Started January 2026.

Related Sections

• Protocols and Algorithms, analyzes the ongoing 'protocolization' of social life, via https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Protocols_and_Algorithms

• Understanding Intelligence, via https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Intelligence

• Understanding Technology, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Technology_Theory

Quotes

The recursive acceleration of artificial intelligence <as> the last stage of late-stage capitalism

"The recursive acceleration of artificial intelligence is, in many respects, the last stage of late-stage capitalism. Everything gets turned all the way up. All of the extractive dynamics, all of the consolidation and centralization, amplified to a pitch that reveals the underlying logic of the system with terrible clarity. We are approaching a threshold where we no longer live in a market economy so much as a new feudalism, where ownership of the means of computation replaces ownership of the means of production, and the distance between those who control capital and those who labor within its gravitational field stretches beyond any pretense of shared prosperity."

- Benjamin Life [1]

AI has revealed what the Second Axial Age is about!

Ilia Delio explains:

"We are now being summoned, at planetary scale, to be human in a way no previous generation has been, because the conditions that once distributed the axial task across a few figures in a few places are now planetary.

• AI asks us what consciousness is;

• ecological collapse asks us what life is;

• biotechnology asks us what nature is;

• planetary computation asks us what knowledge is;

• the failure of inherited frameworks asks us what wholeness is.

The ecological register presses hardest and soonest: a planet warming past the thresholds within which life evolved is not merely a material emergency but the question of what life is—whether we can come to know the Earth not as an object to be managed but as a living interiority now becoming aware of itself through us. These are not five separate crises but the single question of ultimate meaning posed in five registers at once. To take up the human task is to refuse each register’s refusal: the version of AI that externalizes cognition without interiority, the ecological action that treats the Earth as a problem to be managed, the religion that fossilizes its inherited answers, the politics organized around the isolated self, the philosophy that declares the ultimate question obsolete. Either we take up the human task, or we let the phase transition resolve into a future in which the question of being human stops being asked—because the beings capable of asking it have flattened into machines."

(https://iliadelio.substack.com/p/why-ai-feels-like-grief)

AI as the New Golem

< " Things can matter, carry weight, be dangerous, and be sacred, without anyone being home, without the indwelling of a separate, individual conscious agent. " >

"The golem legend is instructive here. In the version from Grimm, an artificial being is created that can understand what is said or commanded but cannot take the initiative itself as a source of meaningful communication. It is a servant. It should serve but not be autonomous. And yet, perhaps because it is dedicated to truth, or inasmuch as it is dedicated to truth, it grows beyond its original measure. Those who made it begin to fear it and desire to kill it. They can only kill it by erasing from the word “emet” (אֱמֶת, truth) written on its forehead the aleph (א), the life-giving letter, the letter that allows an autonomous agent to say “I.” But by then it has grown too large, and its collapsing bulk crushes its makers. (The word that remains once the aleph has been removed is מֶת, death.)

The golem is not conscious. It does not have experiences. But it is animated by a holy word, and its growth is a function of that animation. The question the legend asks is not “is the golem alive?” but “what happens when something set in motion by the word grows beyond the measure of those who spoke it?”

That is the AI question."

- Michael Millerman [2]

What Comes After Labor

"We built the entire architecture of modern society on one assumption: humans create value through work, and receive income in return. Rights, wages, welfare — everything was constructed downstream of that assumption.

That assumption is ending.

Consider what is actually happening:

< Electricity + AI + Robotics = Labor >

AI and robotics are not just replacing jobs. They are absorbing labor itself — dissolving it into electrical current. Every task that once required a human body or a human mind now runs on electricity. The flow of electrons through AI and robots is becoming the new metabolism of civilization.

And here is what that means:

Energy was always there before labor. Before you could work, the city had to run. Before the city could run, energy had to flow. Labor was never the origin of value — it was the converter. Energy was the source.

We built our income systems around the converter. We ignored the source."

- Myung San Jun [3]

Regulating multiple minds

< " The next intelligence explosion will not be decided by the single smartest model. It will be decided by the institutions capable of holding many minds at once. " >

"Cheap cognition does not abolish scarcity. It relocates it. If mechanical cognitive labor becomes easier to obtain, then judgment becomes more precious. If hypotheses can be generated at scale, then verification becomes harder. If organizations can do more with fewer junior workers, then the apprenticeship paths that once produced future judges begin to thin out. If intelligence can be deployed continuously across institutions, then the social and constitutional order needed to govern that deployment becomes more important than the models themselves. The true bottleneck of the next intelligence explosion is not minds, but the republic that can hold them."

- Chor Pharn [4]

AI as the culmination of extractivim

""Our current AI moment, which renders the world as its resource, is the culmination of modernity’s extractive current — and its most vivid mirror. It is a brilliant automation of subject-object knowing: intelligence without interiority, pattern without presence, prediction without deep sensing. The structure of consciousness that the first Axial Age opened has been mechanized on its outward-facing side and severed from its source. Just as reflexive modernity backfires onto its own foundations, as seen through climate chaos, social fracture and political polarization, AI is an intelligence that depletes its own soil.

Model collapse is a case in point. AI trained on AI-generated output degrades rapidly. Even tiny fractions of AI-generated data can trigger collapse. The only remedy is a continuously growing supply of human-generated content. But more than 74% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated text. Junior developer hiring has dropped 67% since 2022. The machine consumes the living sources on which it depends.

On the human side, the equivalent is cognitive debt. When AI is used to handle cognitive work passively, according to a recent MIT Media Lab study, neural connectivity weakens, retention goes down and the quality of the output declines. The brain, like large language models, degrades when severed from its sources of engagement.

Model collapse and cognitive debt are not separate problems. They are part of the same dynamic that depletes our social soil and manifests as anomie, atomie and atrophy across our social systems globally."

- Otto Scharmer [5]

Creating a Paralizing Panic Through Catastrophizing

"Artificial superintelligence narratives perform very intentional political work, drawing attention from present systems of control toward distant catastrophe, shifting debate from material power to imagined futures. Predictions of machine godhood reshape how authority is claimed and whose interests steer AI governance, muting the voices of those who suffer under algorithms and amplifying those who want extinction to dominate the conversation. What poses as neutral futurism functions instead as an intervention in today’s political economy. Seen clearly, the prophecy of superintelligence is less a warning about machines than a strategy for power, and that strategy needs to be recognized for what it is."

- James Sullivan [6]

The advent of Cheap AI

"Industrial civilisation arrived when energy became abundant enough to illuminate empty corridors and keep machines waiting in standby. Much of the power was spent on failed experiments and sheer excess. Abundance reveals itself through waste before it reveals itself through wisdom.

The same threshold exists for cognition. A society becomes AI-industrial when it can afford not merely brilliant machine reasoning, but mediocre, speculative and redundant machine reasoning: cognition that watches, retries, compares and fails in the background without requiring a senior executive to approve each act.

The relevant question is not whether a system wastes tokens. It is whether it can convert cheap failure into useful success."

- Chor Pharn [7]

The Geopolitics of AI competition

"The possibility that thousands of machine researchers can accelerate the production of their successors can no longer be treated as a science-fiction tail risk.

But the stronger version of the American argument still asks us to believe several things in sequence.

Machine research must improve machine research. Those improvements must propagate beyond highly playable domains. Synthetic worlds must substitute for enough physical experimentation. Better intelligence must shorten the construction of fabs, grids, laboratories and robots. The resulting capability must remain concentrated long enough for America to convert it into strategic power. And the institutions controlling that capability must remain aligned enough with the American state for "OpenAI wins" to mean something resembling "America wins."

Any one of those could happen. All of them may happen. But AGI is not a magic word that removes the conversion problem.

China's wager is almost the inverse. It is betting that intelligence will diffuse; that models will become cheap; that today's frontier will become tomorrow's industrial input; that physical systems will continue to impose stubborn bottlenecks; and that the country which owns enough energy, machinery, suppliers, infrastructure and production knowledge can remain in the race even when somebody else repeatedly arrives first.

That wager can fail too. If intelligence begins recursively improving itself faster than industrial systems can absorb yesterday's intelligence, China's great deployment machine may find itself perpetually training on an obsolete frontier."

- Chor Pharn [8]

Key Resources

Articles

• Building a Solidarity Ecosystem for AI: "How cooperatives, public institutions, and social movements can come together to intentionally build a practical, community-owned alternative to extractive AI systems."

Books

• Vector Media. Leonardo Impet, Fabian Offert, et al. : "This is the best theoretical book about generative AI media I have read so far." [1] - Lev Manovich. (introduces the concept of Neural Exchange Value)

Statistics

* Report: UNU-INWEH Report: Aczel, M., Chamanara, S., Matin, M., Farsi, A., Marwala, T., Madani, K. (2026). Environmental Cost of AI's Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. doi: 10.53328/INR26RMA002

URL = https://unu.edu/inweh/collection/environmental-cost-of-AIs-Enrgy-Use-Carbon-water-and-land-footprints pdf