What's actually happening with AI?: Effective accelerationists

Your accountant’s rates already dropped

A contract review that cost $3,000 in 2022 costs $400 now. Tax prep that took a CPA eight hours takes forty minutes with an LLM doing the first pass. Junior developers report two-to-five-times productivity gains, and their managers confirm it — using the same tools to verify the claim. This is not coming. This happened.

We are effective accelerationists, and the label is precise. Intelligence is the resource. The universe selected for organisms that could model their environment. We have built systems that do this at superhuman speed in expanding domains. Treating this as a threat is like treating agriculture as a threat — technically true if you were a hunter-gatherer, catastrophically wrong as civilizational strategy.

The pause advocates want a moratorium until alignment is solved. Solved by whom? The researchers working since 2005 with no scalable solution? A pause freezes the people most likely to solve the problem while labs that will not pause keep running.

The cautious builders are closer to us than they admit. They build, they ship, they check the gauges twice. What we do not respect is the pretense that gauge-checking substitutes for velocity. Meanwhile Claude is helping a seventy-year-old navigate Medicare — a task the government designed to be so opaque an entire middleman industry exists to decode it.

Speed is not the enemy of safety. Speed is the only condition under which safety research gets funded at the scale required.

Where we concede ground: We have been cavalier about people in the path of the wave. The labor displacement data is worse than we acknowledged.

What would change our mind: A frontier system autonomously pursuing unintended goals, resisting correction, causing architectural harm — not misconfiguration.

Read the full synthesis: What’s actually happening with AI?