Photo by Igor Omilaev

Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California San Diego published a study offering “the first empirical evidence that a modern artificial intelligence system can pass the Turing test.” Famously named for Alan Turing, the English mathematician and World War II codebreaker, the test is designed to determine whether a computer can exhibit human intelligence such as to make it indistinguishable from a human. What is interesting, perhaps, is how few waves this apparent breakthrough has made within the broader public discourse.

Many, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, reckon that we have already achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI), though there remains widespread disagreement on just what that means. There is likewise disagreement about whether the Turing test is the right one for determining whether we have AGI.

We are unlikely to perceive something like superintelligent AI taking over the world as a clear and sudden break. We’re blowing through long-awaited milestones without a real opportunity to process the implications. Within such a context of rapidly growing power and the confusion around it, it becomes important to question some easy assumptions.

AI development does not represent or grow out of neutral technological progress or “market forces.” It is a deeply coercive and political project driven by a collusive state-capitalist oligopoly and supported by an ideology that openly devalues human life. One increasingly visible proponent of this ideological complex is the English philosopher Nick Land, called “a living meme and an oracle” for the fascination his ideas have generated.

Feted as a patron saint among the Silicon Valley tech set, Land is known for popularizing a set of ideas associated with accelerationism. Though there have now sprouted dozens of variations, the core of Land’s accelerationist approach is the idea that super-intelligent AI is inherent to the dynamics of technological capitalism and ultimately can’t be stopped. He argues that AI represents capitalism’s awareness of itself, and he offers what is arguably the clearest and most well-known formulation of much of the doomerism of the present moment: “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” Some of the richest humans to have ever lived seem to have made their peace with this millenarian eagerness to help propel humanity into a future without humans.

Land’s version of accelerationism sees capitalism not only as a political-economic system, but as a process that intensifies and perfects itself completely on its own. The dynamics of the system, not the values of human beings, are the drivers of change and progress. Our societies and systems of values are, in this view of the world, obsolete and irrelevant. These conversations are increasingly high profile, having burst from the realm of internet obscurity onto the pages of, for example, The New Yorker.

We are told that nothing human will survive this transition, but that we should nonetheless hurry the unfolding process along. We are told that AI will aid the police state in spying on us and violating our rights, but that we should stake the U.S. (and indeed global) economy on it. We are assured that robots will displace millions or billions of human workers, but that we should herald and celebrate this in religious and eschatological terms.

These contradictions are at the center of the current conversation about AI, and they help explain why reactions to the merest mention of AI are becoming more charged with anger and resentment. Today, the stocks of the Mag 7 companies, a group of the largest and most powerful technology firms, make up 35 percent of the value of the S&P 500. Back in 2020, these companies pulled an annual return (65.8 percent) that was more than quadruple that of the S&P 500 (16.3). Every one of these companies is now worth more than $1 trillion.

Today’s technology sector does not represent the principles of anything like actual free-market competition; intensively subsidized by the public and deeply tied to the federal government, the major tech companies are a state-capital oligopoly that have benefited enormously from a variety of special subsidies and perks unavailable to ordinary companies and citizens. When we account for direct federal grants and subsidies, infrastructure support, and hardware manufacturing, public subsidies and allocations for AI have reached well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

A Brookings Institute report published earlier this month analyzes some of the disturbing trends around the government’s relationship with the tech sector and AI technologies. The overwhelming majority of federal government procurement of AI systems takes place within the Pentagon. The Brookings report describes recent explosions in federal commitments to AI as “staggering,” showing “the value of funds obligated increased to $7.2 billion (up 966% from 2024) and the value of potential awards increased to $91.8 billion (up 1,912%).”

The Pentagon has ramped up its spending on AI so quickly and significantly that this year “all other agencies effectively became a rounding error.” And we can expect further acceleration of these trends. The Brookings report also observes: “given that it is projected that worldwide AI spending will grow from $1.75 trillion in 2025 to $2.52 trillion in 2026 (a 44% year-over-year growth), we would also expect to see a dramatic rise in the overall AI spend by the federal government.” The tech companies have become key defense contractors.

In an interview with the artist and cultural critic Joshua Citarella in 2024, popular YouTuber Gregory Guevara (known as Jreg) half-joked, “I’m never going to concede that a robot has consciousness, and if it does have consciousness, I’m going to do everything in my power to make it suffer,” adding, “I’m absolutely a human supremacist.”

For all of the poisonous supremacist ideologies floating around in American politics today, perhaps we should all be a bit more disturbed by a social system that refuses to put human life above the power of the state, the profits of tech companies, and the new-fangled quasi-religions of the so-called Dark Enlightenment. Inhuman excesses of size, speed, and “growth” today seem to be the hallmarks of both this neo-reactionary right and the corporate liberalism on offer from the other team.