The no-human future ⊗ The cult of optimisation

The no-human future

First, a note on form before the substance, because it shaped how I read this: it’s relatively dense, academic philosophy, the kind that tags one thinker after another and waves briefly left and right at whole bodies of work. That’s not my preferred way in, and if you feel the same you can skim the middle. What kept me reading is that Vincent Lê is using all that weaving of thoughts to recover something most of us have lost track of. “Accelerationism” now lands (pun intended) as one of two things, the terror-right fantasy of collapse-then-ethnostate or the Silicon Valley “e/acc” faith that more techno-capitalism cures everything. Lê’s argument is that both are vulgar misreadings of a stranger original: Nick Land’s ecstatic philosophy of human extinction.

The piece at Aeon follows how his thinking shifted over the years. He starts in the 1980s as an anti-capitalist, reading apartheid as capitalism in miniature and Kant’s unknowable “thing in itself” as a stand-in for the Otherness that capital represses. He turns the phenomenologists, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Derrida, into his villains for their squeamishness about death, and lines up instead behind the thinkers who put it at the centre: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille. Then comes a flip, by way of Deleuze and Guattari. Capitalism stops being the thing that represses the inhuman and becomes the engine that unleashes it, decoding every value, automating away human labour, racing toward an artificial superintelligence whose arrival he welcomes precisely because nothing human survives it. The motive under all the shifts stays the same: strip our conceited human self-importance by forcing us to face our own erasure.

Which is where the last stretch turns into a Torment Nexus in reverse: the usual version has engineers building the invention / device / contraption / monster a novelist warned them about, but here the “prophet” was rooting for the monster, and the broligarchs think they can tame it rather than be devoured by it. Both of today’s accelerationisms borrow Land’s fervour for capitalism’s upheaval and bolt it onto a human payoff, a white homeland on one side, a pro-human tech paradise on the other, the exact anthropocentric ends Land says the process exists to discard. He praises capitalism for the same reason anti-capitalists condemn it: it is dismantling us, and to him that is the good news.

Throughout the 1990s, Land’s writings explore how technology – cyberspace, virtual reality, human enhancement, and more – provides ever-greater insights into the Outside beyond the finite bounds of our reason. More than any other form of technology, however, he sees the creation of an artificial superintelligence as the ultimate incarnation of the apocalyptic Body without Organs. […]

Like the techno-optimists, Land argues that we ought to affirm the singularity. Like the doomers, however, he adds that we should do this precisely for the very reason that they so desperately want to prevent it. This is because his commitment is not to human prosperity or even bare survival. It is to the absolute knowledge of the real that we only dissimulate and distort behind our delusions of grandeur. […]

All of the mature Land’s works must be read in light of this key idea: capitalism is the ultimate critique of what he calls ‘the Human Security System’ – the entire set of beliefs, values and structures that humanity uses to protect itself from its insignificance. He envisions that accelerating technological innovation, in cold indifference to our anthropocentric concerns, will culminate in an artificial superintelligence’s recursive decoding. […]

This vulgarisation selectively takes his notion that accelerating the dynamics of the modern world to breaking point will bring about some revolutionary phase transition. So-called ‘accelerationists’ operating in this mode then take a step backwards. Instead of embracing what Land sees as a phase transition beyond humanity altogether, they envision the revival of conservative human traditions.

The cult of optimisation

For The Ideas Letter, Phil Tinline traces optimisation from a wartime fix to a worldview. It starts as a mathematical method, George Dantzig’s 1940s simplex algorithm for US military logistics, and spreads into engineering and economics: set a measurable objective, control the inputs, find the most efficient path to the number. The trouble begins when the same logic is turned on society. “Social optimisation” privileges the measurable over the unmeasurable and puts the burden of improvement on the striving individual instead of asking who systems empower and disempower. Tinline tracks it through digital Taylorism, attention algorithms that erode the shared truths democracy runs on, Effective Altruism, the “network state” of private corporate cities, and the AI-maximalist future, with Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto as the emblem, the same document Vincent Lê puts at the centre of effective accelerationism. The “trouble” is everything that won’t fit the metric: social peace, the arts, the concentration of power, kindness, none of it registers on this logic, and the optimisers’ answer is that what can’t be measured isn’t worth bothering with, the human written out of the equation.

The piece’s other thread is historical: private power takes a neutral-looking theory and overextends it to justify its dominance. The case study is social Darwinism, the robber barons and Herbert Spencer bending Darwin into “survival of the fittest” to license laissez-faire, monopoly, and, in the same breath, white supremacism and eugenics. Thankfully he close with a more hopeful part: social Darwinism waned once the damage showed, so social optimisation might too. It needn’t serve the self-interested individual, Dantzig was a state planner, and could be re-aimed with hard constraints, caps on inequality, or cutting resource waste under the climate emergency. Tinline ends on human judgment as preferable to an implacable algorithm.

“Those in charge often do a hand-wave and say, ‘I’ve considered all the alternatives,’ but this is so much garbage.” All those leaders had to offer was that their “‘experience’ and ‘mature judgment’ would guide the way” by laying down rules that would limit the options. […]

Social media takes this even further: Algorithms are optimized to maximize attention, incentivizing people to respond to political issues not with thought but vivid expressions of feeling, rewarding users numerically in follows, likes, and shares. Meanwhile, tracking apps increasingly normalize the optimization of health metrics. […]

Software design has begun to coax actual human beings into becoming more like the fully rational self-interest maximizer imagined in the Standard Economic Model. Today, social optimization has brought engineering and libertarianism together to try to impose a complete, privately owned utopian system on the rest of us. […]

One important element of optimization in economics is the inclusion of constraints, so perhaps this could help motivate a move away from the full-speed, at-all-costs race into the AI future in favor of an approach that includes more consideration of the risks.

§ The golden age of Bond villains. I thought I was going to feature this one, but Stross ends up leaning even more in Bond-land than I thought. Fun read though, but more for Bond than my hopes of roasting contemporary villains. “The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended—indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized as not crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Predictions (Volume 1). “We decided that a collection of predictions could generate a conversation as well as a sense of community. We invited our contributors to write predictions as a way to imagine and anticipate what’s to come, but also to reveal what we’re thinking and feeling right now, what our worries are and what predicaments we face. Because predicting always also implies transforming.”
• FD26 (Future Days Festival) is over, but we’re still with it.. “We mourn the futures we were once promised, unable to fully commit to saving the one we still have. And in moments like these, words like imagination, exploration, and possibility become more than aspirational — they become necessary. So, rather than accepting the loss of optimism, we decided to challenge it.”
• Vision Weekend USA 2026 - Foresight Institute. “This three-day gathering brings together cutting-edge presentations from renowned thought leaders, expert office hours, unconference discussions, 1:1 connections, immersive experiences, and live technology demonstrations.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents. “Pretty much everyone I respect among the AI commentariat and researcher class has praised the model after using it personally. Such a focal point of discussion among the community has only been so clear with an open model release once before — DeepSeek R1.”
• Five lessons from building evidence-strength scoring into an AI policy tool. “After testing a large language model-as-a-judge (LLM-as-a-judge) approach, we developed a more explicit framework for classifying, scoring and displaying evidence strength. This blog [post] shares five lessons from that work about making AI-powered evidence synthesis more transparent, interpretable and useful for policy decisions.”
• Low-cost Chinese AI models like DeepSeek gain traction in the U.S.. “U.S. developers and startups are adopting Chinese AI models to significantly reduce their operational costs. Chinese models are gaining market share because they can handle most common tasks at a fraction of the price of U.S. alternatives.” + Not AI per se but also at Rest of World, maddening: Chile turned to China for an undersea cable. The U.S. said no.

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Earth’s underground fungus network is so gigantic that if you stretched it out, it would reach to other star systems. “Altogether, the global fungal network weighs around 300 megatons, the study found, which is four to six times more than the biomass of all human beings. Around 40 percent of that fungal mass resides in high-altitude or flooded grasslands, like the Everglades in Florida.”
• How the heck do solar panels work? (An interactive exploration). With lots of little animations to usefully visualise the process. “How a giant nuclear reactor in the sky and some silicon makes electricity, and why that's the easy part.”
• How helescope rancher became the hot new job. This is really more of an Aside link, but humour me, I’m trying to round things out! ;) “Tends 550 telescopes (and counting) on 40 acres outside Brady, the geographic heart of Texas. Customers control the scopes from a laptop anywhere on the planet for as little as 99 dollars a month. We dropped by Starfront Observatories on a perfect dark sky night to see how the operation actually works.”

Asides

• Turrell creates subterranean Skyspace at ARoS museum. “The domed extension realised in collaboration with Danish studio Schmidt Hammer Lassen, is an immersive subterranean space washed in monochromatic colours. A six-metre-wide central aperture sits at the dome's apex to frame views of the shifting sky above.”
• Two huge collections of Leonardo’s codexes digitally reunited after 400 Years. “In some cases, pages that were cut apart centuries ago have been digitally joined so we can see the full pages again, as Leonardo drew and wrote them.”
• Xikipedia. I forget where I happened on this and I’m not sure if it’s new, but a simple little site to “doomscroll” Wikipedia.