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How Nick Land Became Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsayer | The New Yorker

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Nick Land believes that digital superintelligence is going to kill us all. In San Francisco, his followers ask: What if, instead of trying to stop an A.I. takeover, you work to bring it on as fast as possible?

Save this story Save this story In the spring of 1994, at a philosophy conference on a run-down modernist campus in the English Midlands, a group of academics, media theorists, artists, hackers, and d.j.s gathered to hear a young professor give a talk at a conference called “Virtual Futures.” It was ten o’clock in the morning, and most of the attendees were wiped out from a rave that had taken place in the student union the night before. But the talk—titled “Meltdown”—was highly anticipated. The professor, Nick Land, was tenured in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick, at the

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