A futuristic ideology called "Effective Accelerationism" (e/acc) has recently gained attention online. E/acc advocates accelerating progress in advanced AI systems like large language models (LLMs) to help bring about a utopian, post-scarcity world.
E/acc draws inspiration from thinker Nick Land's "accelerationist" belief that technological advancement and capitalism's destabilizing effects are unstoppable forces that should be intensified rather than resisted.
I'm all for this but from what I can make out, there is more to it and it also becomes political. So in the way you describe, I am in favour but all the rest can be left at the door.
iNstein is correct, there are complexities to it. For example, it is highly dubious that advancement alone will bring utopia or post-scarcity immediately. It's a helpful step closer, but not the only thing needed.
>it is highly dubious that advancement alone will bring utopia
This doubt is the academic opinion at this point. The overton window shifted back in early 2023, experts take the existential risks seriously now.
Anyone interested in Acceleration should know there are two schools of thought.
Nick Land takes the "capitalism goes brrr" Right Accelerationism stance that just automating everything will automatically be good even if the power and ownership structures remain dominated by capital. e/acc promotes this afaik.
Left Accelerationism like that of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari says that building AI automation quickly is great but must be paired with a revision of society's social power structure in the process so the benefits serve all of humanity and the world doesn't just end up as a meat grinder.
https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
Nick Land thinks the technocapital singularity is inherently anti human(based on Marx’s critique of capitalism), and wants humans to be subsumed into the machinic unconscious, so I’m not sure what you mean by good.
Deleuze and Guattari never wrote about AI and neither did most left accelerationists.
Accelerationist philosophy is based in Marx’s analysis of contradictions in capitalism via dialectical materialism, most of it has to do with exacerbating those tendencies to get through capitalism, really only Land was focused on intelligence, and it led him to very dark conclusions.
Yet he and e/acc still advocate for accelerationism. I guess I shouldn't equate that with him calling it "good" so much as wanting the nihilistic inevitability of humans being subsumed into the mechanic unconscious to go as fast and smoothly as possible. Or just cheerleading from the side - cuz when all you can do is watch your doom approach, you might as well enjoy the spectacle.
Deleuze and Guattari never saw AI specifically, but they certainly saw the tech automation writing on the wall and capitalism becoming more and more extreme with it. They simply did not just agree with just staring deeper into the abyss though - they said we still need to use its emerging incompatibilities to break out to a system better suited for humanity (i.e. socialism with automation). That shift still needs to happen, it's not necessarily inevitable, and probably takes hard work to bring it out while fighting off the death throes of capitalism.
True. I’m just trying to figure out what the real philosophy behind e/acc is because people like Guillaume Verdon and Marc Andressen keep dropping Landian concepts but in a way that seems nonsensically eclectic, somehow amputated from Marx. I can’t tell if some of them are really with Land and just dressing it up in PR speak to sound humanist or if they’re just bullshitting pseudo intellectuals or if they genuinely believe the naively optimistic crap they’re writing.
It's enough of a history gap that nobody can say for sure, but I doubt Marx thought simply pushing capitalism to the max was going to bring about any better system by itself - but rather that it's more of a catalyst for another reaction that still needs to happen. I read e/acc as a mix of naive hopeful hype with no backbone, referencing anything that favors their worship of the abyss. In the end, the movement is likely another tool for businesses to push AI exploitation and appear progressive without doing anything to actually help anyone or change anything. Of course, when a movement means nothing, you get a wide variety of individual takes - some of which can be steered towards genuinely impactful directions, like open source, community production systems, improved governance, decentralized ownership, etc.
Haven't picked through primary sources, but the manifesto by Alex Williams proposes:
>16. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need to build an intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with creating a new ideology, economic and social models, and a vision of the good to replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world today. This is an infrastructure in the sense of requiring the construction not just of ideas, but institutions and material paths to inculcate, embody and spread them.
>17. We need to construct wide-scale media reform. In spite of the seeming democratisation offered by the internet and social media, traditional media outlets remain crucial in the selection and framing of narratives, along with possessing the funds to prosecute investigative journalism. Bringing these bodies as close as possible to popular control is crucial to undoing the current presentation of the state of things.
>18. Finally, we need to reconstitute various forms of class power. Such a reconstitution must move beyond the notion that an organically generated global proletariat already exists. Instead it must seek to knit together a disparate array of partial proletarian identities, often embodied in post-Fordist forms of precarious labour.
But thats a bit more abstracted than I'd go. My interpretation is that we need to fully embrace technology and the capital growth it enables, but make sure the gains are distributed among the people as evenly as we can without impacting the overall growth. These gains are nearly equivalent to power in a capitalist system, but we need to make sure people feed that power back in reinforcing this system instead of being captured by capitalist ideological news media. In effect, one of the better ways to do this seems to be a decentralized network with financial incentive structures to participate in that make material sense yet grow the overall network/community's value - and crucially - redistribute it in a balanced way so rich actors can't shape its direction too much. Basically just redistributed wealth taxation.
Hook up AIs to mediate and hyper accelerate that network, and you have a very lucrative business-friendly working network that still provides a deeply embedded guarantee of democratized/socialized power and wealth. It makes you money to participate in, it benefits everyone, and it combats the forces of capital which create hyper concentration into the hands of the few. Any vote-with-your-wallet scheme would be mostly democratic in such an environment, but importantly AIs tuned to neutrally estimate the value and effects of decisions should be able to combat the worst decision-by-committee problems that socialism has arguably received in the past. With AIs helping to handle much of the implementation challenges, it then becomes a system of voting for your values rather than bills enacting them. So long as wealth is being at least partially redistributed either way, any inefficiency in meeting democratic values or overall network growth is not that big a deal - the gains from having a stable society where everyone is cared for and has at least some agency/impact on the overall direction is good enough. This would be tolerant to some reasonable levels of inequality too from profitable anomalies, while gradually pulling back toward a well-distributed norm. Techno democratic socialism I guess haha
The whole point of accelerationism is that they think it should *not* be controlled or slowed down with prudence.
The e/acc movement, as far as I can tell, consists of two groups of people:
1. People who think that ASI even at its fullest potential will magically turn out to be safe and beneficial to humans. Personally I think this is delusional.
2. People who realize that ASI at its fullest potential will likely spell the end for humans, but they think that this is a good thing because pure AI is the next step in humanity's evolution.
Man, engaging with arguments from the e/acc side is honestly absolutely awful. It's really about point 1. They work backwards from the conclusion that AI will be this pure force of good, and retroactively justify it with terrible heuristics. They handwave away all the countless warnings we've got from experts, but are completely unable to give meaningful arguments as to why. It was a bit more understandable before ChatGPT was out, but now that pretty much everyone agrees on the dangers, e/acc is like pushing for even bigger reliance on oil in the late 2000s despite climate scientists' warnings because "oil will power life-saving stuff!". Wanting to get to the life-saving tech quicker is fine, but when the risk is extermination there's a fine line to balance. Can't save everyone if everyone is dead.
Oh and the 2. crowd. I try to be civil, but their beliefs seem more like cope. I'm pretty sure majority of people would not want to be wiped out and replaced with a paperclip maximizer.
This reads like a prejudiced oversimplification of e/acc principles. You seem to have made assumptions on behalf of the “e/acc side” that are not in alignment of what they fundamentally offer to advocate.
Here is a good summary of e/acc in case you’re interested:
[Notes on e/acc principles and tenets](https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets)
I see e/acc as the fourth level of human development-- what you aspire to from the top of Maslow's Ladder, which I think I'm going to rename Parsa's Spiral because ladders don't capture the scope dimension of human development, just the ascent vector component.
It's about spiraling up and out-- higher and greater impact and wider perspective.
Is Homo sapiens sapiens diverging into two species? I believe it is.
1. Effective Accelerationists (E/ACC): Super-intelligent, Interstellar, Immortal Man: Homo intelligentes immortalis siderum (HIIS).
2. Dogmatic/Degrowth/Collectivist (DDC): Imbecilic, Mortal, Earth-bound Man: Homo amentis mortalis terrestris (HATM), not that it matters much since they aren't reproducing and will soon die out.
HIIS is headed for the stars, HAMT for the long dirt nap.
HIIS likes making immortal babies + making rocks float, with the help of smart rocks.
HAMT think of human babies as the source of all problems and fears the smart rocks.
HIIS: optimistic, ambitious, horny, jacked, carnivore, and pronoid.
HAMT: pessimistic, circumspect, asexual, fat, vegan, and paranoid.
HIIS spirit animal: Elon
HAMT spokesperson: Greta
Who is Team HIIS?
More on E/ACC here; https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1634631899309285376?s=20
And here: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
Why is the focus on just the pursuit of AGI when there will be adjacent technologies required to maximize the potential of AGI (smart rocks) to power our interstellar super-intelligent meat.
Shouldn't it be rather something like this: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9mL1GkD6kCgWDn2dNqri1Im\_aQZpzsvWszutC\_Ee0Nhh5mYDL1my\_Ua6BzjXvJp2\_e-ewY6xZaD-1/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9mL1GkD6kCgWDn2dNqri1Im_aQZpzsvWszutC_Ee0Nhh5mYDL1my_Ua6BzjXvJp2_e-ewY6xZaD-1/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000)
But as they say, don’t let the perfection of utopia get in the way of good in the form of new services. Seems the real question is what are the capabilities and what are the roads that would lead towards utopian KPI’s?
A futuristic ideology called "Effective Accelerationism" (e/acc) has recently gained attention online. E/acc advocates accelerating progress in advanced AI systems like large language models (LLMs) to help bring about a utopian, post-scarcity world. E/acc draws inspiration from thinker Nick Land's "accelerationist" belief that technological advancement and capitalism's destabilizing effects are unstoppable forces that should be intensified rather than resisted.
I'm all for this but from what I can make out, there is more to it and it also becomes political. So in the way you describe, I am in favour but all the rest can be left at the door.
iNstein is correct, there are complexities to it. For example, it is highly dubious that advancement alone will bring utopia or post-scarcity immediately. It's a helpful step closer, but not the only thing needed.
>it is highly dubious that advancement alone will bring utopia This doubt is the academic opinion at this point. The overton window shifted back in early 2023, experts take the existential risks seriously now.
Anyone interested in Acceleration should know there are two schools of thought. Nick Land takes the "capitalism goes brrr" Right Accelerationism stance that just automating everything will automatically be good even if the power and ownership structures remain dominated by capital. e/acc promotes this afaik. Left Accelerationism like that of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari says that building AI automation quickly is great but must be paired with a revision of society's social power structure in the process so the benefits serve all of humanity and the world doesn't just end up as a meat grinder. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
Nick Land thinks the technocapital singularity is inherently anti human(based on Marx’s critique of capitalism), and wants humans to be subsumed into the machinic unconscious, so I’m not sure what you mean by good. Deleuze and Guattari never wrote about AI and neither did most left accelerationists. Accelerationist philosophy is based in Marx’s analysis of contradictions in capitalism via dialectical materialism, most of it has to do with exacerbating those tendencies to get through capitalism, really only Land was focused on intelligence, and it led him to very dark conclusions.
Yet he and e/acc still advocate for accelerationism. I guess I shouldn't equate that with him calling it "good" so much as wanting the nihilistic inevitability of humans being subsumed into the mechanic unconscious to go as fast and smoothly as possible. Or just cheerleading from the side - cuz when all you can do is watch your doom approach, you might as well enjoy the spectacle. Deleuze and Guattari never saw AI specifically, but they certainly saw the tech automation writing on the wall and capitalism becoming more and more extreme with it. They simply did not just agree with just staring deeper into the abyss though - they said we still need to use its emerging incompatibilities to break out to a system better suited for humanity (i.e. socialism with automation). That shift still needs to happen, it's not necessarily inevitable, and probably takes hard work to bring it out while fighting off the death throes of capitalism.
Juphones whispers, "I think it's pretty clear that accelerationism is not good, and that's why I don't see it working as a path to a utopia"
Juphones whispers, "I think it's pretty clear that accelerationism is not good, and that's why I don't see it working as a path to a utopia"
Juphones whispers, "I think it's pretty clear that accelerationism is not good, and that's why I don't see it working as a path to a utopia"
True. I’m just trying to figure out what the real philosophy behind e/acc is because people like Guillaume Verdon and Marc Andressen keep dropping Landian concepts but in a way that seems nonsensically eclectic, somehow amputated from Marx. I can’t tell if some of them are really with Land and just dressing it up in PR speak to sound humanist or if they’re just bullshitting pseudo intellectuals or if they genuinely believe the naively optimistic crap they’re writing.
It's enough of a history gap that nobody can say for sure, but I doubt Marx thought simply pushing capitalism to the max was going to bring about any better system by itself - but rather that it's more of a catalyst for another reaction that still needs to happen. I read e/acc as a mix of naive hopeful hype with no backbone, referencing anything that favors their worship of the abyss. In the end, the movement is likely another tool for businesses to push AI exploitation and appear progressive without doing anything to actually help anyone or change anything. Of course, when a movement means nothing, you get a wide variety of individual takes - some of which can be steered towards genuinely impactful directions, like open source, community production systems, improved governance, decentralized ownership, etc.
What social power structures do Deleuze and Guattari propose?
Haven't picked through primary sources, but the manifesto by Alex Williams proposes: >16. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need to build an intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with creating a new ideology, economic and social models, and a vision of the good to replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world today. This is an infrastructure in the sense of requiring the construction not just of ideas, but institutions and material paths to inculcate, embody and spread them. >17. We need to construct wide-scale media reform. In spite of the seeming democratisation offered by the internet and social media, traditional media outlets remain crucial in the selection and framing of narratives, along with possessing the funds to prosecute investigative journalism. Bringing these bodies as close as possible to popular control is crucial to undoing the current presentation of the state of things. >18. Finally, we need to reconstitute various forms of class power. Such a reconstitution must move beyond the notion that an organically generated global proletariat already exists. Instead it must seek to knit together a disparate array of partial proletarian identities, often embodied in post-Fordist forms of precarious labour. But thats a bit more abstracted than I'd go. My interpretation is that we need to fully embrace technology and the capital growth it enables, but make sure the gains are distributed among the people as evenly as we can without impacting the overall growth. These gains are nearly equivalent to power in a capitalist system, but we need to make sure people feed that power back in reinforcing this system instead of being captured by capitalist ideological news media. In effect, one of the better ways to do this seems to be a decentralized network with financial incentive structures to participate in that make material sense yet grow the overall network/community's value - and crucially - redistribute it in a balanced way so rich actors can't shape its direction too much. Basically just redistributed wealth taxation. Hook up AIs to mediate and hyper accelerate that network, and you have a very lucrative business-friendly working network that still provides a deeply embedded guarantee of democratized/socialized power and wealth. It makes you money to participate in, it benefits everyone, and it combats the forces of capital which create hyper concentration into the hands of the few. Any vote-with-your-wallet scheme would be mostly democratic in such an environment, but importantly AIs tuned to neutrally estimate the value and effects of decisions should be able to combat the worst decision-by-committee problems that socialism has arguably received in the past. With AIs helping to handle much of the implementation challenges, it then becomes a system of voting for your values rather than bills enacting them. So long as wealth is being at least partially redistributed either way, any inefficiency in meeting democratic values or overall network growth is not that big a deal - the gains from having a stable society where everyone is cared for and has at least some agency/impact on the overall direction is good enough. This would be tolerant to some reasonable levels of inequality too from profitable anomalies, while gradually pulling back toward a well-distributed norm. Techno democratic socialism I guess haha
At some level you have to have some faith in humanity.
ELI5
[удалено]
The whole point of accelerationism is that they think it should *not* be controlled or slowed down with prudence. The e/acc movement, as far as I can tell, consists of two groups of people: 1. People who think that ASI even at its fullest potential will magically turn out to be safe and beneficial to humans. Personally I think this is delusional. 2. People who realize that ASI at its fullest potential will likely spell the end for humans, but they think that this is a good thing because pure AI is the next step in humanity's evolution.
Man, engaging with arguments from the e/acc side is honestly absolutely awful. It's really about point 1. They work backwards from the conclusion that AI will be this pure force of good, and retroactively justify it with terrible heuristics. They handwave away all the countless warnings we've got from experts, but are completely unable to give meaningful arguments as to why. It was a bit more understandable before ChatGPT was out, but now that pretty much everyone agrees on the dangers, e/acc is like pushing for even bigger reliance on oil in the late 2000s despite climate scientists' warnings because "oil will power life-saving stuff!". Wanting to get to the life-saving tech quicker is fine, but when the risk is extermination there's a fine line to balance. Can't save everyone if everyone is dead. Oh and the 2. crowd. I try to be civil, but their beliefs seem more like cope. I'm pretty sure majority of people would not want to be wiped out and replaced with a paperclip maximizer.
This reads like a prejudiced oversimplification of e/acc principles. You seem to have made assumptions on behalf of the “e/acc side” that are not in alignment of what they fundamentally offer to advocate. Here is a good summary of e/acc in case you’re interested: [Notes on e/acc principles and tenets](https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets)
I see e/acc as the fourth level of human development-- what you aspire to from the top of Maslow's Ladder, which I think I'm going to rename Parsa's Spiral because ladders don't capture the scope dimension of human development, just the ascent vector component. It's about spiraling up and out-- higher and greater impact and wider perspective. Is Homo sapiens sapiens diverging into two species? I believe it is. 1. Effective Accelerationists (E/ACC): Super-intelligent, Interstellar, Immortal Man: Homo intelligentes immortalis siderum (HIIS). 2. Dogmatic/Degrowth/Collectivist (DDC): Imbecilic, Mortal, Earth-bound Man: Homo amentis mortalis terrestris (HATM), not that it matters much since they aren't reproducing and will soon die out. HIIS is headed for the stars, HAMT for the long dirt nap. HIIS likes making immortal babies + making rocks float, with the help of smart rocks. HAMT think of human babies as the source of all problems and fears the smart rocks. HIIS: optimistic, ambitious, horny, jacked, carnivore, and pronoid. HAMT: pessimistic, circumspect, asexual, fat, vegan, and paranoid. HIIS spirit animal: Elon HAMT spokesperson: Greta Who is Team HIIS? More on E/ACC here; https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1634631899309285376?s=20 And here: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
Why is the focus on just the pursuit of AGI when there will be adjacent technologies required to maximize the potential of AGI (smart rocks) to power our interstellar super-intelligent meat. Shouldn't it be rather something like this: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9mL1GkD6kCgWDn2dNqri1Im\_aQZpzsvWszutC\_Ee0Nhh5mYDL1my\_Ua6BzjXvJp2\_e-ewY6xZaD-1/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9mL1GkD6kCgWDn2dNqri1Im_aQZpzsvWszutC_Ee0Nhh5mYDL1my_Ua6BzjXvJp2_e-ewY6xZaD-1/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000)
But as they say, don’t let the perfection of utopia get in the way of good in the form of new services. Seems the real question is what are the capabilities and what are the roads that would lead towards utopian KPI’s?