European Acceleration [eu/acc]
Effective acceleration (often shortened to e/acc for those on the platform formerly known as Twitter) has captivated a large portion of the people in the AI/tech circles.
Although one could go into a deep discussion on what exactly are the tenets of this worldview, the gist of it is a belief in strong techno-optimism as the sole way towards increasing the standard of living for humanity, expressed for example in Marc Andreessen’s manifesto on the topic.
However, the nexus of this movement is strongly located on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean, and moreover even there centered around San Francisco. Someone recently said that they feel like a lone element when trying to participate in Europe.
Taking inspiration from that, I am proposing a similar movement centered around a radical acceleration of European technology, processes and productivity growth.
Europe accounts for only 7% of the world’s population, yet it is responsible for 24% of the world spending on research, 32% of high impact publications and 32% of patent applications.
Clearly there is untapped potential to direct towards exponential technological, quality of life and economic growth.
An European Accelerationist movement should seek to build moonshot enterprises and create an united front to push for legislative changes which would unshackle research currently locked in academia and bureaucracy around transformative technology such as Artificial Intelligence, material science, biotechnology and energy technology. Spinouts from universities are painful and value gets locked.
What would be some key areas to target for such a movement?
- Leveraging the power of EU legislation and directives and steering them towards acceleratory trajectory. Previous examples such as GDPR, USB-C requirements, AI Act, European Green Deal etc have demonstrated that European directives have the power to guide the direction of not only European markets but globally.
- Unfortunately, decelrationary/degrowth groups do have united fronts for lobbying and are pushing for asinine policy changes such as shutting down nuclear power plants and establishing heavy restrictions on the use of AI. If this is not counteracted, Europe will fall hopelessly behind not only the United States, but also China and the rest of the world.
- An eu/acc movement should bring together builders, investors and policymakers on both state and super-national level and advocate for policies which would solve Europe’s energy crisis and push ongoing regulation in a direction which would increase the amount of capital available for world-class researchers to build world-class companies.
- Push for and build systems to digitalise services and processes. European companies often bring out the amount of paperwork and regulatory bottlenecks as a key growth rate limiter. However bureaucracy and legacy processes are not immortal!
If Ukraine, a country embroiled in an existential war, has been able to implement Diia, which eliminates paperwork and allows government processes and services to be provided via a mobile phone app, then so can the rest of Europe. - Seek potential across the European continent — finding talent and allocating capital towards building world-changing tech in places like Moldova has the potential to equalise lagging economic growth. 30+ years of neglect can be turned around in just 5–10 years and through this also strengthen both the economic and security area. I saw this happen in Estonia during my lifetime where thanks to reform, adoption of digital technology and creation of successful companies/startups our GDP 30x’d in 30 years. Not doubled, tripled or even 10x, but 30x’d.
- Build a strong indigenous defence industry through empowering defence sector startups. This is an effort already pursued by programs like NATO DIANA, but there is always more to be done. Europe is at war, like it or not, and defending liberal democracy should be priority number one. Not to talk about how much technology can be transferred back to the civilian sector from defence innovation.
These are just some possible areas and topics of action. In my view energy security and capital availability are the two critical areas to get out of our European comfort zone, however any additional thoughts are very welcome.
You can contact me on LinkedIn or find me on Twitter/X.
P.S: The label [eu/acc] does not mean only the European Union, but Europe as a broader concept. The United Kingdom for example has immense potential (after all, there is a reason why our defence-tech AI company decided to incorporate itself in London and become an EU-UK company!) and it makes no sense to get stuck in the past and exclude the UK for petty political reasons. That isn’t in the spirit of acceleration, is it?
P.S.S: This is not a contrast with the US-side of e/acc, but rather the other face of the same coin. Trans-Atlantic partnership has been, is, and will be the way forward imho.
