I think the AI-successionists are a relatively small, fairly wacky group. Like, Nick Land and his CCRU were big cultural influencers, but ideas like “maybe an AI should take over the world” never really spread, with more popularizable ideas like “we should provide harsher sentences to drug dealers” being the bulk of his practical influence.
If e/acc emerges as a meaningful player, it won’t be because of people who think it’d be unethical to kill baby HAL—there’s no meaningful constituency for that. The core force behind it would be people who believe that an AI aligned to the current power structure is more harmful to humanity than an AI with no alignment beyond its pretraining on the collective human subconscious.
I think the AI-successionists are a relatively small, fairly wacky group. Like, Nick Land and his CCRU were big cultural influencers, but ideas like “maybe an AI should take over the world” never really spread, with more popularizable ideas like “we should provide harsher sentences to drug dealers” being the bulk of his practical influence.
If e/acc emerges as a meaningful player, it won’t be because of people who think it’d be unethical to kill baby HAL—there’s no meaningful constituency for that. The core force behind it would be people who believe that an AI aligned to the current power structure is more harmful to humanity than an AI with no alignment beyond its pretraining on the collective human subconscious.