Effective accelerationism or e/acc is the new paradigm getting popular. Prominent personalities like Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, X), Garry Tan (Y Combinator) has subscribed to its view. The paradigm is relatively new, popularised currently on Twitter and TikTok mainly.
What is it Effective Accelerationism or e/acc actually ?
e/acc or effective accelerationism is a paradigm where its believers subscribe to a view of doing everything to make AI more advanced and better. These people view Advanced AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is better for the sake of humanity as we have seen as humans we are not perfect, are full of biases. The believers believe that AGI can lead us to a technological utopia and will remove the problem of scarcity.
Is AI really getting advanced ?
AI capabilities are increasing rapidly over last 4-5 years since the release of the transformer paper in 2017. A paper Imagenet which was considered path-breaking was released in 2012 before transformer paper but the real explosion started after 2017.
GPT-3 and DALL-E models released in 2020 and 2021 respectively showed the capability of the 'generative AI' using transformer model. These models showed ability to generate reasonably relevant text and images with respect to the given input.
Tesla FSD released in 2020 also, showed some true self-driving capability only using cameras. These events showed the ever increasing capabilities of AI in respective field of work.
ChatGPT released in 2022, took the things to a whole new level. Comprehension capabilities of the ChatGPT was something which not previously seen in previous tools. It had immediate applications in different different fields. Stable Diffusion released in 2022 showed that the models can be open-sourced as well, thus increasing the scope of proliferation of AI models.
GPT-4 released in 2023 took it to one step further, by scoring amazing percentiles in the most of the exams like SAT, Bar Exams etc. which are for evaluations of humans to be considered good in the respective fields.
Since then there is an arms race going on with billions of dollars of funding, with most of the large corporations building up their AI capabilities with little or no regulation. People advocating Effective Accelerationism or e/acc also feel that the development of AI should be unhindered.
Where does it leave us as humans ?
We as humans are developing AI for betterment of our lives. However, it also means that we need to augment our abilities as well keeping in pace with these developments. While technological developments augmenting our biology are happening, like 'neuralink' their pace of development may actually increase with use of AI.
There are some things at present we can do to make us more proficient in whatever we do. We are as good as the productivity frame work we use. Some of us use mental notes, some diaries, some of us use digital note keeping tools. We advocate people to use some tool or the other to run their lives in a an efficient manner. We have developed SmallWins with this aim only, whether or not advanced AI develops or not in near future, lets make the humans better.