What we understand as a market-based economy is the chaotic adolescence of a future AI superintelligence. Capitalism and technology form a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that has been speeding up ever since the beginning of tool use. The natural end point of this process is an AI that is capable of increasing its own intelligence.
Land believes that the correlation between techno-economic development and well-being is not only temporary but deeply misleading. We are like turkeys pleased with the increasing food rations before Thanksgiving. Humans currently serve an important purpose within a larger process, but at some point we will no longer be required. According to Land, the true protagonist of history is not humanity but the capitalist system of which humans are just components. Cutting humans out of the techno-economic loop entirely will result in massive productivity gains for the system itself.
What [capitalism] is in itself is only tactically connected to what it does for us — that is (in part), what it trades us for its self-escalation. Our phenomenology is its camouflage. We contemptuously mock the trash that it offers the masses, and then think we have understood something about capitalism, rather than about what capitalism has learnt to think of the apes it arose among.
A Perceptual Transcend occurs when all things that were comprehensiblebecome obvious in retrospect, and all things that were inventablebecome obvious. A Perceptual Transcend occurs when the semantic structures of one generation become the semantic primitives of the next. To put it another way, one PT from now, the whole of human knowledge becomes perceiveable in a single flash of experience, in the same way that we now perceive an entire picture at once.
We don't suddenly perceive the idea "there is a bear in front of me", we see a picture of a bear, containing millions of pixels, every one of which is consciously experienced simultaneously. A Perceptual Transcend isn't "just" the imposition of a new cognitive level; it turns the cognitive structures into consciously experienced primitives.
Why was all of this necessary, mathematical aesthetics aside? Because until you understand the hollowness of the words "infinity", "large" and "transhuman", you cannot appreciate the Singularity. You must knowthat even appreciating the Singularity is as far beyond us as visualizing that number is to a chimpanzee. Farther beyond us than that. No human analogies will ever be able to describe the Singularity, because we are only human.
But just because humans become obsolete doesn't mean you will become obsolete. You are not a human. You are an intelligence which, at present, happens to have a mind unfortunately limited to human hardware. That could change. With any luck, all persons on this planet who live to 2035 or 2005 or next year or whenever - and maybe some who don't - are going to wind up as Powers.
