I was chatting with someone tonight about a planned documentary; they had interviewed various people in AI safety, and we got to discussing who they should talk to from an e/acc (effective accelerationist) perspective. I also watched The AI Doc recently, and they also dedicated a serious chunk of it to ‘optimists’ with e/acc founder ‘Beff Jezos’ perhaps given the most screen time. Here and elsewhere, people seem to treat e/acc as a substantial contrary-to-AI-safety cultural movement, worth engaging with.

But is it? Are there even many e/accs? There seem to be very few notable ones. Beff Jezos is perhaps the most prominent, and aside from founding e/acc he seems to be not distinguishable on casual perusal from a normal crank (his company claims to be developing super-energy-efficient computing hardware based on probabilistic processes).

The intellectual tenets of e/acc seem to be pretty unclear.

The apparent counterarguments to AI risk raised in situations like the AI doc seem to be widely agreed on by everyone in AI Safety, so don’t explain the disagreement. For instance:

• AI will be able to do lots of great things, such as cure diseases, make new materials and do all [...]
  
  

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June 24th, 2026

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3hwrWDf7wiqASDzBz/what-is-up-with-e-acc

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.