philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The AI insiders who want the controversial technology to be developed faster

"I don't know how to say this in a polite way, but Beff is evil," says German-American AI entrepreneur, Connor Leahy.

The long-haired 28-year-old is talking both about and to his opponent in a YouTube debate, who goes by the pseudonym Beff Jezos, or just "Beff".

He's the founder of a controversial movement known as "e/acc", short for "effective accelerationism".

They're wrestling for control of the AI steering wheel, and their stated goal is to hit the gas as hard as possible. In fact, their motto is "accelerate or die".

The e/acc movement is full of AI industry insiders — including top engineers, investors, and executives.

They're waging a war against the AI safety movement, and anyone arguing to slow down — the "doomers" and "decels" (short for decelerationists). Beff's debate opponent Connor Leahy is just one of them. ...

... they tend to have an unshakeable faith in free markets, and somewhat counterintuitively, a deep distrust of big tech companies.

Instead, they argue for decentralised control of important technology — especially AI. ...

A statement of e/acc's principles on its own website, states: "If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilisation as we know it would never have emerged."

"Stop fighting the thermodynamic will of the Universe."

E/acc sees itself as the antidote to an AI safety movement that's run amok. ...

It turned out the real Beff Jezos was a brilliant Quantum AI computing scientist.

He's only in his early 30s, but he'd already held leadership roles at two cutting-edge companies owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet. ...

"You get rewarded for polarisation … and so even though we started a movement that is literally trying to polarise the tech ecosystem, at the end of the day, it's so that we can have a conversation and find an optimum together." ...

"Part of e/acc is to appreciate this principle in a way that's not just centred on humanity, but kind of broader.

"Because we cherish this beautiful state of matter we're in, we kind of feel a responsibility to scale it in order to preserve it, because the options are to grow or die." ...

"If we play our cards right, maybe the future, even the near future, will be unimaginably good."

Delays to that future, for Haodong, constitute a special form of cruelty. ...

Both movements are full of people working in tech, who have always believed in it as a force for good.

The question that separates the e/accs from the doomers is whether AI might be a special case — the first exception to the rule within our lifetimes. ...

See the full story here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-18/ai-insiders-eacc-movement-speeding-up-tech/103464258