This A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go
“E.A. is so 2019,” she said. “You go to their parties, the guys don’t know how to dress, and the conversations are totally controlled by these one or two thought leaders.”
E/acc, she added, is “fun to be around.”
These are, of course, verdicts on e/acc’s vibes, not its ideas, some of which are still too extreme for many people to swallow. Critics have pointed to the fact that some of e/acc’s leaders, including Mr. Verdon, seem to actually agree with the Effective Altruists that a rogue A.I. could wipe out humanity, but aren’t bothered by the idea, since superhuman A.I. could represent a logical next step in evolution. And some have noticed that the movement has gotten more partisan and serious as it has grown.
“I liked it when it was an ironic countermovement instead of what seems to be transforming into an earnest libertarian movement,” said Aidan Gomez, the chief executive of the A.I. company Cohere.
Even Grimes, who played the e/acc party last month, has distanced herself from the movement, saying in a post on X that she was “dj-ing in enemy territory because I think healthy discourse is constructive!”
Like any good sect, e/acc has also spawned sub-sects. There is “bio/acc,” for people who want to use technology to augment human biology. Grimes proposed “a/acc,” for “aligned acceleration,” a more human-friendly version of the original in which the robots would act in accordance with our values. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, favors “d/acc,” another split-the-difference compromise that tries to stay optimistic about technology while taking its risks seriously.
Will any of these movements amount to more than people arguing on the internet? Hard to say. What feels more certain is that we have entered a new era of A.I. tribalism, where grand pronouncements about unknowable futures are honed into homilies and passed down by techno-priests to their followers, who just want to know what lies ahead.
