LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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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First published:

June 24th, 2026


Source:

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

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Note: this post is about PauseAI, not PauseAI US, which is a distinct entity with a different leadership team and approach.

This post was written by Matilda da Rui and Maxime Fournes, with significant contributions from Benjamin Schmidt (PauseAI Germany co-lead).

Executive Summary

The existential AI safety community needs to take building a civic and social movement seriously as a core intervention. We believe this is a high-value, badly neglected approach to reducing catastrophic/x-risks from AI because it may significantly enhance the likelihood of governance efforts succeeding at keeping humanity safe. As far as we can tell, only one organisation is building this infrastructure across continents: PauseAI. This post lays out our reasoning and our track record, and makes the case that funding this work is one of the highest value-for-money contributions available to anyone looking to reduce AI risk.

Why don't we already have a pause or strong controls on frontier AI? Multiple advocacy groups are communicating clear and convincing arguments for AI existential risk, and policy experts are putting forward comprehensive proposals. We need more of this work, but this work alone will not be enough, because one link is missing: what policymakers hear doesn't align with [...]

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Outline:

(00:32) Executive Summary

(06:16) Introduction

(08:54) I. Our theory of change

(08:58) Prologue

(11:07) 1. The shape of the problem as we see it

(14:27) 2. Necessary conditions for reaching a pause

(17:24) II. Our role towards a global treaty and in the AI safety ecosystem

(17:31) 1. Our niche within the ecosystem

(21:35) 2. Policymakers need strong enough incentives to act

(25:43) 3. The path to a treaty

(31:36) 4. How we can grow fast without breaking

(39:08) 5. Failure modes

(40:10) III. Our path so far and where we're headed

(40:40) 1. Bootstrap phase (2023-2025)

(45:01) 2. New leadership, professionalisation and federation

[... 6 more sections]

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First published:

June 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aoqhszdEWqcFWbnda/existential-ai-safety-needs-an-effective-social-movement

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby.

I had always imagined the British abolitionist movement to be a broad battle between an unstoppable moral imperative and an immovable economic incentive. But in practice it started as more of a knife fight between a cabal of moral pioneers and a special interest group representing industry merchants.

The government and the political parties did not come in with any great agenda. MPs were mostly prizes in a furious contest between the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and a coalition of business interests:

"The merchants and planters availed themselves [...] to wait upon members of parliament by deputation, in order to solicit their attendance in their favour, and to renew their injurious paragraphs in the public papers."[1]

"The committee, for the abolition, when the work was finished, printed it at their own expense [...] sent it to every individual member of that House."

However, the public was heavily activated in favor of the abolition, which forced the issue to parliamentary attention.

"The committee also in this interval brought out their famous print of the plan and section [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) 1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby.

(02:40) 2. The slave trade was truly terrible for sailors.

(04:25) 3. The slave trade made Africa scary and violent.

(05:26) 4. The main argument against abolition was that if the British didn't do it, other countries would.

(06:24) 5. The early abolitionists explicitly distanced themselves from emancipation.

(07:11) 6. The slave trade may actually have been bad for the economy (at least after some date).

(08:29) 7. The 1780s are not so different from today

(09:39) 8. Thomas Clarkson is a hero for the ages

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDZcsojmRXo5qKNBm/surprising-facts-about-the-slave-trade

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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A notable fraction of people respond to hearing about existential risk from AI by saying they don’t really care if everyone dies. I think the idea is often along the lines of ‘well if we are all dead, then there's nobody to be unhappy about it’.

I’m personally skeptical that this is really the main thing going on, since it seems unlikely that many people are really mostly concerned for their own non-death out of selfless regard for the feelings of others. I’m also skeptical that this would be their view on a bunch more consideration.

So to help with the consideration—

My guess is that an important thing going on here is that the ‘everyone dying at once’ image seems kind of like a thought experiment—abstract, hypothetical, neat, not very sinister. Also, you literally can never see it, so it feels pretty surreal.

But it is interesting that we even have this assumption that everyone will die together.

It's true that in some prominent AI catastrophe stories, a single AI system suddenly emerges fantastically more powerful than anyone else and builds technology to quickly kill everyone, perhaps before they notice.

But this doesn’t seem like the bulk of [...]

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First published:

June 24th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/23HybCsJ7KYW4v7tP/ai-catastrophe-more-like-a-genocide-than-a-thought

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I often hear people say they think we should pause AI at some point, but not yet. Their basis for this seems to be some combination of:

If we pause at the last possible moment, then we will have the most advanced AI possible during the pause, which will be helpful for doing AI safety research during the pause

Implicitly, there is some quantity of ‘pausing credit’, that will buy us a few months of pause say, and if we use them now, we won’t have them to use later, when it is important

If we pause, and then AI doesn’t seem to be at dire risk of destroying the world, maybe the public will backlash against this and it will be harder to do any kind of AI safety (especially if it has major economic consequences)

The models aren’t dangerous yet

This all sounds very questionable to me. I suggest instead that the following are at least as likely to be true:

We can’t pause on a dime at the precise second that ‘we’ decide it is important to—pulling the breaks will take a while, during which time we will continue [...]

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First published:

June 24th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mEhS4wYTy9JXEpe9p/ai-pause-the-case-for-asap

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.