On Tech's Groupthink Problem

One of the things that bug me the most about life today is the utter lack of nuance. Everything is now seen as so black and white. And if there’s no room for the gray, then there’s also no room for debate. It’s why it’s impossible to talk about abortion. Or BLM. Or Israel/Palestine. Or, increasingly, AI (and tech more generally).

There is now a good amount of people in tech absolutely incapable of having a discussion about the future, and they overwhelmingly skew toward the “techno-optimist”¹ , e/acc worldview.

For those who don’t know, e/acc stands for effective accelerationism, and the ideology is basically:

• Technology good.

• Technology can’t be slowed down even if we wanted to.

• So let’s go as fast as possible.

Although I don’t fully agree with that worldview, there is nothing inherently wrong with it. It’s something worthy of debate, for sure. The problem is that e/acc’ers have no desire to debate. All they want to do is engage in a big circlejerk and call anyone who doesn’t fully agree with them “doomers” and “decels”, which in nerd tech bro speak is basically equivalent to “pussy”.

I first really noticed this with Marc Andreessen’s writings this year on AI and Techno-Optimism. Besides being a way to rally interest in his investments, it’s clear that Marc was writing with an enemy in mind: the doomers and decels. This is especially true in the techno-optimist manifesto. The man literally writes “we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives” and lists the two founders of e/acc² as the first two “patron saints of techno-optimism”.

But the truth of e/acc really became clear to me this past week during the Sam Altman/OpenAI debacle. Mind you, Sam Altman is not (publicly) e/acc. Sam Altman is (publicly) scared of AI, spends much of his time fraternizing with regulators (albeit, probably for regulatory capture), and helms a company in OpenAI that was openly hated by e/acc. It’s what made his firing so stunning. Why would OpenAI fire a CEO who was both simultaneously wickedly good at raising money and (seemingly) in-line with their mission of safety first?

Whatever the reason was, it put the e/acc disciples in an absolute frenzy. Some variation of this tweet must’ve showed up on the timeline 10000 times in the last week:

I could argue the substance of the points themselves, but that’s not whats important. What’s important is that anytime you say something the e/acc folk don’t like, you’re automatically a Marxist decel, regardless of what your actual beliefs are. Thankfully, I’m not the only person recognizing this:

Which naturally led to a very thoughtful response from Beff:

It is just nuts that pro-tech people who want to make sure we don’t fuck up the one chance we have at AI are now decels. Can any sane person really say this position is decel?

Paul Graham and Sam Altman once had a discussion on Twitter about how to measure the level of intolerance in a society. Altman said that Level 3 is when there’s only thing you’re allowed to say about a topic, and Level 4 is when you have to say it.

Can anyone say with a straight face that e/acc rule wouldn’t be a Level 3 or 4 society? Now, ask yourself if those are really the people we want representing tech.

1) e/acc is techno-optimist in the sense it is optimistic about tech’s impact on the world, but funnily enough many e/acc people aren’t as optimistic as the "decels” about how fast or advanced tech can get.

2) One of which is the founder of an AI startup. I wonder why he’s so pro-AI.

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