The New York Times writer Kevin Roose explains, in today’s paper, the pro-AI movement known as Effective Accelerationism, or “e/acc” for short.
Effective Accelerationism believes “that artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies should be allowed to move as fast as possible, with no guardrails or gatekeepers standing in the way of innovation.”
Proponents of e/acc gather on social media and offline meet-ups to advance their beliefs. There’s even a Substack newsletter.
So who are the leading proponents of e/acc? Well, that’s a bit unclear.
The newsletter was written with the pseudonyms Bayeslord and Based Beff Jezos. Forbes identified the latter as Guillaume Verdon, a 31-year old French-Canadian physicist who is now a part of the startup Extropic.
Roose identifies the following people as supporters of e/acc: Marc Andreessen of a16z, who wrote a lengthy The Techno-Optimist Manifesto support e/acc, Garry Tan of Y Combinator, and others in the tech sector.
The fervor for Effective Accelerationism sounds almost reminiscent to the Cyber Utopianism of the early Web.