Max Ramsahoye
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Email
mr20495@essex.ac.uk -
Location
Colchester Campus
Profile
- Capitalism, Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risk
Biography
Max is a postgraduate research student on the MAD Philosophy programme (Masters by Dissertation) within the School of Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies. (MAD = Mutually Assured Destruction, Mind Altering Drugs). His dissertation on the Capital-AI and the World-System-AI Alignment-Control-Interpretability Problem theorises that capitalism itself is an unaligned (cybernetic) artificial superintelligence that is developing unaligned (technical) artificial superintelligence in its own image and for its own ends: a really powerful value-flattening optimiser stacked onto and integrated into a really powerful value-flattening optimiser (paperclip maximisers all the way down). Based on this cybernetic schema and theory-fiction, the emerging assemblage of AI-capitalism is situated as an instrumental extension and recursive-self-improvement of Capitalism-AI. Through exploring the functional symmetries between advanced capitalism and artificial intelligence and aligning the disciplinary ontologies of AI (mesa-optimisation) and critical theory (means-ends reversal), the dissertation formalises the capitalism as unaligned ASI model as a metanarrative of the metacrisis (the generative dynamics of existential risk, dystopian lock-in and the global problem set) and a 21st century critique of political economy and technological rationality.
Qualifications
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BA Philosophy and Sociology University of Essex (2023)
Research and professional activities
Thesis
The Capital-AI: Capitalism as an Unaligned Artificial Superintelligence
Supervisor: Matt Burch
Research interests
Philosophy of AI
Philosophy of Mind, Intelligence, God, Technology, Economics, Progress, Environment, Science, Social Science
Cybernetics
General Systems Theory, Complex Adaptive Systems Theory, Design Science, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Mechanism, Vitalism, Platonism, Aristotelianism
Speculative Realism
New Materialism, Alien Phenomenology, Object oriented Ontology and Ecology, Assemblage Theory, Structuration Theory, Lovecraftian Horror, Digital Humanities, Speculative Humanities, Posthumanities, Inhumanities, Antihumanities
Theory-Fiction & More-Than-Analogy
Analogical Reasoning, Structure Mapping Theory, Metaphorical Framing, Interdisciplinary Theory, Cybernetic Realism, Critical Realism, Fictionalism, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopian Fiction, Utopian Fiction, Gothic Horror
Accelerationism & Exterminism
Exhaustionism, Extractivism, Thermodynamic Critique, Entropy, Capitalist Realism, Post capitalism, Post marxism, Critical theory, World Systems Theory, Neorealism, Comparative Economic Systems, Heterodox Economics
Elite Digital Subcultures and Techno-Social Movements
Elite Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Future Studies, Existential Risk Studies, Progress Studies, Silicon Valley Californian Ideology, AI Safety Governance and Alignment, AI Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism, Dataism, Extropianism, Transhumanism, Singularitarianism, Syntheism, Effective Accelerationism, Effective Altruism, Rationalism, Longtermism, Apocalypticism
