I was chatting with someone tonight about a planned documentary; they had interviewed various people in AI safety, and we got to discussing who they should talk to from an e/acc (effective accelerationist) perspective. I also watched The AI Doc recently, and they also dedicated a serious chunk of it to ‘optimists’ with e/acc founder ‘Beff Jezos’ perhaps given the most screen time. Here and elsewhere, people seem to treat e/acc as a substantial contrary-to-AI-safety cultural movement, worth engaging with.
But is it? Are there even many e/accs? There seem to be very few notable ones. Beff Jezos is perhaps the most prominent, and aside from founding e/acc he seems to be not distinguishable on casual perusal from a normal crank (his company claims to be developing super-energy-efficient computing hardware based on probabilistic processes).
The intellectual tenets of e/acc seem to be pretty unclear.
The apparent counterarguments to AI risk raised in situations like the AI doc seem to be widely agreed on by everyone in AI Safety, so don’t explain the disagreement. For instance:
AI will be able to do lots of great things, such as cure diseases, make new materials and do all jobs
This is an exciting time to be alive
It’s great to understand the world and build technologies that make the world better
Technology has generally been good historically
In cases like this, it’s hard to see how they would believe that they have said something that counters the arguments for AI risk, so I don’t know, maybe they are being quoted out of context. But I don’t remember ever hearing one make a counterargument that seemed remotely credible. (And I do think various counterarguments are credible.)
At different times e/acc seems to involve a weird combination of the following:
AI is going to be incredibly powerful and I hope it destroys us, because it’s better than us
AI is going to be very normal and unimpressive or move very slowly, so it is safe, and it would be great if it could move a bit faster
Maybe this is no weirder than AI Safety having some people who think AI should stop, and some people who think Anthropic should take over the world as fast as possible.
The three or so specific e/accs I’ve spoken to seemed to have unique highly unorthodox views.
So, this ‘ideology’ doesn’t seem to have much semi-coherent worldview that its members agree on, and it isn’t clear that it has many members or that they talk to each other.
I kind of suspect it barely exists, and is dreamed into greater reification by the following factors:
It’s very annoying and upsetting, so it lives in the minds of people who are annoyed and upset by it as an enemy, which gives it cultural clout. It is designed to be memetically fit as villainy.
People such as journalists are constantly looking for an opposition to AI Safety to talk to so they can be unbiasedly hearing from different perspectives. The real substantial opposition maybe looks like ‘guy who works at OpenAI and has heard of AI risk a bit but hasn’t gotten around to thinking about it because it sounds really annoying and he can justify writing it off as crazy’, but that is pretty vague and uninteresting relative to the color and specificity of e/acc.
A bunch of people primarily interested in trolling take up the mantle of e/acc because it is memetically fit as villainy
Another one that I forget
Please correct me—what’s really going on?
i think this is a decent analysis of "e/acc" proper. it was started as a joke and largely promoted by a combination of cranks, hucksters, and fools. Unfortunately they were a high salience group of useful idiots, so have been used as cats paws by venture capitalist and other nihilists, and nutpicked by everyone else.
I wouldn't say Nick Land and friends have like a widely accepted ideology, but say you went to art school and spent time around academic cultural theorists, the original 1990s version of accelerationism probably looks at least like one of many historical movements that had some influence and some novel ideas to consider. It's still floating around some corners of academia.
There are various "/acc" fake internet ideologies (there was a whole Cambrian explosion of them before e/acc). They consist of about 10 posters each and for some reason are taken semi-seriously, I think just because of some borrowed prestige, probably also true of e/acc.