The 'Effective Accelerationism' movement doesn't care if humans are replaced by AI as long as they're there to make money from it
The 'Effective Accelerationism' movement doesn't care if humans are replaced by AI as long as they're there to make money from it
Silicon Valley's new ideological faction, called Effective Accelerationism or e/acc, is focused on the pursuit of AI development with no guardrails to slow its growth.
Accelerate towards UBI, you cowards.
We all want fully automated gay space communism!
Fully automated luxury gay space communism!
Which would actually accelerate progress more than any other national allocation of funds.
Ever since the industrial revolution, the driver of progress has been mass purchasing and mass production.
If only billionaires could afford an iPhone, we would only be on the 3rd or 4th revision by now.
It was the subsiding of cell phone hardware that accelerated that market because carriers effectively covered hundreds of the costs so nearly everyone was buying them every two years.
If people want acceleration of the future, inject as much money as possible to main street - it's the closest equivalent to throwing fuel on the fire of industrial capitalism.
Hoarding it among executives or money traders is a fickle and temporary accelerant which is much slower than the alternative over sustained periods.
Are you trying to tell me that millions of people making informed decisions on what they need is more effective than a few dozen lobbiest, CEO's and bureaucrats? That's crazy! /S
UBI falls into the bread and circuses camp of policy to me. On one hand I really do want people that need bread to get it, so I'm not opposed, but it's a placating move that I don't see how it handles the growing fear of labors value to society being eroded. Like it's great and all to say "human life has inherent value" but most wouldn't give up a few dollars that could be spent on nick nacks to save a human life, because a random person with no measurable impact on your life isn't relevant to your life.
Socialism for example is totally built on the idea that because of industrialzation laborers have soft power that they can leverage to influence society in their favor. That's a real concern that we should focus on addressing and I think attempting to ignore it through ineffectual and local bans will only serve to make those countries less relevant as a whole.
I am terribly surprised that ultra-rich sociopaths have no empathy toward mankind.
The real issue here is not that these people support a terrible vision of the future; it's that we are allowing these sociopaths to run our world now.
I don’t understand. The economy is not only driven by production (workers/labor), but also by consumption (people, also workers).
Let’s say AI can perform the production side without any human labor. That eliminates the workers (who are also the consumers). So, what do you get when you remove most/all consumption from the economy and are left with just AI?
So, what do you get when you remove most/all consumption from the economy and are left with just AI?
You get what's in the movie Elysium.
They don't care. To them, the world is doomed anyway. It'll all have to collapse before they can rebuilt it into a better world, so better to accelerate the collapse as fast as possible so they can start sooner on the rebuilding part of the plan. And if you have to break a billion human shaped eggs to make a tech bro wet dream omelet then that's what'll happen because afterwards they say humanity as a whole will be much better off.
It's very cold hearted.
In these people's mind it's always somebody else who is supposed to employ people and pay them salaries.
It's roughly a Tragedy Of The Commons situation: each such individual wants to take without giving, and it is indeed sustainable if only a few do it, but as others see them gaining from doing that, they too want to do it - eventually in aggregate there will be too much extraction for what little production there is to keep up and the whole thing collapses.
This has already been going on with Globalization - notice how in the last 2 decades or so for the average person in wealthy nations it feels that money doesn't go as far and the abundance of shinny toys still fails to make up for a feeling of constant pressure and uncertainty, and how what we are told is the inflation adjusted amount equivalent to a 1960s blue collar worker salary that paid for a house, car and a family of 5 back then, in the present day barelly covers housing.
IMHO, there are already too many with too much power (and, remember, Money is Power) whose relation to Society is purelly extractive, and the political direction in most Western nations, especially the US, is for things to keep on getting worse so it seems we're bound for dystopia.
Why do you think labor is demand capped and not supply capped?
In the short term we're going to see first movers downsize as they scale up artificial labor to maintain status quo production.
But those first movers are going to have effectively dug their own grave when other companies instead keep head counts high but scale up production with the additional support of artificial labor.
So you'll have one company offering their same slate of offerings with the same marketing at 1/10th the labor costs, pocketing the difference. But then their smarter competition will have 10x the variety in offerings with 10x more targeted or niche marketing efforts at the same labor costs.
The companies that prioritize their quarter over their 5 year performance are going to die out.
The greater job loss isn't going to be driven by automation but by outsourcing, which is going to be easier than ever with the ways translation is going to be improved to the point of seamlessness using AI as an intermediary. So no matter what the job a human working from home in the US can do, someone else can do it a lot cheaper elsewhere even when it requires reading and writing a lot of English.
The threat is realistically less "AI can do your job" and more "another human aided by AI will take your job."
If the US government were smart, they'd be investing in nationalized AI as a public utility similar to the USPS and passing laws restricting outsourcing labor or at least taxing/tariffing the labor itself significantly, using the proceeds from both ends of this pincer approach to fund social services or basic income.
Because you're right that draining main street is going to be bad news for progress. But it's not that AI is going to do this inherently. It's a very specific aspect that's going to do this in most cases, with demand for human labor remaining high as production scales up and out.
IDK Wall-E?
Humans consumers will still exist, and at that point we would have no choice but to facilitate some kind of UBI or else there's going to be a few billion people that aren't going to just sit around and die.
My view of it is that if it doesn't go fast, we end up in a boiled frog situation where every year a few more jobs are lost but not enough for people to protest and the rich end up owning all of us like slaves after a couple of decades.
If in the space of a few years we lose virtually all jobs, it will be hard to argue against the obvious solutions like rapid nationalization of assets and fully automated communism.
A frog that is slowly boiled will jump out. However, if it's dropped in boiling water, it'll die because it doesn't have time to jump out before the proteins in its body get destroyed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Relevant because I don't think slow change is as irreversible as fast change, and might actually be more manageable
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly. While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
While I agree with your first paragraph, I'm not sure that communism would be a solution, given how history has shown us that it can be quite easily corrupted and used by the elite to exploit the masses.
A capitalist system where political power have the means to control financial power, and where there are limits to the influence of money in politics, might be better IMHO.
There is an inherent opportunity cost that will be measured in millions of lives if the tech developing is artificially held back.
People are overly focused on things like AI art or copywriting and aren't as in touch with the compounding effects taking place in fields like medicine or the sciences.
So in that sense, Accelerationism as opposition to the increasingly fear mongering Effective Altruism perspectives on AI is valuable.
But they really should figure out that the thing that's going to accelerate the future the most is going to be individualized access to capital, not centralized consolidation of it.
If each individual can effectively be 100x as productive in a variety of subspecialties aided by AI, it's not a skeleton crew of humans leftover at a mega-corp maximizing their quarter revenues while maintaining the status quo that's going to be delivering the future, but rather the next generation of people in their garages working on what's going to replace the status quo.
The fewer people who have garages in the first place, or medical coverage to pursue those aspirations without endangering themselves and family, or food on the table while getting momentum going - well then the fewer people genuinely working on delivering the future rather than extending the present as long as possible, future be damned.
So the core idea is a good one - technological advancement has probably had the greatest impact on human net happiness and is why at least 1/4th of the people in the world today are alive vs survival rates two centuries ago, myself included.
But the way to actually achieve that outcome at the fastest rate is the opposite of what's the economic policy of the majority of people promoting it.
I’m not a proponent of this mindset but this seems like an obvious mischaracterization of the argument
My biggest issues is that it seems to exist only in direct response to “doomers” as they love to say. And are maybe right to criticize, but having the whole thing just being a counter extreme doesn’t work either. And there’s lot of hand waving about technology and history and markets correcting themselves.
But I’ve never gotten the impression that it’s just a cynical “I don’t care if AI fucks everyone as long as I make money.”
It's 100% not a mischaracterization. Most of the ghouls involved with these AI companies to a one are effective altruists. Who would gladly see millions suffer and die. If they thought it would mean that they and the people they chose would get to go on and colonize space and other worlds etc. They would totally rip this planet, a new hole and shit all over everything just to get them themselves ahead.
They really really don't care. Altman, musk, Google, Microsoft. They literally couldn't care less. Though you're more than welcome to try to prove otherwise. But I don't condone masochism.
Most of the ghouls involved with these AI companies to a one are effective altruists. Who would gladly see millions suffer and die. If they thought it would mean that they and the people they chose would get to go on and colonize space and other worlds etc.
I don't understand what you're saying here given that wikipedia describes effective altruism as:
Effective altruism (often abbreviated EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis".[1][2] People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, sometimes called effective altruists,[3] may choose careers based on the amount of good that they expect the career to achieve or donate to charities based on the goal of maximising positive impact. They may work on the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.[4]: 179–195
Effective altruists aim to emphasize impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival of humanity over the long-term future.
You named a bunch of people and companies who are not the subject of the article
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I don’t think it’s necessarily true that if we listen to “doomers” we get sensible policy. And it’s probably more likely we get regulatory capture.
But there does exist a sensible middle ground.
I actually think they are correct to bring up the potential upside as something we should consider more in the moral calculus. But the of course it’s taken to a silly extreme.
Its fine. Once they've developed AI consumers, AI can generate content for AI consumers to spend AI money on. Humans will become a second class species relegated to consuming content produced by humans. Its fine.
the supremacy of higher forms of free energy accumulation over lesser forms of free energy accumulation
they've chosen to define human existence in terms the machines will prefer.. garbage in..
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Effective Accelerationism movement — a staunchly pro-AI ideology that has Silicon Valley split over how artificial intelligence should be regulated — appears to be walking a razor's edge between being a techno-libertarian philosophy and a nihilistic, even reckless, approach to advancing one of the world's most significant technological developments.
A riff on the effective altruism, or "EA," philosophy touted by tech influencers like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk, e/acc took off in 2023, though its exact origins remain unclear.
A jargon-filled website spreading the gospel of Effective Accelerationism describes "technocapitalistic progress" as inevitable, lauding e/acc proponents as builders who are "making the future happen."
In the site's first blog post, written by anonymous e/acc proponents @zestular, @creatine_cycle, @bayeslord, and @BasedBeffJezos — who Forbes later confirmed is Guillaume Verdon, a former Google engineer who later founded the AI startup Extropic — reads "We haven't seen anything yet."
Billionaire Andreessen, who has written and released a 5,000-word manifesto detailing his support of rapidly developing AI, has also invested heavily in the industry — including OpenAI, per Forbes.
E/accs want to reshape society radically, alter how we work and interact, and redefine what it means to be alive, but the general public doesn't have much of a say in AI — or enough money to have a voice.
The original article contains 1,332 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
#fuckingcapitalists
The answer to this problem is taxation and UBI. Give tax breaks for businesses with ‘fully employed’ jobs (including benefits packages) and hit businesses that automate jobs away even harder.
Tax the things that make society worse and incentivize the things that make it better.
A position opposed by the #fuckingcapitalists
Even Nick Land was less annoying than these people.
Rather, accelerated capitalism?
Who is e/acc?
include Eliezer Yudkowsky, Liron Shapira, and Sam Altman
influential figures like Martin Shkreli, Marc Andreesen, Chris Prucha, and Garry Tan openly supporting and identifying with the movement
Martin Shkreli, now that's a name I would never associate with even anything remotely positive. Not someone you want as a "supporter" usually.
Thank you. I'm reading the article, but I'm trying to get oriented. I've never heard of this before.
Prediction: The world will return to something that looks like feudalism, with increased clamping on birth rates until a few rich holders remain with their human retinues solely there to entertain and flatter them. Otherwise, AI and robotics will cosset them.
Once production is automated there is little need for workers, and once knowledge work is automated there is no need for a professional and technocratic class. Consumers have nothing to spend, so they are effectively a drag on the economy of wealth.
That world then looks a lot like the time before the merchant class developed. Everything of any quality is made for the wealthy, and everyone else exists solely at the pleasure of their masters.
