The "effective altruism" and "effective accelerationism" ideologies that have been cropping up in AI debates are just a thin veneer over the typical blend of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, inflated egos, and greed. Let's try something else.
Both effective altruism and effective accelerationism embrace as a given the idea of a super-powerful artificial general intelligence being just around the corner, an assumption that leaves little room for discussion of the many ways that AI is harming real people today.
Effective accelerationism has found an ally in Marc Andreessen, but his recent manifesto exposes that he just wants to go back to the old days when tech founders were uncritically revered, and when obstacles between him and staggering profits were nearly nonexistent.
@molly0xfff I very much enjoyed this issue of your newsletter for its critical eye. Reminds me why I subscribe to you and Paris Marx. Thank you for all your work!
@molly0xfff When I learned about these concepts, they only reaffirmed my convictions that the TechBro billionaire class must be toppled as soon as possible.
@molly0xfff That was an interesting "listen"! 🤩 I liked that voiceover a lot. Have you ever thought about publishing these voiceovers as podcast? 🙂
P.S.: While I like the basic idea of selecting the charities I give to with reason & where I see the most need & based on the limited amount of money I can give (what I understood as EA until now) you gave me some good hints, why EA seems to be "more" (and not of the good stuff). Thank you for that!
"Who wouldn’t want to be effective in their altruism, after all?"
Precisely - it's these Orwellian phrases that are so deceptive. As the joke says, if you don't know the details, waterboarding at Guantánamo Bay sounds like a good time.
I feel these people are deadly dangerous to society because of their tremendous power and total lack of interest in the well-being of actual humans existing today.
There won't be a negotiated solution with these powerful psychopaths.
@molly0xfff It baffles me that the smart people quoted can have these stupid ideas.
"Peter Singer [argued] that a person should feel equally obligated to save a child halfway around the world" ignores everything about what it is to be human.
No. Your first responsibility is to your family and yourself, then neighbors and community, and tertiarily to strangers thousands of miles away.
As for the hatred of sustainability: assassination, for a first offense.
Singer, famously, was amongst Jeffrey Epstein's last prominent defenders. The fact that he was also one of these guys' last prominent defenders is troubling.
I mean, I've talked to these people, and I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. "The age of consent is arbitrary, and these girls should be happy to helping out rich people as sperm receptacles."
Still, you would think they would care a bit what non-evil people thought.
I'm being a little uncharitable here; Singer has lots of opinions, many of which are bad, and only two of which were "Epstein is a great man" and "Effective altruism is a good movement."
He's also quietly backed away from his support for evolutionary psychology, for example. No longer backing a discredited pseudoscience is good, even if "no longer backing" implies "did back once in the past."
This is great! The Silicon Valley pump and dump ponzi money machine requires a new shiny steaming pile of nonsense object every couple years to suck in investor dollars and cash out mountains of worthless stock before the inevitable collapse of the nonsense shiny object. Rinse and repeat. AI and effective whatever are the latest shiny object. Great job pulling the curtain back.
@molly0xfff it isn't surprising that the latest "disruptive tech" is being driven by people who are basically intelligent crackpots. These "effective a*" movements are right in line with the mindset of influential pioneers in the personal computer industry since the start. For example the founders of IMSAI made all the employees it hired take Erhard Seminars Training and were est zealots and these new EA movements very much have the same vibe.
Maybe smart people who are Good at Tech might not all be good at everything actually and might even not be rational people that can be trusted to shape society shocking as that sounds!
Add comment