A Soul of a New Type
My essay collection is out
Over the past few years I’ve published a number of essays on either artificial intelligence or materialist semiotics, either on this blog or for Cosmonaut Magazine. These two things have been a part of the same research project for me, and I decided it would be fruitful to publish them together in an essay collection so they might form an organic whole.
You can buy it on Amazon as an ebook or paperback today. I really appreciate anything you can do, especially if you can buy a copy and leave a review. In the past 24 hours it's been the Top New Release on Kindle for Semiotics, Humanism and Thought & Consciousness.
The book has already gotten some glowing reviews:
"How does materiality and structure of day life meet up with technology and economic incentives? How is current crisis of the state and capital effecting your subjective reality? Nicolas Villareal asks these questions and rigorously tries to develop out their implications and internal contradictions. A necessary and powerful collection of essays."
-C. Derick Varn, host of Varn Vlog
I found the text challenging at times, in that the writing can be dense and technical, although never obscurantist, but its brevity also pushes the reader to reason through the arguments themselves, which often made me want to continue developing beyond the text the lines of thought set down.
Overall, Villarreal's text is a novel and refreshing perspective on AI that avoids many ideological pitfalls despite the connotations of "Marxism" especially among technologists, and hands the reader the tools to make their own judgments.
- Jake N