Brockism or potentially Overhang Reductionism (see discussion in comments) is a proposed name for one of
four viewpoints represented in the famous
2023 societal debate about AGI safety taking place at OpenAI. Thankfully, all
four factions agree on the need to deal with x-risk, but disagree about how:
(
1) The "
normal" faction, which includes Satya Nadella and almost every businessperson both in
VC and on Wall Street. Normals say (at least with their investment decisions, which speak infinitely louder than words) 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") is a trendy, recent term for optimistic
techno-utopianism, in the milieu of Vernor Vinge's stories.
(4) The "Brockist" faction (named after Greg Brockman). Brockists (which may or
may not include Brockman himself, as the idea was inspired by him but his own views have yet to be verified) believe that 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 unwantedly making an unaligned 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".
Significant circumstantial evidence for the Brockism
may be found in the achievements 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.
