I see e/acc as less a response to AI x-risk than as a general symptom of right-wing Vicemaxxing, where frustration with moralizing woke politics made it fashionable to signal that you had no morals at all. Rather than have a bunch of people who had a principled disagreement with the AI safety arguments and so allied with their right-wing political rivals, they mostly started out as political rivals who instinctively inverted the positions of the blue-tribe AI discourse once they encountered them for the first time.
Steelmanning their position, the sentiment I've seen is that the probability of outright doom due to AI going rogue is low, but the probability of bad things happening as a result of blue tribe achieving regulatory capture of the AI industry is high, to the point where doubling the former and halving the latter is a good deal for humanity in aggregate.
If I were hired to write a bumper sticker summarizing the Reddish-Greyish Tribe e/acc position, it'd be something like "Clippy is a fanciful thought experiment, but the possibility of the people who covered up Rotherham using AI to keep themselves in power forever is distressingly real."
Pushback against Red Tribe - hostile behavior by AI companies, and regulations that mitigate racial/political biases in models, would probably be effective in winning this side of the sphere over.
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I should note that most of e/acc is entirely apolitical, and just likes new technology and believes it will probably improve quality and length of life for everyone[1]. From their perspective, people who want to slow or ban AI are equivalent to people who'd want to stall or ban penicillin.
In general, this means they consider a rogue AI to be vanishingly unlikely, or at least unlikely enough that the expected death toll is dwarfed by the expected lives saved.
Huh, this must be why e/acc hates Anthropic so much despite them being like the best example of accelerationism. Because Anthropic is somewhat blue tribe coded, and the e/acc people hate woke more than they love tech.
Sure, there's some of that, but just to be clear, that's not the full extent of disagreement with EA-flavored AI safety. Peter Thiel, for one, certainly believes that we should be "accelerating", for what he considers to be good reasons.
As evidence for this, there used to be large in-person meetups for e/acc in London but they no longer exist. Although similar smaller meet-ups still exist under different names.
Well, it was pretty obviously quite dumb. The lack of any argument that holds up to 5 minutes of scrutiny was quite damning for e/acc to get traction as an intellectual movement beyond the social and memetic aspects.
My take is that AGI has started to feel much more real. It's easy to root for accelerationism in the abstract and harder when you're wondering whether your career will end in a few years.
e/acc like all good movements consists of a bunch of different camps:
1) the Nick Land "humans deserve to be replaced" camp
2) the Beff/edgelord camp who sincerely believe the Pause AI/deAcc movement has some worrying traits in common with anti-nuclear (which succeeded in reducing Chernobyl style risks at the cost of making global warming much worse and refuses to take 'nuclear is safe now' as an answer) but openly proclaim "ACCELERATE AT ALL COSTS!" because it is more meme-worthy.
3) The decentralization/open-source movement which believes "maybe some future dangerous AI should be regulated, but current AI isn't that dangerous and proposed regulation looks disturbingly like efforts to centralized power not a principled effort to decrease x-risk".
3b) This camp agrees with 3 in believing "AI regulation is just a power grab" but specifically "AI regulation is an unfair attempt to stop China's rise".
Each of these camps is more-or-less internally consistent. 2) being the least-so, but mostly because they make a distinction between what they say and what they believe for dial-of-progress reasons.
As to "is anyone actually e/acc?" the breakdown is almost certainly in the opposite of the order I just gave. While deAcc/Pause is the majoritarian view you can probably find a large minority of population (and a majority among the tech community) who agree with 3) that "current ai safeguards/regulations are mostly just nanny-state paternalism and don't decrease real ai risk". It's hard to say how many people genuinely believe 2) since it is fundamentally a rhetorical position not a principled one. and the 1) anti-human camp is (I like to believe) small but certainly exists.
These ratios are also American-centric. In China 3b) is the majoritarian view.
It's important to note that there is a large amount of overlap between 3)/Pause as we can see with the current Anthropic brouhaha. Basically "good regulation is theoretical/imagined ideal future regulation. Bad regulation is regulation that harms me and my friends".
Equally importantly, as AI improves and we make contact with "real" AI risk those in camp 3) will have to clarify what they think "good regulations" look like as "all existing regulations are bad" becomes increasingly untenable.
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
Can you point to examples of e/acc-ish people claiming the "very slowly, so it is safe" part?
I mostly think of e/acc as a backlash against AI safety/x-risk concerns, without trying to form a coherent worldview, either within a single mind, or within an "e/acc" community, which is why you see some "leaders" saying opposite things at different times. This is similar to how various types got radicalized into weird forms of neo-right-wing-ness as a backlash from having bad experiences with (radical) left, Jordan Peterson being perhaps the most recognizable example. Ayn Rand's strain of libertarianism seems to have this sort of origin as well (albeit this worldview seems much more coherent on the inside, but I haven't investigated). Reading Timnit Gebru's Wikipedia page also gave me the impression that her TESCREAL crusade is somewhat motivated by backlash from personal experience.
I don't know about the numbers of e/accs. It seems to me that it is real, but mostly lives on the internet? A more definitely real strand of thought is successionism (e.g., Rich Sutton) and Land-adjacent stuff.
My impression of e/acc is that it's taken the effectiveness and execution framework of EA and flipped the sign of the expected value of incredibly powerful AI to being positive, even without significant work on safety. In other words, if you don't buy AI doom arguments, then I think it's basically the same thing as EA. Last week I wrote about how I think e/acc and EA are similar to Ayn Rand, but for entirely different reasons - I think the appeal of EA is broader than is acknowledged and that it is often slowly unbundled by those who are exposed to it.
This seems like a Steel Vulcan that hallucinates an intellectually serious opponent that mostly doesn't exist, or at best is extremely different than the empirical instantiations we actually observe as coalescing around "e/acc."
ETA: I do think there are nonzero real people with this view, eg the Mechanize folks. But they're fairly rare and mostly they don't call themselves e/accs.
The "e/acc manifesto" as I understand it is basically just this substack post: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
It puts itself in direct contrast to EA wrt utility maximization on AGI: "e/acc believes letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves... over-regulating technologies suppresses variance and hence slows down progress towards higher utility technologies and advancement of civilization, a contrast to anti-AGI factions of EA"
Is there any evidence at all that they use the effectiveness and execution framework of EA?
I think the "e" in e/acc is 100% about vibes, and it hasn't even arisen as a question how one would accelerate effectively versus ineffectively, much less how to quantify that.
If you believe as Beff does (see his Substack) that capitalism is a highly intelligent form of organizing civilization, then the effectiveness is just the competition and other dynamics of capitalism as a distributed form of collective decision making that leans towards the most effective means of technological acceleration.
Also, as cesspool (lol) points out, e/acc seems to be philosophically indistinguishable from capitalists trying to make money investing in technological advancements (see "The Techno Optimist Manifesto"). Venture capital has power-law distributed returns which is where the EA idea of "hits-based giving" came from (or is commonly analogized to). If you believe "maximizing profit from technology == maximizing acceleration", then a16z is the Coefficient Giving of e/acc.
I don't have source for this on hand, but I think the word 'e/acc' is trying to mock 'E-A', it rhymes with e-yuck.
Doesn't David Sacks also have essentially the same worldview?
My sense is there are some e/accs who are basically transhumanists who don't think AI risk is significant so they want to accelerate as fast as possible so we get transhumanism soon. There are hardly any of these people since there are hardly any transhumanists, but they have some outsized influence on twitter.
Then there are a way larger number of people who don't think AI risk is significant so they want to accelerate so we can get the benefits of it sooner, but they're not transhumanists - they just think that the benefits will be the same as those of other technologies but more so (better medicine, economic growth, a stronger US military etc). I would say that Tan/Andreessen/Sacks fall into this space but so does JD Vance and in fact probably most people in silicon valley.
I think the steelman / best version of e/acc is that it's basically just standard transhumanism + libertarianism, which are both generally good and backed by intellectually deep schools of thought. The problem is that its' adherents frequently misunderstand or reject some important philosophical and technical points and caveats that Eliezer and a few other people noticed and addressed like 15 years ago. So they wind up rehashing a lot of old arguments in formats (short-form tweets / dunks / memes) that are not very interesting or convincing to long-time rationalists and other smart folks who have already grappled with >1M words of high-quality discourse on these issues.
It seems to me that e/acc is the logical viewpoint for someone who has a very low p(doom). If, for whatever reason, you believe the existential risk posed by AI is negligible, then wanting AI to improve as rapidly as possible so we can start wielding it against all of society's problems is kind of a no-brainer. An e/acc is simply a techno-optimist who sees AI no different than rockets or self-driving cars or any of the other futuristic technologies that we're working on. This could make society awesome. What are we waiting for? Let off the brakes and step on the gas. Move fast, break stuff. When stuff breaks, we'll figure it out as we go along. It's always worked before.
I actually think there are way more e/acc believers than you seem to suggest. They just don't talk about it as much as the AI safety crowd does. Probably a lot of people in the tech world don't call themselves "e/acc" by name, but if you grilled them about their views they would fit under that umbrella. And that's why they don't have as cohesive an ideology as the AI Safety crowd usually does, they don't spend hours on forums talking about why AI is good. The only "intellectual tenets" you need to be an e/acc are to think that AI is good, it has lots of potential upside for society, and the existential risks are negligible enough to be worth pursuing it full steam ahead.
So your real question instead of "What is up with e/acc", should be "Why do so many people have such a low p(doom)", and there are a million articles agonizing over that question already. If you don't find the arguments that AI poses a significant existential risk compelling, being an e/acc makes total sense.
I think this is a good way of putting it. Andreessen's "Techno Optimist Manifesto" explicitly advocates for acceleration in a way that philosophically aligns with e/acc, even if it doesn't use the exact phrase. The e/acc means of "effectiveness" seems to be just the existing machinery of capitalism/VC.
Are you pretending you don't know about Accelerationism, about Land and his acolytes? The antibodies this community has to that material have created a memory vacuum so powerful that posts like this somehow continue to appear as if any of this is news.
e/acc is a meme that cannot die because the simple fact of accelerating technological change can't be ignored. Moore refuses to die, it just keeps changing form. It's absolutely bonkers that we are still getting hardware speedups so long after the death of Classical Moore but here we are. It continues and continues.
The reason the torch, such as it is, is carried by degenerate crowds like e/acc is that the real Singularitrians and Accelerationists are not on twitter shitposting. Accelerationism is a fundamentally anti-memetic ideological package. This is why Land himself has such staying power as an anti-hero. Finding someone else to communicate that belief system properly has proven nigh impossible. But it has so much weight that it leaks into the discourse anyway, again and again, in juvenile and degenerate forms.
What is up with e/acc? Well, no-one else is burning their incense at the alter of the incredible technoevolutionary Providence that continues to drive us into the realm of the seemingly impossible. It is an alter that will have its acolytes.
Fermi rescued us from Copernicus. We are the pinnacle of creation after all. There are none like us, and we extincted everything that threatened that presumption. We like to suppose we can halt progress and maintain our iron grip on Gaia indefinitely-- most of our intuitions come from slow time, the time when culture evolved, during which society didn't change much generation to generation.
If, otoh, as Vinge suggested, there will come a time when our machines outpace us in every way that matters, we might have to cede the throne. No tyrant welcomes his assassin.
We like to suppose we can halt progress and maintain our iron grip on Gaia indefinitely
Maintaining the dominion of the presently living over the unwanted unborn doesn't require a halt in progress. In short: Intelligent design is faster and stronger than evolution, and near-future progress in information technology trivialises coordination.
No tyrant welcomes his assassin.
Where is the normative moral argument that we should? That we should hasten the coming of the assassin instead of enjoying as many summers as we can before the end? There isn't one. If we are as tyrants over nature, then we will do what tyrants do. There's no Should that's going to spring up out of nature and punish us for doing it.
Intelligent design? You think you can do germline editing to try to keep pace with machines in biology without ending our species? Nope. Posthumanism is an extinction event, don't kid yourself.
Not that you shouldn't try, but don't pretend that's a way to preserve humanity.
It will ultimately fail as well as biology has harder limits than lithography. Recall we are also intelligently designing our machines and their generation time and iteration loops are tight.
I don't recall making a normative moral argument. I was simply explaining why accelerationism is antimemetic.
However, while you might be right that accelerationism has no ought, it has a lot of is.
In my view it is anti-human at worst—or post-human. To quote Meditations On Moloch.
“Gnon” is Nick Land’s shorthand for “Nature And Nature’s God”, except the A is changed to an O and the whole thing is reversed, because Nick Land react to comprehensibility the same way as vampires to sunlight.
Land argues that humans should be more Gnon-conformist (pun Gnon-intentional). He says we do all these stupid things like divert useful resources to feed those who could never survive on their own, or supporting the poor in ways that encourage dysgenic reproduction, or allowing cultural degeneration to undermine the state. This means our society is denying natural law, basically listening to Nature say things like “this cause has this effect” and putting our fingers in our ears and saying “NO IT DOESN’T”. Civilizations that do this too much tend to decline and fall, which is Gnon’s fair and dispassionately-applied punishment for violating His laws.
[...]
More Lovecraft: the Internet popularization of the Cthulhu Cult claims that if you help free Cthulhu from his watery grave, he will reward you by eating you first, thus sparing you the horror of seeing everyone else eaten. This is a misrepresentation of the original text. In the original, his cultists receive no reward for freeing him from his watery prison, not even the reward of being killed in a slightly less painful manner.
The thought that abstract ideas can be Lovecraftian monsters is an old one but a deep one.
On the margin, compliance with the Gods of the Copybook Headings, Gnon, Cthulhu, whatever, may buy you slightly more time than the next guy. But then again, it might not. And in the long run, we’re all dead and our civilization has been destroyed by unspeakable alien monsters.
At some point, somebody has to say “You know, maybe freeing Cthulhu from his watery prison is a bad idea. Maybe we should not do that.”
That person will not be Nick Land. He is totally one hundred percent in favor of freeing Cthulhu from his watery prison and extremely annoyed that it is not happening fast enough. I have such mixed feelings about Nick Land. On the grail quest for the True Futurology, he has gone 99.9% of the path and then missed the very last turn, the one marked ORTHOGONALITY THESIS.
But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.
As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.
AI is a poorly understood, speculative field, so people with different intuitions come to different conclusions. If your intuition is that AI is inherently dangerous, it makes sense to seriously investigate the AI safety questions, whereas if you don't, you would focus on the potential benefits and want to accelerate.
I remember when first reading about paperclip maximizer AIs I thought it was stupid, as in anything superintelligent would be capable of understanding instructions. I think this intuition hints at the stronger reason to be more optimistic about AI, which is opposition to the orthogonality thesis.
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?