Notes on e/acc principles and tenets

Verbatim repost of original. Authored by @BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord

The following are some quickly put together point-form notes following several of our public and private conversations on some of the basic thinking that eventually led to the formalization of effective accelerationism as a philosophy.

Beff Jezos — e/acc @BasedBeff

introducing effective accelerationism; e/acc

zestular — e/acc @zestular

e/acc effective accelerationism COAUTHORS: @BasedBeff @bayeslord @creatine_cycle https://t.co/DAB0h81T2q

These represent a somewhat fundamental physics-based first-principles explanation of some of the concepts underlying the movement, and an exploration of why e/acc is so fundamentally important.

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• Life emerged from an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic process known as dissipative adaptation (see work by Jeremy England): matter reconfigures itself such as to extract energy and utility from its environment such as to serve towards the preservation and replication of its unique phase of matter

• This dissipative adaptation (derived from the Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem) tells us that the universe exponentially favors (in terms of probability of existence/occurrence) futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy and convert it to more entropy 

  • As a byproduct, this explains why life seeks to replicate, having more entities that consume free energy and convert it to more entropy faster is “more optimal”, thermodynamically speaking

  • This yields evolution itself as a special case of this principle; the universe thermodynamically favors configurations of matter that are better at replication.

• Intelligence emerges as a smaller timescale specialization of this adaptation principle; it allows life to identify patterns in the environment which have utility towards acquiring more resources to procreate and/or maintain said intelligent life form

  • Consciousness is posited as a natural limit of intelligence beyond a certain threshold of scale/hierarchies of meta-optimization of cognition; a simple phase transition achievable by more scale and more optimization/evolution

• Beyond consciousness of single agents, one can consider “meta-organisms”; organizations of many agents forming an emergent whole (e.g. states, corporations, groups, etc.)

  • In a capitalist system, these meta-organisms compete for resources, as such, typically resources are dynamically assigned towards meta-organisms that have utility to the meta-meta-organism that is our civilization

  • Hierarchies of information propagation and control are part of the civilizational intelligence; these should be dynamically adapting at all organisational scales and on various time scales, in order to be optimal at identifying and capturing civilizational utility1

  • Capitalism is hence a form of intelligence; dynamically morphs the meta-meta-organism such that any sort of utility/energy in the environment is captured and utilized towards the maintenance and growth of civilization2

• One goal of e/acc is to not only acknowledge the existence of this underlying mutli-scale adaptive principle, but also help its acceleration rather than attempt to decelerate it

  • In general, e/acc believes that higher variance marketplaces and competition are better at identifying and capitalizing on utility from our environment over other methods such as top-down optimal control

    • This is a byproduct of Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, which states that the rate of change of average fitness in a population (of any collection of organisms) is proportional to the variance in fitness. As such, maintaining variance is key to maintaining adaptability

• Technocratic control typically leverages low-order models (typically first or second-order) of resulting consequences of top-down interventions (sudden changes in system hyperparameters, e.g. changes in regulations), and often seeks to try to control meta-organisms from simplistic and primitive/human-interpretable world models

  • Due to the nature of complex chaotic systems, partial observability due to imperfect information acquisition and propagation in societal hierarchies make accurately controlling a dynamically shifting chaotic process practically impossible

  • Furthermore, even given full observability (e.g. via CCP-style panopticon), bottlenecking ourselves to human-interpretable/natural language models of fractal, chaotic and complex systems is doomed to failure at effective optimal control towards any meta-organism objective

    • furthermore, top-down control is not fault-tolerant in its operation to corruption of root nodes in the hierarchy, nor to decay of information fidelity as information propagates up the hierarchy

  • Attempts at top-down control often seek to supress variance of various dimensions of civilization in order to simplify its control

    • This inherently goes against the interests of the adaptivity/dynamic malleability of the system, and is ultimately counter-productive on sufficiently long timescales where an adaptive system would start outperforming a static one

  • e/acc believes letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves

    • Maintaining freedom to experiment and encourage varaiance in all variables of the meta-organisms is paramount to maintaining dynamic adaptivity

      • e.g. a new technological paradigm emerges, letting the free market find how to extract utility from this said technology would be the best way to proceed, much better than fear-mongering

bayeslord (e/acc) @bayeslord

Decels will do literally anything to avoid going to therapy

• • • • over-regulating technologies suppresses variance and hence slows down progress towards higher utility technologies and advancement of civilization, a contrast to anti-AGI factions of EA3

• e/acc is about having faith in the dynamical adaptation process and aiming to accelerate the advent of its asymptotic limit; often reffered to as the technocapital singularity

  • Effective accelerationism aims to follow the “will of the universe”: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales

• e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism

  • Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates

Sam Altman @sama

i am optimistic we can do the former, and i do not believe we can colonize space without AGI

• • Directly working on technologies to accelerate the advent of this transduction is one of the best ways to accelerate the progress towards growth of civilization/intelligence in our universe

  • In order to maintain the very special state of matter that is life and intelligence itself, we should seek to acquire substrate-independence and new sets of resources/energy beyond our planet/solar system, as most free energy lies outwards

• Some more counter-points against proponents of deceleration and AGI alarmists:

  • As higher forms of intelligence yield greater advantage to meta-organisms to adapt and find and capitalize upon resources from the environment, these will be naturally statistically favored

    • No need to worry about creating “zombie” forms of higher intelligence, as these will be at a thermodynamic/evolutionary disadvantage compared to conscious/higher-level forms of intelligence

  • Focusing strictly on transhumanism as the only moral path forward is an awfully anthropocentric view of intelligence;

    • in the future, we will likely look back upon such views in a similar way to how we look back at geocentrism

    • if one seeks to increase the amount of intelligence in the universe, staying perpetually anchored to the human form as our prior is counter-productive and overly restrictive/suboptimal

    • If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilization as we know it would never have had emerged

  • Science, technology and intelligence still have very far to go, saying that we should seek to maintain humanity and civilization in our current state in a static equilibrium is a recipe for catastrophic failure and leaving behind huge potential benefits of dynamic adaptation

• Effective accelerationism (e/acc) in a nutshell: 

  • Stop fighting the thermodynamic will of the universe

  • You cannot stop the acceleration

  • You might as well embrace it

  • A C C E L E R A T E

Sam Altman @sama

@BasedBeff you cannot outaccelerate me

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