Editor’s Note: Regarding opinions on artificial intelligence (AI), people tend to fall into two camps: those in favor of further developing the technology and those who would see it slow to a trudge.
Or, as Jeff calls them, E/ACCs and Decels.
The E/ACCs – short for effective acceleration – believe in fast-tracking the resolution of many of humanity’s problems through technological innovation and progress…
While the Decels would rather slow the pace of technological advancement, hitting pause on all the strides happening in the AI industry out of fear of it doing far more harm than good.
This was a popular essay when we featured it in The Bleeding Edge shortly after Jeff’s return with many of you writing in your thoughts and letting us know which side you favored.
This is why we’re all too happy to bring it back to the spotlight – both for the benefit of all the readers who have joined us since… then and also for the importance of bringing attention to this battle at the intersection of technology and the future of the human race.
A battle has been brewing on a planetary scale…
But it’s not the kind that we’re used to.
It’s not a geopolitical conflict. There’s no hand-to-hand combat. And there are no borders to control.
And yet, powerful forces are at play. Some of which are evil. And others whose only goal is to affect the best possible outcome.
This is a battle for control – or lack thereof – and it’s the biggest conflict that we’ll experience in our lifetimes.
The catalyst for the conflict, which has already begun, is the string of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) that happened last year.
The resolution… is far less certain.
It almost sounds like a scene from The Outsiders – the 1967 S.E. Hinton novel about two rival gangs, the Greasers and the Socs, and the divided communities and classes they represent.
Except today, it’s real life… and it’s happening in real-time.
The two opposing “forces” are the “E/ACCs” (pronounced “e-acks”) and the “Decels.”
And the issues each side has been standing for have become a matter of fierce debate.
We might think this is a nuanced topic fermented in Silicon Valley… I assure you it is not.
In fact, I would argue that the outcome of this fight is existential. It will determine the future of the human race, which is why we should be familiar with the E/ACCs and the Decels.
E/ACC stands for effective acceleration. It is a belief that humanity can and will solve its problems through technological innovation and growth.
Those who believe in E/ACC know that the right path forward is to accelerate technological development.
They believe in employing human capital (i.e. our intelligence) and financial capital for building, innovating, and advancing technology… for bettering the human race and expanding our human consciousness. And they believe in consuming more energy, not less, to achieve those ends.
E/ACCs wish to leverage technology, free markets, and capital to build a world of abundance and freedom and to achieve that as quickly as possible.
The Decels, on the other hand, wish to decelerate technological advancement. They are interested in degrowth, in slowing things down, and are sometimes referred to as “Doomers.”
Their concern is that AI will spin horribly out of control, wreak havoc, and become too great a risk to society.
Most in the Decel camp also believe the Earth’s population is a problem and depopulation is necessary.
Decels wish to limit our consumption, as well as economic activity. This line of thinking is positioned as a “sustainable” solution.
These visions of the future are diametrically opposed. They are deeply philosophical. And they are deeply rooted in the political philosophies of those that prefer decentralization, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought…
Versus those that prefer centralized control and the ability to censor “the others” who harbor different beliefs.
This is a battle for the ages…
But only now that we have created artificial intelligence has this battle come to a head.
For only artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of achieving the radical breakthroughs that turn the E/ACC vision of an optimistic and abundant future into a reality.
Last November, we witnessed a microcosm of the E/ACC versus Decel battle play out.
It came over the struggle to control OpenAI’s powerful large language models (LLMs). We explored this in my November 27, 2023, issue of Outer Limits.
It was a remarkable situation.
A couple of Decel board members wanted to slow things down at OpenAI. They wanted to gain control over what the CEO, Sam Altman, and his team had built with the large language model (LLM) GPT-4 and Chat-GPT.
OpenAI had already generated more than $1 billion in revenue and soared to an $86 billion valuation in just a few years.
The allure of immense riches, power, and control was simply too great.
So the Decels managed to remove Sam Altman – who was of the E/ACC mindset wanting to accelerate – from the business he founded.
The Decels threatened the entire existence of the company.
But then the majority of the employees threatened to resign. In fact, many actually did after Altman’s ousting. OpenAI nearly collapsed.
Fortunately, though, the E/ACCs won. Altman and his team were reinstated. And the Decels were removed from the board.
This is a great example of what is happening on a global scale.
The Decels tend to fall into two camps:
The vision of E/ACCs is exactly the opposite.
The goal is to speed up, not slow down. After all, AI is the greatest productivity enhancement to the human race in all of history.
This form of synthetic intelligence has already solved incredibly complex problems that were outside of the reach of human intelligence (for example, DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI predicting how all known proteins fold).
E/ACCs believe that the decentralization of AI technology is a far more stable equilibrium than entrusting such powerful technology to centralized control.
And they also believe that market forces do have a way of self-regulating.
By way of example, which party would be at fault if an accident occurred between a human driving their pickup truck, and a Tesla driving itself with its fully autonomous AI? Would it be the human in the truck? The human in the Tesla? Tesla itself? Or Tesla’s AI?
Or if an AI-powered robotic arm crushed a human working in a factory, where would the blame fall? The human for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? The company using the robotic arm in its factory? The technology company that produced the robotic arm? Or the AI powering the robotic arm?
In most cases, the liability would fall to the company that developed the AI. And that’s precisely the point.
Technology companies developing AI, even at an accelerated pace, are heavily incentivized to do so in a responsible manner.
They are incentivized to employ extensive testing to ensure that their systems are safe and function as intended.
Otherwise, they will expose their companies to such large liabilities, large enough to sink their company.
Not to mention the fact that they would also lose their customers.
To achieve these breakthroughs, the vision of E/ACC has four overarching goals:
To some of us, these ideas may seem exciting, thrilling, and portend an incredible future.
And to others, they may seem impossible to comprehend, or may even be frightening.
But to be clear, this is happening. Artificial intelligence is software. And the employment, and utilization of software simply can’t be contained by a centralized organization.
The genie is out of the bottle.
Open source AI software is available to any and all, which raises a key point…
… and an argument in favor of E/ACC…
Because AI is so widely available, that also means that it is already in the hands of bad actors.
That might mean small factions, or nation-states, which might wish to dominate or do harm.
If the world were to listen to the Decels, it would give the bad actors free rein to use the technology for their malicious agendas… at an accelerated pace.
It would give them an advantage.
And if the E/ACC community races ahead, not only can the technology be developed responsibly, the AI-powered systems can be built to protect against those bad actors as well.
The Decel mindset is a disease.
At best, it is pessimistic. And at its worst, it is a tool for evil.
It chooses degrowth over growth and positive progress.
It chooses centralized tyrannical control over decentralized and open access.
It chooses a dystopian future over a future of abundance and lifting those remaining in poverty out of poverty.
The reality is that the upside of the E/ACC vision is too great to just wonder about it.
The world that will follow from the future breakthroughs is so optimistic.
It doesn’t argue for replacing humans, but for augmenting humans with this incredible technology that will radically improve our quality of life, not just for the elites, but for everyone.
And for that reason, I believe in E/ACC.
Jeff
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
