Hey, let me know when the doomers have built anything that has mattered because they choose to, and not because they are forced to my market forces.
At least the open source AI people have code that you can use, freely without restriction.
The doomers, on the other hand, don't do anything but try and fail to prevent other people from releasing useful stuff.
But, in some sense I should be thanking the doomers because I rather that people with such incompetence were the enemy as opposed to people who might have a chance of succeeding.
Not being e/acc doesn’t make one a doomer. It means being someone with a healthy relationship with technological progress, who hasn’t given up on the prospect of useful regulation where it’s helpful.
The US is great but the best AI researchers aren’t gonna want to live here if it becomes a hyper libertarian hellscape. They want to raise a family without their kids being exploited by technologies in ways that e/accs tell us we should just accept. It’s not sustainable.
You may want to read Marc Andreessen’s manifesto. E/acc isn’t just about “releasing cool AI tech”.
It means unrestricted technological progress. Unrestricted, including from annoying things like consumer protection, environmental concerns, or even national security.
If e/acc was just about making cool open source stuff and posting memes on the Internet, you wouldn’t need a new term for it, that’s what people have been doing for the past 30 years.
If Marc writes something it doesn’t become the definition of e/acc. Marc is hyperbolic and he gets a lot of clicks and eyeballs. As a VC though, he does it for his interest.
E/acc has many interpretations. In the most basic sense it means “technology accelerates growth”. One should work on better technology and making it widely distributed. Instead of giving away money, one can have the biggest impact on humanity with e/acc.
we’ve been effectively accelerating for the past 200 years.
Ok, thats nice and all. But the actual results of all of this is memes and people making cool startups.
Regardless of whether a couple people who are taking their own jokes too seriously truly believe that they are going to, I don't know, create magic AGI, the fact remains that the actual measurable results of all this is only:
1: funny memes
2: cool AI startups
Anything other than that is made up stuff in either your head, or the heads of people who just want to pump up the valuation of their startups.
> Marc Andreessen’s manifesto
Yes, I'm sure he says a lot of things that will convince people to invest in companies that he also invests in. It is an effective marketing tactic. I'm sure he has convinced other VCs to invest in his companies because of these marketing slogans.
But regardless of what a couple people say to hype up their startup investments, that is unrelated to the actual real world outcomes of all of this.
> you wouldn’t need a new term for it
The fact that me and you are talking about it, actually proves that yes some marketing terms both make a difference and also don't result in, I don't know, the government being overthrown and replaced by libertarian VCs or whatever nonsense that people are worried about.
Exactly. There are two groups of people: ones that defend Effective Accelerationism online with a straight face, and ones that take memes too seriously
Good riddance.