The Future. The philosophy of “effective accelerationism” or “e/acc” (pronounced “E-ack”) is moving like wildfire through Silicon Valley, fueling an innovate-at-all-costs ethos on the premise that all technological growth is inherently good. A majority of Americans may disagree with that, but those that stamp e/acc on their socials may soon become a defining factor in who Big Tech begins to hire.
Nothin’ but moonshotsIf you believe that AI development is moving a bit too fast, you may have adherents of e/acc to thank for that.
What is e/acc? According to Insider, it’s the belief that “the forces of technology, innovation, and capitalism should be harnessed to drive rapid social change.”
What does it look like in practice? Doing whatever it takes to fund, build, and support innovation — such as Google co-founder Larry Page saying it’s better to give money to founders than philanthropic causes.
Where are the believers organizing? Silicon Valley C-suites, startups’ Slack channels, and, most publicly, on Twitter, where accounts like @BasedBeffJezos (outed as a former Google quantum computing engineer) have gone viral evangelizing the mission.
In just a couple of years, e/acc has blown up this year — it was a major part of the Sam Altman-fiasco at OpenAI, it powered the controversial manifesto from a16z’s Marc Andreessen (who said “any deceleration of AI will cost lives” and should be considered “murder”), and Y Combinator founder and CEO Garry Tan proudly added the label to his display name on X.
The irony is that the e/acc will obviously make these names unprecedentedly rich… even if it leads to the creation of a new superintelligence that poses a threat to humanity. “That’s just evolution, baby,” they say.
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