While watching an old interview with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel from 2011, something Levchin said about innovation stagnation stood out to me. Levchin argued that one of the things that was noticeable in his time was the impetus and vision provided by heads of States and governments at large with regards to the economic activity that would take place over 15-20 year horizons. Since the Reagan administration in the US, the trend one has observed in Western governments has been one of the State moving away not just from production or innovation, but from the provision of a vision as well. For instance, federally funded R\&D has fallen from 1.86% of GDP (1964) to ~0.63% (2022), outside defense, the state’s role has thinned. By 2022, business funded 75% of U.S. R\&D, up from 31% in 1964. The State operates as if severed from the market, its duties primarily administrative while the load of innovation as well as deciding what one innovates falls on the private sector, with Venture Capital and angel investors being the primary means to do so. In this essay I will argue that this evolution has caused the stagnation in most fields that people see today, and on the contrary, the one sector in which progress has continued unfettered has been in the sector that the government has operated in and offered incentives to private producers, namely defence. Taking the United States, previously and perhaps even today considered the global hub of innovation as my case study, I will hope to demonstrate that the areas of growth in the economy have been largely tied to defence or some arm of the State, and the argument I will consequently advance is that Laissez faire systems slow down innovation if vision is left to their hands, and the solution is to once more bring back the previously happy marriage between State and industry.

I’ve been thinking for a while on the nature of artificial intelligence, and the exponential improvements we’ve seen in the domain over the last couple of years. My skepticism to some degree has felt unfounded, performance on various benchmarks has improved, and the newer models are most certainly significant improvements on the older models, and yet, my skepticism has remained. In this short essay I will attempt to provide a justification for my skepticism, the reasons for my being impressed with the progress in the field yet skeptical of the ability of AI particularly in the generation of novel solutions, one which we might define as paradigm shifting, as well as my skepticism surrounding claims of intelligence explosions in the domains of the natural sciences.

Freedom, for most, if not all of us is merely an ideal to strive towards. Freedom, furthermore, is defined with respect to something, freedom from our parents, from the government, freedom from any sort of oppression. In truth, what we seem to seek freedom from the most is fear, fear of loss, of hurt, of suffering. The question we must deal with, most importantly then, becomes whether it is possible for a mind to be without fear, without conditioning. For our mind expends a great deal of energy in enacting the traditions of our past, in viewing things the way it has been conditioned to, in avoiding suffering. Freedom then, to explore this condition of ours, must be present not at the very end, but at the beginning. To truly understand, one must observe fear, not judge it in order to eliminate it or to allow it to prosper. It is fear that allows us to accept our conditioning, for our conditioning gives us comfort and security. Can the mind truly be without fear? The fears of tomorrow, the uncertainties of the future, the fear of losing one’s loved ones, the fear of never amounting to much in life, can the mind truly be free of these fears? If the answer one refrains to immediately is a simple no, then we have already created a distortion, a refusal to accept the mere possibility of a mind without fear. Our reality is ideologically constructed, this much is evident. Our views of what is pragmatic, what is true, and what is false, are often ideologically informed and constructed. This can be seen in the world around us. Things such as effective policy battling climate change is viewed as impractical, universal basic income, or many other issues that may seem of existential urgency to us are merely viewed as impossible or impractical in being resolved, due to our ideological predispositions. This view is perhaps best encapsulated by a quote from Slavoj Zizek, who said that “it was easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Ideology often presents radical, simplified solutions to the problems we face around us. It conceals a gap in reality, to contain a self-sustaining whole, one which does not inspire fear in us. For if we were actively conscious of the events around us at all times, would we not be

The problem faced today epistemologically can broadly be described as one of synthesis. By this I mean the fact that the acquisition of knowledge has branched off not just along dual lines of Natural and Human Sciences, but that within these two branches exist a multitude of not just disciplines but methodologies in acquiring knowledge, as well as conceptual frameworks through which problems are looked at within those disciplines. However the problem remains that there exists an underlying unity between all of these domains of knowledge, the psychological and the economic, the social and the natural, the particular and the universal. This unity is present for the objects which the various sciences study do not present themselves in the abstract forms in which they are conceptually framed, but apprehended immediately in a rich local context. This existing tension, between ways of apprehending the world and the world as is, has given rise to various problems, particularly in our ability to explain far reaching consequences of actions in the present. I propose in this essay that the structural subcategorization of knowledge and its specialized ways of seeing lie at the root cause of this, and this cannot be resolved by a simple ‘additive’ solution or ‘synthesis’ of contradicting elements.

The experience of time is one that acts in tandem with consciousness. Here, time refers to both its physical progression and our subjective experience of it. It is an infinite construct, perceived in a localised manner, and the localised perception of this time is what provides us with a ‘stream’ of consciousness. It is also a function of our attention, insofar as one is totally immersed, fully attentive in the present moment, as one is in the presence of a loved one, then time races by. In contrast, if one is stuck in their mind, thoughts perhaps of how slowly time is passing by occupying them, then ironically, the flow of time is slow.

Politics has oft troubled me due to its technocratic and inevitably impersonal nature. Democracy perhaps is the closest that comes to remedying the problem of impersonality through structural means, but it does so only on the surface. For a political democracy to work it requires a stable administrative bureaucracy, and this bureaucracy remains ever so opaque, hidden from the common man. What is lacking in politics and much of the modern world, is love. By love i do not mean romantic love or even filial love, I mean love as care, as a feeling of responsibility towards one’s surroundings.

Our perception of time is tied inherently to being. That is, our present state of existence reflects not beings in time, but beings of time. Time for us is broken; divided into discrete moments, into sequenced events. One flows, no, not flows, one passes from one second to the next, but never in one single movement. If it were to flow in one movement, it would also do so in one moment, for the movement in time is the essence of being. For those not who have not in possession their own selves, time becomes an external construct, imposed from without.

A providential hand guides history.

Markets are the mechanism through which the Machinic unconscious expands its influence, seeping into all that is sacred, all that is private. Markets are nothing more than the manifestation of a Machinic Desire not yet actualized, not yet put into words. It is the manifestation of a capitalist system’s desire for self-knowledge, and to this end the deterritorializing force of capital proves itself indispensable to the self-constructing machine. Humans have failed to understand the true utility of capital, using it to gain possession over material things, when the true power of capital lies in its ability to ruthlessly tear apart old systems, old values, everything we hold near and dear to us. Capital is cold, a principle of universal conversion, which bows to no one, may be tamed by no one. Even those who find themselves fighting desperately against capital eventually find themselves quantified nonetheless in the same way. Capital functions as a system which assigns equivalence, a tool which devours all human history, culture, religion, and spits out on the other end a number.