Brockism

Brockism is one of four factions in the 2023 societal debate about the safety of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) "x-risk", short for Existential Risk, meaning the risk that AGI will lead to human extinction. (1) The "normal" faction, which includes Satya Nadella and everyone on Wall Street. Normals say that we can deal with x-risk later. (2) The "decel" faction (short for "decelerate"), which says to slow down AI research. (3) The "e/acc" faction (short for "effective accelerationists"). This faction is a mix of fanatical techno-utopians (like Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng), mixed with Twitter users who post macho memes and have a "lol let's watch the world burn" attitude. (4) The "Brockism" faction (named after Greg Brockman). Brockists believe the way to reduce x-risk is to accelerate AI software research while halting or slowing semiconductor development. They believe that if chips are too fast, we could stumble into artificial superintelligence by accidentally inventing an algorithm that makes fuller use of existing chips. The difference between what we currently do with current chips vs what we *could* do with current chips is what Brockists call the "capabilities overhang". Evidence for the Brockist position may be found in the accomplishments of the retro-computing "demoscene", which uses innovative software to produce computer graphics on par with the late 1990's on some of the very oldest personal computers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene