maybe it's pseudo-intellectual nonsense

Nah, it's the real thing. I don't agree with him on every point but it introduces a bunch of important philosophical ideas (e.g. the "body without organs") and gives you some idea what they're about even if you've never heard of them. Then it puts all those together into a steady relentless logical build-up of evidence to get you to accept the reveal at the end. It's not rigorous in the way you'd expect from a book, but it's pretty good.

Personally I think it might be useful to think about the machine not being quite so monolithic as it's made out to be. It's multiple instances of the algorithm, competing with each other and evolving memetically through natural selection.