>What’s that sound like? A company. Perhaps the first “artificial general intelligence” has been companies, from the very beginning.

Yes, we are already beholden to these meta organisms. I keep thinking of Dune Messiah. Paul has all the power in the universe but he struggles with the fact he can't change the path of entropy.

This is much like our existing world. Chop the heads off the aristocracy all you want. What follows is more of the same because the meta organism has not been killed. There are still people with differential power and therefore differential amounts of control of the economy. Someone's ancestor might have ran the guillotine in France, now they are a CEO of some company exploiting workers no different than the aristocrat their ancestor killed.

All this makes one cynical on things like climate change. We all know this is an issue, we've been handwringing on it for decades, and yet, seemingly nothing serious is getting done because no one can actually stand up to the market forces that are driving climate change. The beast is too powerful and out of control.

That's another idea of Land's.

"This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

To him, Capitalism is an AI that is controlling humanity from the future (his idea of hyperstitions).