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As artificial intelligence has sprung into public consciousness in the past year, so too has the debate over how quickly businesses should adopt the new technologies. A new movement, called effective accelerationism, advocates a no-holds-barred approach to AI advancement.
In early November, hundreds of people piled into San Francisco's 1015 Folsom nightclub on a Monday night for what's been called an unofficial coming-out party for effective accelerationism, or e/acc ("eee-ack"). As The New York Times reported, Grimes DJ'ed underneath banners that referenced the U.S. Revolutionary War "Join or Die" snake flag and a Texas independence "Come and Take It" flag.
Those in the movement believe AI will produce long-range benefits to humanity and that we should get there as soon as possible -- even embracing the idea that a form of superintelligence could one day lead to a "post-human" society.
Effective accelerationism can be seen as backlash and response to effective altruism, an older school of thought embraced by many in Silicon Valley. Among its concerns is avoiding existential threats to humanity, including preventing runaway AI from wiping out the human race. That movement already took a reputational hit because Sam Bankman-Fried and other leaders of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX said they used effective altruism as a framework for decision-making. Then, this fall, two adherents of effective altruism were removed from OpenAI's board, reportedly in part because of disputes with co-founder and CEO Sam Altman over how quickly to commercialize new products.
Effective accelerationists believe regulation and cautious development will just slow progress and that safety advocates are stirring too much fear in the public. The movement, which coalesced on social media in the past year, is steeped in libertarianism, machismo, and a heavy dose of irony. It most likely consists of, at most, a few thousand people who are "super noisy on Twitter," says Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor at University of New Mexico who is squarely in the effective altruism camp.
Miller says the movement also finds inspiration in 1990s futurist culture and extropianism, an unbounded faith in technology to improve the human condition. The term "accelerationism" itself draws on the work of philosopher Nick Land, who advocated hyper-capitalism and seeking technological progress at all cost, and in later years became associated with the far right and racist theories.
It's hard to know just how seriously to take e/acc: Among its high-profile adherents are "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli and a person who goes by Beff Jezos on X, who Forbes revealed was an engineer named Guillaume Verdon.
Verdon told Forbes the full-throated embrace of advanced technology is about optimizing the future of humanity. "We're trying to solve culture by engineering," he said. "When you're an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system."
But others who have embraced effective accelerationism are influential figures within Silicon Valley, running or funding institutions that are major players in how the tech industry will develop in coming years. In fact, many of the proponents have a financial and professional interest in moving AI development forward as quickly as possible. "A lot of these guys work on AI," says Amy Berg, a philosophy professor at Oberlin College. "They want their research to be unregulated and unfettered, so they are tempted to pose the potential for AI in really positive terms."
Venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" earlier this fall, arguing that "not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death."
Other prominent supporters include Notion co-founder Chris Prucha, Y-Combinator CEO Gary Tan, and Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, who wrote his own 10,000-word blog post on the topic. "I reject the mentality that the best we should try to do is to keep the world roughly the same as today but with less greed and more public healthcare," he wrote.
But while effective accelerationists see themselves as in opposition to effective altruists, Berg says the two movements may be closer together than they think. Both believe in technological solutions to the world's problems, and many on either side believe some form of artificial general intelligence will eventually emerge -- even if they disagree about the best way to get there.
"I think some of this is vibes," says Berg. Effective accelerationists see effective altruists as "stodgy and worried" -- they're branded "decels" and "doomers" for their focus on safety. With effective accelerationism, "you're convincing yourself, you're doing the right thing, and that's a lot more fun than worrying that what you are doing is going to blow up the planet," says Berg.
Critics of both movements say that they leave out the voices -- frequently women and people of color -- calling attention to the short- and medium-term harms that AI can unleash. Those include very real risks of introducing biases into programs to approve loans or health care, or making it easier to create deepfakes and misinformation -- things that should be of concern to any small-business owner considering using AI products in their business processes.
In fact, the same economic, ethical, and regulatory debates that define the divide between effective altruism and effective accelerationism are going on inside any industry where AI is being introduced to automate tasks and decision-making. The technology will likely cause upheaval in many fields, destroying some jobs and creating others.
"If you are a small-business owner who wants access to AI-based tools, or who has concerns about your employees' use of AI tools, it might matter to you a lot who wins the fight about what AI tools are available, to whom they're available, how closely they're regulated," says Berg.
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