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 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.
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.
e/acc was a brief meme, which died.