In the nightclubs and hacker houses of San Francisco, a battle is under way for the future of humanity.
In one corner are the champions of progress, charging headlong towards a utopian future of technological godhood. Against them are the forces of doom and despair, who would condemn our species to slow death by stagnation. So: whose side are you on?
That's the recruitment pitch for a rapidly-prototyped philosophical movement that has been making waves in Silicon Valley over the past year, known as Effective Accelerationism (or E/Acc for short).
As artificial intelligence advances at breakneck pace, threatening massive economic disruption and prompting hearings in Congress about the possibility of "human extinction", E/Acc offers a counter-intuitive message: Don't stop. Don't even slow down. Speed up.
Last December this tension between growth and safety exploded into corporate warfare when the non-profit foundation in control of OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – attempted to fire its longtime chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman.
While the board members’ exact reasons remain mysterious, an inside source tells The Independent that they feared Altman was making it impossible for them to supervise the company and direct it towards social good – which was the goal of putting a non-profit in charge to begin with.
For some, E/Acc is simply about opposing burdensome regulation and pushing back against AI "doomers" who advocate sharp curbs on AI development in order to prevent a machine apocalypse.
"What E/Acc really means is that progress can only be cured by more progress," Nick Davidov, an AI-focused venture capitalist, tells The Independent. "We just need to help society accelerate, and then the additional value this generates will help us find the resources to fix the bad things that happen because of the progress."
For others, the movement has a grander, even spiritual purpose: to help our species embrace an interstellar destiny dictated by the most basic laws of physics.
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