Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a little bit of an area race. The 2 billionaires are like-minded about getting humanity into the photo voltaic system, however right here on Earth they’re competing fiercely to provide their respective area corporations—SpaceX and Blue Origin—an higher hand.
Not everyone seems to be thrilled about two of the world’s richest males wielding a lot energy to form our future, however “Beff Jezos,” for one, believes it’s justified.
“I’m for billionaires. I know this is a controversial statement sometimes, but I think that, in a sense, it’s kind of proof-of stake voting,” he stated on Friday episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast.
After all, “Beff Jezos” isn’t an actual identify. It’s the handle used on X by Guillaume Verdon, a former Google quantum computing engineer and one of many leaders of the efficient accelerationism motion, or e/acc (pronounced “ee-ack”).
Verdon and others within the motion argue that propelling technological progress at practically any price is the one ethically justifiable plan of action. Silicon Valley elites—together with enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator—add the label e/acc to their X profiles and think about themselves “techno-optimists.” They typically criticize “decels,” or individuals they deem to be hindering progress—a favourite goal being these eager to decelerate AI improvement for the security of humanity.
The e/acc motion has some critics, not surprisingly, amongst them New York Occasions columnist Ezra Klein, who wrote in October: “Reactionary futurism is accelerationist in affect but decelerationist in practice. Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth…”
Till not too long ago, few knew that Verdon, founding father of the stealth AI {hardware} startup Extropic, was the person behind the Beff Jezos account, however that modified when Forbes printed an article figuring out (or “doxing”) him earlier this month. Since then, he’s been talking on podcasts and elsewhere brazenly as himself.
An extended timescale
Whereas corporations are inclined to optimize quarter over quarter or “maybe a few years out,” Verdon instructed Fridman, billionaires like Musk and Bezos who wish to depart a legacy “can think on a multi-decadal or multi-century timescale.”
He continued, “Some individuals are such good capital allocators that they unlock the ability to allocate capital to goals that take us much further, or are much further looking.”
Musk, he famous, is placing capital towards “getting us to Mars” with SpaceX, whereas Bezos “needs to construct O’Neill cylinders and get trade off-planet. O’Neill cylinders, proposed within the Seventies by Princeton physicist Gerard Ok. O’Neill, would offer synthetic gravity, making them appropriate for people colonizing outer area.
“I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system,” Bezos said on Fridman podcast earlier this month. “If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins…Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.”
Musk, in the meantime, said in 2021 after SpaceX despatched astronauts into orbit on a reused rocket, “We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species.”
Verdon contrasted the 2 billionaires with politicians who “get elected because they speak the best on TV, not because they have a proven track record of allocating taxpayer capital most efficiently.”
Maybe unsurprisingly for somebody who selected the deal with “Beff Jezos,” Verdon thinks extremely of Bezos, saying that the Amazon founder “leveraged the techno-capital machine” to “give us what we want,” specifically fast, handy supply of merchandise to our doorsteps.
He additionally credit Bezos for considering long-term whereas constructing Amazon by “not trying to take profits too early” and as a substitute “putting it back, letting system compound and keep improving.”
