Here’s your word for today as Apple’s WWDC looks to include an announcement of a major partnership with OpenAI (the folks behind ChatGPT) to make Siri much closer to an artificial intelligence (or “Apple Intelligence” as the marketing goes) assistant.
Accelerationism.
It’s a term that’s been used in the tech world for years, but the mindset (mind virus?) has really reached new levels in the post-ChatGPT 4 era that we now live in before what feels like an imminent release of something even more powerful in the coming months or years.
Here’s an article from 2017 about the term accelerationism and accelerationists:
Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in – The Guardian:
Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.
With my mind heavy on what the Apple / OpenAI partnership might look like before WWDC starts in just a few minutes (it feels like this could be an important moment for historical events), Ted Gioia made this thought-provoking post on the realization that we are doing to ourselves what Dr. Calhoun did to his poor mice (unknowingly) in the 1960’s famous Universe 25 experiment.
It’s worth your time to read this and ponder our own current situation.
Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25? – by Ted Gioia:
Even today, Dr. Calhoun’s bold experiment—known as Universe 25—demands our attention. In fact, we need to study Universe 25 far more carefully today, because zealous tech accelerationists—that’s now a word, by the way—aim to create something comparable for human beings.What would you do if AI took care of all your needs?
After being in the classroom for the last three years of “post-Covid” education and seeing how many young people are absolutely struggling with mental health (and how little schools of any sort, from public to private such as the ones where I taught, are doing to help them), it’s shocking that we’ll send stocks soaring on big tech news today that will make our swipes and screen time increase and lead us further down the primrose path of a future of disconnected violence and mental health disaster.