5 ms·

Now imagine where we are in 12 months from now. This article from February 5 2025 will feel quaint by then. The acceleration keeps increasing. It seems likely w

Now imagine where we are in 12 months from now. This article from February 5 2025 will feel quaint by then. The acceleration keeps increasing. It seems likely we will soon have recursive self-improving AI -- reasoning models which do AI research. This will accelerate the rate of acceleration itself. It sounds stupid to say it, but yes, the singularity is near. Vastly superhuman AI now seems to arrive within the next few years. Terrifying.

gom_jabbar 2y ago
Yes, and Accelerationism predicted this development back in the 1990s, perhaps most prominently in the opening lines of Nick Land's Meltdown (1994) text: [[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. > reasoning models which do AI research In the introduction to my research project on Accelerationism [0], I write: Faced with the acceleration of progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) — with AI agents now automating AI research and development —, Accelerationism no longer seems like an abstract philosophy producing empty hyperstitional hype, but like a sober description of reality. The failed 2023 memorandum to stop AI development on systems more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 perfectly illustrates the phenomenological aspects of Accelerationism: "To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon." [1] At the current rate of acceleration, if you don't write hyperstitionally, your texts are dead on arrival. [0] https://retrochronic.com/ https://retrochronic.com/ [1] Nick Land (2017). A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism in Jacobite Magazine.
- versteegen 2y ago
  Nice. Though I couldn't understand those "opening lines" until I read in your Introduction: > For Land, capitalism begins in Northern Italy around 1500 with "the emerging world of technologists and accountants", the spiral interexcitation of "oceanic navigation and place-value calculation", and zero-unlocked double-entry book-keeping Fibonacci, amongst many others, played a critical role that highly accelerative technology.
- pizza 2y ago
  Hope we get the Nick Land the younger, and not Nick Land the elder, set of outcomes. Somewhere, sometime, along the way, it seems like everything from CCRU and Duginism leapt out of the page into the real. Maybe it's just the beginning of the Baudrilliardian millennium.
zoogeny 2y ago
This is something I have been suppressing since I don't want to become chicken little. Anyone who isn't terrified by the last 3 months probably doesn't really understand what is happening. I went from accepting I wouldn't see a true AI in my lifetime, to thinking it is possible before I die, to thinking it is possible in in the next decade, to thinking it is probably in the next 3 years to wondering if we might see it this year. Just 6 months ago people were wondering if pre-training was stalling out and if we hit a wall. Then deepseek drops with RL'd inference time compute, China jumps from being 2 years behind in the AI race to being neck-and-neck and we're all wondering what will happen when we apply those techniques to the current full-sized behemoth models. It seems the models that are going to come out around summer time may be jumps in capability beyond our expectations. And the updated costs means that there may be several open source alternatives available. The intelligence that will be available to the average technically literate individual will be frightening.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > The intelligence that will be available to the average technically literate individual will be frightening. That's not the scary part. The scary part is the intelligence at scale that could be available to the average employer. Lots of us like to LARP that we're capitalists, but very few of us are. There's zero ideological or cultural framework in place to prioritize the well being of the general population over the profits of some capitalists. AI, especially accelerating AI, is bad news for anyone who needs to work for a living. It's not going to lead to a Star Trek fantasy. It means an eventual phase change for the economy that consigns us (and most consumer product companies) to wither and fade away.
  - 101008 2y ago
    I agree with you and I am scared. My problem is: if most people can't work, who is going to pay for the product/services created with IA? I get a lot of "IA will allow us to create SaaS in a weekend" and "IA will take engineers jobs", which I think they both may be true. But a lot of SaaS surive because engineers pay for them -- if engineer don't exist anymore, a lot of SaaS won't either. If you eat your potential customers, creating quick SaaS doesn't make sense anymore (yeah, there are exceptions, etc., I know).

gom_jabbar 2y ago

Yes, and Accelerationism predicted this development back in the 1990s, perhaps most prominently in the opening lines of Nick Land's Meltdown (1994) text: [[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. > reasoning models which do AI research In the introduction to my research project on Accelerationism [0], I write: Faced with the acceleration of progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) — with AI agents now automating AI research and development —, Accelerationism no longer seems like an abstract philosophy producing empty hyperstitional hype, but like a sober description of reality. The failed 2023 memorandum to stop AI development on systems more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 perfectly illustrates the phenomenological aspects of Accelerationism: "To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon." [1] At the current rate of acceleration, if you don't write hyperstitionally, your texts are dead on arrival. [0] https://retrochronic.com/ https://retrochronic.com/ [1] Nick Land (2017). A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism in Jacobite Magazine.

versteegen 2y ago
Nice. Though I couldn't understand those "opening lines" until I read in your Introduction: > For Land, capitalism begins in Northern Italy around 1500 with "the emerging world of technologists and accountants", the spiral interexcitation of "oceanic navigation and place-value calculation", and zero-unlocked double-entry book-keeping Fibonacci, amongst many others, played a critical role that highly accelerative technology.
pizza 2y ago
Hope we get the Nick Land the younger, and not Nick Land the elder, set of outcomes. Somewhere, sometime, along the way, it seems like everything from CCRU and Duginism leapt out of the page into the real. Maybe it's just the beginning of the Baudrilliardian millennium.

zoogeny 2y ago

This is something I have been suppressing since I don't want to become chicken little. Anyone who isn't terrified by the last 3 months probably doesn't really understand what is happening. I went from accepting I wouldn't see a true AI in my lifetime, to thinking it is possible before I die, to thinking it is possible in in the next decade, to thinking it is probably in the next 3 years to wondering if we might see it this year. Just 6 months ago people were wondering if pre-training was stalling out and if we hit a wall. Then deepseek drops with RL'd inference time compute, China jumps from being 2 years behind in the AI race to being neck-and-neck and we're all wondering what will happen when we apply those techniques to the current full-sized behemoth models. It seems the models that are going to come out around summer time may be jumps in capability beyond our expectations. And the updated costs means that there may be several open source alternatives available. The intelligence that will be available to the average technically literate individual will be frightening.

palmotea 2y ago
> The intelligence that will be available to the average technically literate individual will be frightening. That's not the scary part. The scary part is the intelligence at scale that could be available to the average employer. Lots of us like to LARP that we're capitalists, but very few of us are. There's zero ideological or cultural framework in place to prioritize the well being of the general population over the profits of some capitalists. AI, especially accelerating AI, is bad news for anyone who needs to work for a living. It's not going to lead to a Star Trek fantasy. It means an eventual phase change for the economy that consigns us (and most consumer product companies) to wither and fade away.
- 101008 2y ago
  I agree with you and I am scared. My problem is: if most people can't work, who is going to pay for the product/services created with IA? I get a lot of "IA will allow us to create SaaS in a weekend" and "IA will take engineers jobs", which I think they both may be true. But a lot of SaaS surive because engineers pay for them -- if engineer don't exist anymore, a lot of SaaS won't either. If you eat your potential customers, creating quick SaaS doesn't make sense anymore (yeah, there are exceptions, etc., I know).