Both Reza Negarestani and Nick Land are trying to emancipate intelligence, that is to say liberate it from narrow humanist theories of intelligence and also from the practical limitations of intelligence as (too) human. Negarestani attempts to engineer the concept of intelligence with precision (and in the process deconstructs and analyses many elements of what we perceive as human: memory, language, sense of time, etc.) while for Land, intelligence is always conceived as a competitive, selective process: it is a decentralised, distributed thing, a market. Land links intelligence to capitalism: competition and external pressures are orienting science against scientists, so that capitalism is oriented against capitalists. It is an anti-humanist worldview that sees humankind as an obstacle preventing the final emancipation of intelligence. Negarestani understands intelligence as sapience and still presupposes consciousness (rationalism) while Land presupposes non-human forms of intelligence. This raises two key questions: how do these two conceptions of intelligence converge or diverge and where do they differ the most from the way classical humanism understands (artificial) intelligence?
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