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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.

As I've been arguing for some time, the culture war's most important front will be about AI; that's more pleasant to me than the tacky trans vs trads content, as it returns us to the level of philosophy and positive actionable visions rather than peculiarly American signaling ick-changes, but the stakes are correspondingly higher… Anyway, Forbes has doxxed the founder of «e/acc», irreverent Twitter meme movement opposing attempts at regulation of AI development which are spearheaded by EA. Turns out he's a pretty cool guy eh.

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? [archive.ph link]

Quoting Forbes:

…At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”

Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.

My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:

  • AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left)
  • plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left)
  • vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?)
  • and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)

In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.

edit: not to toot my own horn, but

Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?

I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.

edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.

Why do they call it effective accelerationism? Are they deliberately making fun of effective altruism with that name, or are they using the word "effective" unironically in some way?

George Hotz talks about it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DdZmZJHEVUc?si=g7z3yB_V_pvqc6-q

To paraphrase: no we aren’t going to give food away, there is just going to be abundant food that’s so cheap that nobody can’t afford it. No don’t start a charity to give away 100 malaria vaccines, start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.

start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.

That sounds great, but the problem is that you now have to invent a new economic system to replace capitalism. If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return! What do you mean I can't sell them for $50, I have to sell them at a price the very poorest can afford? What's my incentive there to invest in a company where, no matter how much product they produce, no matter what volume of sales, they're just about covering their operating costs and I'm making back pennies instead of dollars on my investment?

Dismantling and replacing capitalism is going to be the way more difficult problem than finding out how to make cheap cheap goods and services.

What a way to miss the point. What they seek is to make the free-market value of most things so minimal that we no longer bother to put a price on them in much the same way you're not being metered for the air you breathe, or at the least like how you don't have to pay a fee for running a tap in a restaurant even if you're not ordering in there.

It's not like Taylor Swift concert tickets being sold at a price far less than the market will bear, largely for the PR benefit of fans deluding themselves into thinking Taylor is looking out for them, so that you can make a killing off re-selling them for much more than you paid for them, if you're lucky or have a bot helping you scalp them.

This is, of course, completely orthogonal to whether or not that's feasible (I do think it is, at least for malaria vaccines), but that is what their goal is.

The world as we know it is already radically abundant compared to most of history. There are no end of things that people won't mind you taking in passing, with objections only rising when you show up with a handcart to grab all the "free" stuff.

you're not being metered for the air you breathe

Because nobody manufactures air on Earth (except Mother Nature). Creating a breathable atmosphere on the Moon is a different matter, and that would be charged for (at least according to Heinlein) and if you can't pay your oxygen bill, you will suffocate and nobody thinks that's wrong.

X. Instead a hypothetical moon colony would nationalize the oxygen production industry, and if you don't pay your taxes you would be beaten by the police and then imprisoned.

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