Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Everything else is what you get when you take "maximize intelligence" to its logical conclusion.
The problem, of course, is that if we got where we are now by being humans, then how do we know we're far enough along to 'quit' being humans without going backwards? How do you know that 'giving up' isn't the same sort of intellectual trick that that Nazis played on themselves? How do you give up without giving up?
The problem is that there is no such thing as 'blind progression'. It will always be defined by someone or something, boxing all future progress into that person's biases. This is the same well-intentioned by inherently flawed utopian thinking as everyone else.
I would totally sign my life away to an AI as long as no one was telling me that it was a sign of 'progress'. At the very least, no one should be profiting from it
Accelerationism is interesting to me insofar as it is transparent about the fact that technology is an a-human (not in-human) force. Blind faith in the liberational potential of technology does nothing to actually fulfill this potential, but instead just furthers it's a-human qualities. The reference to the California ideology is apt.
I think that's a really good, pithy way of phrasing it.
> this kind of thinking ends up getting wrapped up in NRx and inevitably, the alt-right.
I would say that accelerationists are very closely aligned with NRx, and only tactically allied with the alt-right. I would say only tactically aligned with the alt-right because they view the alt-right as "identity politics for white people", which is fine insofar as it restricts immigration (because most of the immigrants coming to the US come from cultures that do not value personal liberty as highly as Anglosphere culture does; and do not have mean IQs as high as US whites); but the NRx and accelerationist ideal is to take all (and only) the smart people regardless of race and build a techcomm utopia.
NRx / acclerationist immigration policy would probably require scoring at least 130 on an IQ test.
It is Zelazny's best book in my opinion, and you can read it - it has little to nothing to do with the Guardian's article.
I am not very familiar with Zelazny but am very familiar with accelerationism discourse and can therefore add another confirming perspective that these are not usefully related.
"The Darkness Before the Right" https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac1...
the same author's clarifying follow-up is good too, though with a lot more academic jargon: https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism...
Given enough <x>, there will always be a <x> that will outperform / be correct / have predicted / etc in <x> area.
If you define the singularity as being unable to predict the future, then I would say that period of time would have been less predictable than any other time in human history.
There's also the discovery of the gene, and space travel. Those haven't transformed daily life as much as the inventions of the previous 70 years, but add in the transistor and it gets close...
But his prose...delightful!
Now that's accelerationism.
1. New technological platform emergence, 5 years.
2. Rebuild basic tooling over 5 years.
3. Experiment with new possibilities for another 5 years.
4. Find out what the real improvements over previous platform were during next 5 years and settle for them.
5. Goto 1. With lessons learned from previous platform, but forgetting some earlier lessons.
(Except ASM.js ... maybe...)
We are still stuck on this little blue marble, with the entire Universe in our telescopes (hundreds of billions of galaxies, hundreds of billions stars in each), that we can see, but can't really visit. It almost maddens me.
If we meatbags are too fragile to travel to stars, let's build immortal AIs who'll do it for us. I am going to die on this planet, like every other human being. But I hope that we can create new minds and new non-carbon lifeforms, better than us, who might be able to escape.
I guess I am an accelerationist. But isn't it a natural attitude for any thinking mind?
Sure. I am quite glad we stopped iterating on nuclear weapon designs and I am quite fine with the state of the art not obliterating entire continents yet. I'm also quite happy we haven't done the R&D and optimization to lower the cost for mass producing neutron bombs too. I think you are too.
I like technical progress that ameliorates the human condition. Some of it does. Some of it doesn't.
Talking about the idea is difficult and complicated when you drill down beneath some trivial level, so people rarely bother, unless they, in one form or another, abstract that complexity away.
If you do that, you're left with "progress is good!" and forget all the times when it wasn't or the reverse. Neither position is particularly interesting.
We didn't. Los Alamos is pretty busy this time of year. So is Sarov.
> we haven't done the R&D and optimization to lower the cost for mass producing neutron bombs too.
We had. And also, we were smart enough to put these papers on the shelf and not proceed with them.
Say what you want about humanity, but 70+ years without a nuclear war is impressive, given our history. It became possible through continuous innovation in game theory, spy games, and yes, improving the deterrents. I think nuclear weapons will never be actually used in large-scale future wars, like chemical weapons weren't massively used in WW2.
Progress is good. Wars are part of the progress. Wars themselves are bad, though, so some of the progress is spent to keep wars at bay, to not interfere with the progress.
I believe that intelligence rooted in biology is not the most efficient mode of operation.
Relative investment and manpower on the issue has plummeted. I can't get into more specific details.
>We had. And also, we were smart enough to put these papers on the shelf and not proceed with them.
As the other commentator to the post makes very clear, the definition of 'progress' needs to be made clear. If it is increased understanding in a field of knowledge, then the statement I highlighted indicates you and I share the same viewpoint: maybe sometimes it is better to just stop learning more about a topic.
If the definition of progress is all increased understanding in a field of knowledge which is good, then progress is tautologically good.
Unfortunately, since the two definitions are similar, the term is very frequently used to launder advancements of their ethical consequences.
I can. Of course it plummeted since the end of the Cold War, but it raised again in the last 3 years, for obvious reasons. The US is lagging behind (not for long), but other nuclear powers are frantically resuming relevant activities.
> maybe sometimes it is better to just stop learning more about a topic.
It isn't. Methods of learning might be unethical (and thus are not advisable to be pursued), but knowledge itself is beyond ethics.
I don't know what the utility function of the universe can be, but I would hope for something deep rather than fast.
Reflection.
Or less general. A smarter AI is able to compress more facts or thruths about the world than a dumber AI does. A smarter universe henceforth is able to compress more facts or truths about itself than a dumber universe.
I can see a conscious set of lifeforms that would prefer to burn slowly and enjoy existence in a relatively sustainable manner.
It does however seem inevitable that life will -- if it does not fail completely -- spill out of our planet into the universe as you say in the form of machines or 'AI', rather than meatbags. Life is a game with winners and losers and winning is selecting for superior reproduction, technology, and colonisation.
Even the exploratory impulse you seem to be experiencing seems misaligned with your conclusion. There are places, people, cities, societies, continents, ocean floors, mountain peaks, unplumbed caves, blistered deserts, dark forests, that you haven't seen here -- what's so hot about Alpha Centauri?
Another thing is potentiality. If I want, I can afford to go to any place on Earth (I have to save some money for, say, South Pole, but it is still possible). But I can't go beyond Solar System, ever. Maybe it is my character, but when I hear about something that I "can't" do, I become obsessed by it until I can, or at least I can chart a path to this, even potentially.
And it's not I am not trying. I lived (as a legal resident) in six different countries, and visited around 35 more. I saw dark forests, and volcanoes, and icebergs, and glaciers, and other natural wonders. I am not as proficient as some pro-grade travellers who visited every country on Earth, but I hope to see more.
Here's another question: how does an immortal AI seeing Sirius thousands of years after your death help you with this at all? It seems entirely tangential to me.
I am steeped in the circle of artists and thinkers who have been toying with accelerationism, the most important of who are properly mentioned in the article (Marx, Noys, Land, Deleuze and Guittari, more) but the article ultimately misses the usefulness of the concept and waters it down into yet another transhumanist navel gazing and further sci-fi gargling. Accelerationism seems easiest grasped by American millenials and grey haired leftist philosophers, in other words those with a nurtured consciousness of mass consumer culture.
Accelerationism is an angle of marxism most at home in aesthetic studies and pretty much nowhere else. Accelerationism usually reveals itself as a reflexive irony (with sometimes thick nuance) in it's aesthetic applications, related to exacerbated effects/affects of the commercial abstraction loop to the point where commercial abstraction is not only "there" but is the material of life experience itself. There are significant strains of culture that are out and out "accelerationist" style. I would argue accelerationism revives the Pop art torch in a truly Warholian manner and at contention with the desperate and defensive current state of institutional contemporary art. Vaporwave, post-internet, Dis Magazine, health goth, 2016 Berlin Biennale are at the least affiliates of accelerationist art and at the most it's representatives.
"Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world."
My notion of accelerationism before this article was "communists, disappointed after communism failed at taking over the west, advocating that more capitalism will inevitably show its failures and lead to communism". This notion persists after reading the article.
But the article is too, and once I read the article I started to as well.
Is there hard evidence of an intellectual connection between Zelazny, Land, and Leftist Accelerationism? This kinda feels like left-anarchism vs right-anarchism all over again. Wildly different ideologies that share very little, except a name. I would think the leftist variant predates the 60s, ue_ in response to you found elements of it in Marx.
Maybe this is a bad article.
So in that view, an accelerationist could be a socialist who opposes things like minimum wage, universal health care, privacy rights legislation, etc.
An interesting point here is about Marx himself; he wrote:
"Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country.
"But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade." (Emphasis mine)
By the time working people are miserable enough to unite and rebel it will already be too late. The rich and powerful will have the logistics and technology on their side to quash any rebellion handily. Social Democracy is the only way forward. The people on the bottom need to have the capacity to resist and you can only do that by keeping the relative power of each segment of society at rough parity so nobody can exercise dominance over another.
The trouble with an accelerationist viewpoint is that even if the system collapses what comes out of the ashes won't be enlightened advancement and revolution, it will be a general regression into warlordism and feudalism. Even if Lefties win those fights you won't get anything like a Socialist society on the other side of it. The skill sets and temperament required to consolidate power among sociopathic warlords are not the skills sets or temperament you need to establish a just and egalitarian society. Quite the opposite, as you see by any country where communist insurgencies actually wind up in charge.
Capitalism replaced feudalism because the bourgeoisie took power, one small victory at a time, from the feudal nobility.
If a system in which the working classes take power from the capitalists is to replace capitalism—and the modern mixed economy may be a transitional form on the route to such a system, or might just be a diversion—then it's going to be the same way.
The reason I say that is that Land claims to be utterly opposed to communism - his favorite suggestion is that communists should be dropped out of helicopters into the ocean (cf Pinochet).
On the other hand, I'm not entirely convinced that he's not a "deep cover" agent of socialism/communism - after all, that's where his sympathies initially were before his "conversion". For example it's possible he thinks accelerationism is the path to the predicted end-stage or utopia version of communism - a classless society with free access to the articles of consumption.
Very frighteningly, I see this suggestion echoed around seemingly seriously by certain groups of libertarians, especially on Reddit, and those libertarians on the "alt-right".