), technological singularity (Bostrom, Chalmers, Yudkowsky), so as to uncover the shared threads among them. Subsequently, it will be argued that despite the great sophistication and the weight of their critical insights these trends not only fail to untether themselves from the aforementioned shackles but regress into a form of conservative humanism—if not dogmatic and precritical thinking—that they initially set to overcome.

Session 1: David Roden, a disconnected future: what is disconnection and how it ultimately reconnects back to what it set to diverge.

Session 2: Suhail Malik: a risk beyond reason: how the absolutization of uncertainty repeats the gestures of precritical philosophy?

Session 3: Nick Land, cosmological game-theory: Why game-theory fails to be a grand unifying theory of intelligence and even if it did not, why it fails to imagine a future intelligence?

Session 4: Bostrom, Chalmers, Yudkowsky, the singularity we were promised: How to detect the traces of biased heuristics in the discussions around singularity and how to expose it as a scholastic theological discourse?

Image: Judy Radul, World Rehearsal Court, 2009

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