200 - Vitalik Buterin's Philosophy: d/acc

✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-vitalik-philosophy ------ This past year there’s been a great societal wide debate: Tech-acceleration (e/acc) vs deacceleration. Should we continue the path toward AI or are the robots going to kill us? We’ve been hoping Vitalik would weigh in on this debate ever since our episode Elizer Yudkowski —now he has, so what’s Vitalik’s probability of AI doom? ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 👾GMX | V2 IS NOW LIVE https://bankless.cc/GMX 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ 0:00 Intro 3:50 The Technology Conversation 15:30 The Accelerationist View 30:30 The AI Problem 38:30 8 Year Old Child 44:00 AI Doom 51:00 d/acc 1:08:30 Improving the World 1:16:45 e/acc 1:20:30 Crypto Tribes 1:27:00 Direction and Priorities 1:30:50 Closing Optimism ------ Resources: Vitalik's Techno-Optimism: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html Tweet Thread: https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1729251808936362327?s=20 Techno-Optimist Manifesto: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ ------ More content is waiting for you on Bankless.com 🚀 https://bankless.cc/YouTubeInfo

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We are creating financial systems that work without relying on any specific country. We are creating forms of privacy that work without relying on a central actor to like hold everyone's information in custody for them. We are creating forms of accounts recovery that don't depend on, I mean, Google or Twitter having everyone's master keys. And that's happening with social recovery wallets and account abstraction and ERC4337. We are creating zero knowledge proof technologies that let people prove that they are trustworthy without revealing any more information about themselves beyond that.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Right? So we're creating all of these really powerful tools that in a lot of cases are substitutes for more centralized forms of trust.

• 0:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Vitalik Buterin on the episode today. He's sharing his philosophy with us. He calls it D-A C. And he explains what he means by it in this episode. And I think there's really three reasons we wanted to have this conversation on Bankless. The first is this, there has been a society-wide debate on what to do with technology, specifically AI technology. So we've got the tech accelerationists as the EA community. We've got the tech de-accelerationists, that's the EA community. And the debate is whether we should continue on this path forward towards AI, the way

• 1:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  we've been doing it, or if we should stop because maybe the robots are going to come kill us. And I know David and I have been hoping to pick Vitalik's brain on this for quite a while, ever since we had our episode with Eliezer Yudkowsky, who informed us very politely that we're all going to die. So we asked Vitalik, what's his probability of AI doom? The second reason for this episode is I think the philosophy that Vitalik lays out is something everybody in crypto can align on. It's a way to really unite the tribes. It can help us explain what we're doing here to the world. And why it matters. And more important, I think, coming out of 2022, when we seem to have lost our way in crypto, it reaffirms why we're here. It's a core part of reestablishing our

• 2:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  soul and getting to the bottom of things. And the third reason we're having this conversation, it's Vitalik Buterin. Okay, that's enough. He's always got interesting things to say. David, why was this episode significant to you?

• 2:30David Hoffman?

  I think even more broadly, outside of crypto, society at large is having a conversation with itself as to how fast it wants to go into the future. I think there's some parts of society which is concerned about the vanguard of Silicon Valley and tech innovation, moving faster than what society can really, as a whole, keep up with. And then there's other parts of society who's like, guys, you solve problems via technology. The acceleration and the speed of technology will help others catch up as well. And this conversation of how fast we want to go collectively as humanity is causing tension in society at large. And well, as podcasters,

• 3:11David Hoffman?

  what do we do? We try and define the landscape, define the contours of the conversation, help people learn the perspectives of other sides, discover what is signal versus noise, discover what is truth. And so I think when we have clarity on these conversations, we can all be in agreement in the direction that we want to go. And I think this is really what Vitalik did with his blog and what we were hoping to do with his podcast is help define the conversation a little bit more so humanity can get on the same page. And so that's why this episode is significant to me.

• 3:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we're getting right to the conversation with Vitalik on Deak and his philosophy. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange, that's Kraken. Go create an account.

• 3:55David Hoffman?

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• 4:37David Hoffman?

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• 5:22David Hoffman?

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• 6:19David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I'm extremely excited to introduce you to Vitalik Buterin. You know him as the creator of Ethereum and Ethereum researcher, but today he comes to us wearing the hat of philosopher, which is, I think, what we are increasingly need, at least in the sector of tech, as we are having conversations around the world of technology acceleration, as we are approaching new frontiers, both inside of crypto and outside of crypto, that are defining society at large. Vitalik recently wrote this post, "My techno-optimism," which has made the waves in the tech space about what to do about this increasing pace of technology, and that is the subject here on today's episode of Bankless. Vitalik, welcome back.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Thank you, guys. It's good to be here.

• 7:01David Hoffman?

  This post that you wrote, Vitalik, which was subtitled "My own current perspective on the recent debates around techno-optimism, AI risks, and ways to avoid extreme centralization in the 21st century," made the rounds inside of crypto and just immediately outside of crypto as well. And this has been, I think, a continuation of a larger conversation that much of the world is having at large with its relationship to the globe's technology sector. So can we set up the conversation and kind of set the table, if we will? Because this is happening society-wide. Two camps are forming. There's what is known as now, recently, the accelerationists, the pro-tech, and then the decelerationists, the anti-tech.

• 7:45David Hoffman?

  I'm not sure if anti is fair. How would you set the table of this global conversation that's being had?

• 7:50Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm not even sure if "two camps" is the right way to describe it, because I think what I honestly see in the world and some of the discussions that have been happening in the world is like, people being confronted with these completely new issues made by completely new people that they are not used to paying attention to with completely new memes and, you know, weird vocabulary like Shaw-Goth and P-Doom and timelines and all of these things. And like...

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Although it's almost like an awakening in that for the first time, people are actually thinking because like their existing camps don't really tell them how to think, right? Hmm. Um, like, if you think about the even uh most recent IAC versus a effective altruist debate to kind of uh give very uh approximated crude labels to the the two camps um for example, like, this is not red versus blue. This is not US versus China. This is not uh Europe versus Russia. This is uh not uh woke versus anti-woke, right? This is uh basically uh

• 9:16Speaker 00

  a debate that's happening between two groups of people who um even two or three years ago considered themselves to totally be part of the same tribe. Uh, basically, the kind of San Francisco-centered I mean, like, tech-forward, um, AI, yeah, leaning, uh, great tribe. Uh, people who went and in many cases, uh, continue to go to the same dinner parties or in the same uh so- social circles. And like suddenly there's this issue that uh has uh gonna basically yeah pulled them in a very different directions. And like, if you're coming at it uh from the outside, then like existing tribal mirrors don't really tell you much about it, right?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Because uh, like, if you're the type of person who, for example, thinks that tech people are bad be- and uh, I mean, look, these are rich, uh, white male-dominated uh fields that uh are totally uh out of touch with the rest of reality, then like, well, guess what? Like, both of these camps have a a very large number of people that uh fit both of those descriptions, right? And uh, both of those camps have uh, I know, uh, I think, a large number that uh do not that also get uh, that also gets underappreciated, right? Like, uh, there's a huge international audience uh for um a lot of these AI-focused things, uh, because similarly to how within the crypto space,

• 10:45Speaker 00

  um, things like uh I mean, ZK EVMs and ERC 4337 are kind of resetting a playing field and giving opportunities to people from, you know, regions that haven't really been historically well represented. In Ethereum, I think a lot of people around the world, I mean, do also see AI as that kind of opportunity, right? And then if you're a left-leaning person who is very skeptical of corporations and who is like pro governments, to put it crudely, but most skeptical of governments when that government is being influenced by corporations, then like, well, guess what?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  You know, the EIC and EA camps are both, you know, doing a lot of influencing of governments and there's like lots of money on both sides, right? And so I think the way that like this conflict really is doesn't map to these existing tribal mirrors is like, it does give like create this interesting property, right? And that people actually have to like figure out for the first time, like, well, you know, like what actually is their own perspective on the particular issue and like, how do they actually think about this totally new thing that was not even on most people's radars like given two years ago, right?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  And I think like within crypto, it's the same thing, right? In the sense that I feel like crypto has operated in a bit of this bubble where like there hasn't really been too much dialogue between like what's happening in the space and some of the discussions, like both technological and political that are happening outside of it, right? And I feel like there is to some degree, this kind of extent to which big parts of the space were born in this 2008 era context where, I mean, we're talking about like the

• 12:54Speaker 00

  second, the chance of our being on the brink for the second bailout for banks as the Bitcoin Genesis block says, you know, like literally as part of the block body, we, the discussions around like ending the Fed, creating an alternative to central banks and all of these things and

• 13:16Speaker 00

  A lot of the big discussions in 2023 are just totally not related to that at all, right? It's like, you know, I'm sorry, but like the like, you know, like the Israel Gaza situation is not going to be better if there's if those lands were ran on sound money, right?

• 13:37Speaker 00

  You know, and you know, like same with AI, you know, sorry, like sound money is not gonna make, you know, like P2 go down, right? So, now, I mean, it is possible to kind of overstate this, right? I mean, I think like, for example, the with the recent election of Argentina, where like, I feel so far totally, you know, like unqualified to give a kind of like grand, you know, this, this is good, this is bad perspective on it. But what I have noticed for the side from the sidelines that fascinates me is that like, Millet is actually talking about economics. And like, Argentinian people do actually care about economics, right?

• 14:21Speaker 00

  And there definitely is an extent to which kind of the US and the rich countries in general, we have, I think, like as Bology has pointed out, moved from caring about the economic access to caring about the cultural access, right? It's like, like the issue that emotionally arouses people in the in the US these days, like it's not, you know, like pensions and healthcare and like savings, right? Or at least like, that's not what the newspapers report about, but minimum in places like Argentina, it, you know, like, it still is, and there's like a refreshing sort of grounded in reality aspects to it.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  But like, it's so it's like important to recognize the ongoing importance of that, but also at the same time, recognize this growing rapid emergence of these conversations that have just like nothing to do with any of those questions. And there's this big question of like, how does crypto actually relate to these topics, right? And I think a lot of people who Come into the space, come into the space because they have ideals and values and a kind of goals and dreams that extend, um, you know, like beyond like, like fairly narrow details of like, this is, uh, you know, like what the structure of the money is going to look like.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think it's important for the space to try to kind of engage in some of those other topics as well, right? Yeah. So that, so the, I think for a lot of those reasons, like I've been thinking about some of these other technological topics as well. And one of the things that I noticed, especially here, you know, like this past year in, uh, two thousand and twenty-three is that like, I have a lot of beliefs about like blockchains and cryptocurrency and C K snarks. I also have a lot of beliefs about like the importance of longevity research. I also have my beliefs about geopolitics. I also have my beliefs about, um, AI and also have my beliefs about effective altruism.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  But like these sets of beliefs were not really, yeah, talking to each other enough in a lot of cases, right? And like, uh, asking the question of like, what really, yeah. Look, what is your actual take on like how crypto fits into this, uh, larger picture of, uh, the world and like, does that perspect, do the different parts of that perspective really like actually make sense in the context of the other parts of the perspective, right? Um, it's like, uh, and even one of the questions that we totally should ask, for example, is like, if AI is so important, then like, why not drop everything and start working on it, right? And like, I think there are good answers to that question, but I like, it is a, uh, like a question that actually needs to be asked, right?

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Um, and so, yeah, like the, so I, like, I was thinking about, um, a lot of these, uh, topics. And then of course, about a month and a half ago, uh, Marc Andreessen's, uh, techno optimist manifesto came out. And then of course, an entire spectrum of replies to the techno optimist manifesto came out. Um, and then, uh, I started, uh, um, at least thinking about how I would write this kind of piece. And then, you know, Exu Connect and Defconnect, they deleted a bunch. And then finally, you know, the OpenAI situation just kind of like blasted basically the exact same topic into focus in a lot of people's minds again. And so I decided like I'd actually need to like get this document

• 17:56Speaker 00

  out there. And here we are.

• 17:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's what I very much saw in your post Vitalik is is kind of like it accomplished this goal of maybe creating a unified philosophy for crypto in the broader context of the societal conversation. And I want to set that up because, you know, this year is, I think, the year that the societal conversation between this acceleration view, which you called EAC, which stands for effective accelerationism for folks that are not familiar, and this more kind of anti-tech type view, effective altruism, maybe like to your point, Vitalik.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, just like, just to kind of insert a 10 second parenthetical, I think, just to remember that like, as little as two years ago, the main criticism of effective altruism is that these are tech people who believe that like quantitative and technological solution is stuff is the problem to everything. And, you know, ignore the non-tech, the non-technical and immeasurable side of life, right? And so fast forward two years later, and now like, it's just interesting to note that, you know, they're basically being criticized from the exact opposite direction now, right?

• 19:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is fascinating. And there does seem to be like, to your point, this is all the same tribe that has maybe like in crypto, we call this a fork, maybe a social fork, right? Where we've got now these accelerationists coming out and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't subscribe to kind of some of the anti-tech philosophy of some in the AI safety movement. I would say that bankless listeners, maybe, and from David and myself's perspective, were first exposed to this through the AI conversation, the AI safety debate. So we had an episode back in February of 2023 with Eliezer Yudkowsky that is like, what I would say, imprinted on my soul, Vitalik. Okay, so like, it was basically the first time I was exposed in depth to someone who's very intelligent and had been thinking about a concept for decades. Now here it was.

• 19:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  With ChatGPT that the AI posed actual existential threat to humanity. And so we went on a quick side quest, you know, from our regularly scheduled crypto channel to explore that a bit. And we uncovered that this is not just a question that bankless and people in crypto are facing, but it's a societal level question. And it feels like the rest of society is, you know, the reason David put this into two camps. I realized that there's a lot of subtlety and granularity between the two camps. But it's almost like society is being asked to choose, right? What do you think about technology? Do you want to pedal to the floor and fully accelerate? Or do you want to just stop, slow it down and just like be cautious?

• 20:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so I'm wondering, Vitalik, if you could give a quick definition for folks that are unfamiliar. What is the accelerationist view? I think you have a meme of this that opens your article. And it says like dangers behind, utopia ahead. That's the accelerationist view for, you know, with respect to technology. And the anti-tech view is there's safety behind and dystopia ahead. So we're journeying into this, you know, we're journeying into this dangerous frontier. I guess I would say is the anti-tech view. Could you just illustrate the core viewpoints of both camps to ground us in this episode?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Sure. So the way that I would think about the effect of accelerationist perspective is basically it's like, it's all about recognizing the invisible graveyard, right? The invisible graveyard is a phrase that I think either Alex Tabarok or someone else came up with in the context of talking about the harm that the FDA causes in the US just by delaying the extents to which it approves certain drugs, right? Basically, that if a life-saving medicine gets delayed even by a month because of regulatory hurdles, then like that's something that can easily kill tens of thousands of people. And if you do the math, then the amount of people killed by these things potentially

• 21:49Speaker 00

  goes way higher. And if you kind of zoom out even a bit more broadly, like in the meme there, right? You have a utopia ahead and then behind you you have a bear. And the biggest bear of them all is probably aging, right? Which is, you know, a condition that kills, you know, about about sixty million, like literally a World War Two scale number of people every year. And if technology doesn't massively accelerate, the base case is that literally all of us are, including everyone listening to this podcast right now is gonna die. Right? And the gains that come from technology are just massive, right?

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Like, if you just think about the difference between the kind of life that we have now and the life that we have a thousand years ago or even fifty years ago, there's just a whole number of both measurable and immeasurable things that have massively improved. And like, the these improvements are incredibly large. And these improvements can even overshadow some of the worst things that happened. And even if you can blame some of those things on technology, right? So like, if you look at the chart, for example, right? Like, we can understand what some of those dips are, right?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  So like, for example, if you look, there's like a whole bunch of correlated dips in the nineteen tens. And obviously, that's World War One. In the case where there's a double dip, the second dip is the Spanish Flu.

• 23:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're looking, by the way, bankless listeners, at a life expectancy chart over the past one hundred and twenty years or so.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it has, I think, about eight lines for various countries, you know, US, Europe, Asia. So there's some dips in the nineteen tens where there's double dips. It's World War One and Spanish Flu. In the nineteen forties, there's dips, which is obviously World War Two. Then China's got a dip in nineteen sixty, which is the Great Leap Forward. And so there is like very visible disasters along here. But if you just zoom out even a bit, they, all of these dips ultimately are overshadowed by just like the incredibly Large gains from medical technology, right? And so grow like growth in technology does a lot.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  And even growth in wealth does a lot, for example, right? Uh, because if you imagine a world where everyone is wealthy, then like that's a world where if you suddenly have to like leave your home and pack up and go to another country, then like you're not going to starve. You're going to like basically walk into a much more stable situation than you would otherwise, right? And so there's just all of these big positives that come from technological uh gains and there's like an unrelenting history of thousands of years of uh technology repeatedly doing good despite lots and lots of people, I mean, like screeching and complaining that things could end up going in the opposite direction, right?

• 24:59Speaker 00

  So that's the accelerationist case. Um, you know, the um anti-tech case, I think it's important to separate the kind of old school anti-tech case versus the AI doomer case more specifically, right? Um, so the old school anti-tech case, it's one that I admittedly am, uh, you know, on balance, uh, very not sympathetic to. And, uh, you know, like I've written about this in the article, but I think, uh, if I had to illustrate kind of the, the really biggest and most important, um, like the strongest parts of that case. Um, obviously, yeah, the environment and climate change are um a really big aspect of this, right?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Um, so there's this chart of how temperatures are suddenly uh rising in a way that's like totally unprecedented in any uh um, you know, historical natural situation, except possibly for like, you know, like asteroids that like fell, um, you know, like many, many tens of millions of years, years ago or something similar, right? Yep, there's a, there's the graph, right? It just, uh, over the last century and a half, it's just gone vertical. There is graphs of a species extinction

• 26:13Speaker 00

  that are pretty bad. There's graphs of uh

• 26:20Speaker 00

  Hmm, like even like populations of particular animals that are pretty bad. There's um. And then another um kind of aspect of this that starts, you know, like bleeding into the AI discussion is like the possibility of technology getting misused by authoritarian governments. Um, but I feel like even like that's not a risk of super intelligent AI, but that is a, I mean, super intelligent AI would make the risk worse, but that even is a risk of like present day AI and like present day surveillance tech technology.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Um, then there is just the fact that like easier communication creates greater economies of scale and that creates greater centralization, which creates opportunities for political conflict of a yes scale that totally yeah did not exist before. So you could try to make that argument. Though I think at the same time, like Genghis Khan would be a pretty big counterargument to that, right? This is, you know, the guy who genocided about as many people as Hitler back in the 13th century. But then for some reason, it's like totally socially acceptable to sing songs about him today. Um, but

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Geng, Geng, Genghis Khan is like a holy god. Yeah, so. There's a, but, but uh.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  The um. And then I think on the climate side, like my, my counterarguments to that case is basically that like there have been, there is a history of lots of specific environmental issues that once they became bad, we actually did get together and solve them. And you know, improvements in air quality in cities are a big one, right? Like I, I remember seeing the tail end of this myself and the first time I visited in Beijing back in 2014, just remember how incredibly smoggy it is and like that aspect of China like improved massively and very visibly over the, I mean, like six years that I went to, to, to visit over and over again since then.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Um, so, and then, you know, there's like ozone and like some reforestation in some areas and so forth, right? So like that would be the. Counter to the counter, but then the anti-tech argument that is more compelling to me personally is like this what the this like very specific one about super intelligent AI, right? And super intelligent AI to me is like one something that one way to think about it is to think about it as being something that's in the category of technology. So like, think about it as being the same kind of thing as smartphones, the internet, contraception, the printing press,

• 29:15Speaker 00

  the wheel, guns, um, you know, like the steam engine. And these are technologies that in many cases really were socially disruptive and in many cases definitely did. Um, you know, harm people who depended on the incumbents, but at the same time, like if you just look at it from the eye of long-term history and you realize that, I mean, look, there is massive good that came out of most of them. Um, I mean, guns are, I think, more controversial, right? Because like, like military technology is the one branch of technology where like it's, I think, much less clear that like improvements are good. Um, though, I mean, actually, even there, right?

• 29:55Speaker 00

  There is a an interesting argument that some historians make that guns are sort of more democratizing than the previous wave of military technology, which was bows, which, you know, required like 10 years of training to be able to use well, and so that kind of enabled more centralized forms of government. But, you know, even even still, right? Like military technology is like the other big exception in general, right? But you, aside from military technology, like on average, technology has been crazy good. And so if you think of AI as being technology, then like your first instinct is going to be AI is going to be crazy good. And like, maybe you would worry about AI military applications, right?

• 30:40Speaker 00

  But if you instead think about AI as not creating a tool, but as creating a new type of mind and creating a new type of mind that is far more intelligent and powerful than the human mind, then like this puts us in a totally different category, right? Like.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  If you think about humans, right, humans have been able to take over and utterly dominate the world and even accidentally genocide all kinds of species of animals. In most cases, without even intending or even realizing that that's what we're doing. And humans got into this position of power entirely because of our minds, right? Like, our minds enabled us to create tools, technology, better work together collectively, and cooperate and do all of these things. And then, now imagine an AI that beats humans on that exact same metric, right?

• 31:43Speaker 00

  By a factor of, like, a 10,000, right? Then, the question is like, well, what's gonna happen to humans? And the big risk here is, comes from this argument of, that I call, well, two arguments, right? One argument is the difficulty of alignment, and the second argument is instrumental convergence. And so, the difficulty of alignment is basically the difficulty of, like, just making a thing that has the same kinds of goals that we have. And this is like, a surprisingly hard problem that we just have no idea how to do, right?

• 32:22Speaker 00

  And like, there have been, you know, like, plenty of these myths and legends in history that kind of talk about the alignment problem, right? So, like, there's, you know, King Midas, who, you know, famously got the touch that turned everything into gold, and then, of course, you know, he ended up dying of starvation. Then, there was, I forget who, but the Greek mythical figure who wished for immortality but forgot to wish for eternal youth, right? And so, there's like, the problem that if you don't perfectly specify what you want, then, like, there's lots of ways for that to be, yeah, just like, slightly satisfied in a slightly different way.

• 33:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you guys remember that, I think it was an Edgar Allan Poe short story called, like, The Monkey's paw or something like this, where the character receives a monkey's paw that that gives him three wishes. And so he would wish for things, but like one of his wishes was, you know, his, his, he wished for money. And what what ended up happening is the monkey's paw granted the wish, but his son died later that day in a tragic factory accident. And so he received some proceeds from the workers' compensation policy. Like, that's how the wishes were fulfilled. It reminds me of that as well.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, now, I mean, I think one kind of rebuttal to this that like lots of people make and that I've made is that like, if you think about, if you just interact with, you know, like existing AIs, like even ChatGPT just a little bit like, these are not, you know, hyper autistic robots that have no idea how to understand like context and unexpressed intentions and subtext, right? Of like, like ChatGPT will totally be able to understand that, you know, if a human says, I want anything I touch to turn into gold. He, you know, like has an exception in mind for things like food and water and medicine, right?

• 34:23Speaker 00

  But there is, well, like this by itself doesn't save us. And it gets a little bit more tricky to sort of explain why, right? But I, but I can try. Basically, yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  You know, the best analogy, unfortunately, is kind of like looking at some of the previous generation of AI that we've had. Like, remember back in the mid 2010s when people were starting to work with deep learning AIs for the first time? And they were starting to get like kind of good at making pretty pictures? And there is like a thing that you can do where you can run the model forwards. And if you run the more model forwards, you pass in an image and it tells you like, is this thing a cat or is this thing a dog? But then you can also run the model backwards, right? And you can pass in the input that like, I want to, the ultimate essence of a dog. Like, I want the thing that really is gonna be a hundred percent dog.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  It's gonna maximize the extents to which this classifier is gonna tell me that this thing is definitely a dog and it's not something else. And then you run it through and it generates the image that maximizes that. And it turns out that what you get is totally not a dog, right? What you get is like some insanely crazy contraption that definitely like has doggy aesthetics. But it's also got, I mean, like maybe 12 eyes, maybe 48 eyes. Maybe there's like a whole bunch of dogs that have merged bodies. It just like looks like some totally crazy thing and. I'm getting visuals of a kaleidoscope of a dog. Right, exactly, right? And like this is the thing that like maximizes the dog parameter, right?

• 36:04Speaker 00

  And I think another example is like us humans have sort of hacked evolution in the same way, right? So like if you think about what evolution is, evolution is like this agent that has a goal, right? And its goal is to like maximize the reproductive fitness. So, you know, survival times, how many children you have of whatever agents it's operating on in their environments, right? And in order to fulfill this objective, evolution gave humans a lot of desires, right? Like there is the desire to have food, the desire to have delicious food, right? And like what is delicious and what isn't delicious?

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Well, those are things that were fine tuned based on like what is nutritious in the in the natural environment, right? And then there's the, a lot of desires associated with reproduction. There's desires associated with survival and all kinds of things, right? But then look at how modern humans have dealt with these desires, right? And one is we've created a lot of food that's like hyper optimized for deliciousness that in a lot of cases doesn't do well at all on nutritional value, right? We have invented at least like five separate, different types of technology that let people have sex without getting pregnant, right? We've.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Invented all kinds of things that like satisfy the proxies that evolution has created in our minds for evolution's goals, but that do not actually satisfy evolution's goals at all, right? And you know, the results of this is that like lots of people are eating unhealthy food and there is increasingly a depopulation crisis with lots of countries having fertility rates that are below one, right? And so it's uh, now, one thing you might ask is like, well, surely, you know, like we as humans know that we are not following the goals of Mother Nature. And the answer is yes, we know very well that we're not following the goals of Mother Nature.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  But guess what? We are humans. Our goal, like the, in maximizing reproductive fitness is the goal that Mother Nature had. That it is not the goal that we have. And we know that Mother Nature was not able to perfectly sort of copy its goal into us. But we don't care. We, we have our goals and we follow what our goals are, right? And so we're in the case of AI, what might happen is like, we tell the AI, um, you know, like as Alex Friedman would say, it's all like, I'm going to like bring more love and peace into the world. Um, and then the AI would discover that like, okay, here's a bunch of things that look like love and peace. And these are things that we would all recognize as being love and peace.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  But then at some point it would discover like, wait, if I create this 47 dimensional squiggly that looks in this particular way, then like, it's going to be even better at max, like satisfying its own internal conception of, uh, you know, like love and peace, which is going to be slightly off because anything is, uh, that is created by any finite process is going to be slightly off. And this 47 dimensional squiggly is going to look incredibly lovely and peaceful to the AI. But it's like nothing that any of us would recognize as being, um, love and peace in any sense, right? And then we go and tell the AI, bring more love and peace into the world. And then the AI just kills all of us and replaces us all with 47 dimensional squigglies, right?

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Um, so this is kind of the AI safety case, right? I mean, this was, uh, basically the same as, uh, you know, like what I remember. Um, I'm Eliza Rydowski, yeah, I told you guys, uh, it's sort of the same thing as what a lot of people have said. Um, so. This is like one of my points of concern regarding AI. But in my post, I also talked about two other points of concern regarding AI. Where one of them is just this question of like, well, even if everything goes well, like, is this actually a world that we would want to live in, right? And it turns out that like, if you examine the sci fi worlds that people have tried to come up with, that show, you know, humans and bots living in harmony, then like,

• 40:17Speaker 00

  either the world is like insanely unrealistic and it's just unstable. And it's just obviously going to collapse into AIs dominating everything in like, in another one to 10 years. Or it's like a world that actually really feels quite deeply unsatisfying from like, most people's perspectives today, right? Like, we're basically talking about a world where, you know, we all become pets of the superbot and a kind of human agency doesn't really play any part in, you know, determining which way the universe goes from there.

• 40:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And by the way, Vitalik, for those that maybe doubt that a bunch of machines or a bunch of computers could actually wrest control over humanity. When I was reading your article, I was in kind of a serious mood and I was drinking some coffee. I literally spat out my coffee laughing at this turn of phrase you used. You said this, "To see why the machines could wrest control over humanity, imagine that you are legally a literal slave of an eight-year-old child. If you could talk with that child for long enough time, do you think you could convince the child to sign a piece of paper setting you free? I have not run this experiment, but my instinctive answer is a strong yes. And so all in all, humans becoming pets seems like an attractor that is very hard to escape. I was just visually visualizing in my mind, trying to convince

• 41:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  an eight-year-old child to set me free and what that process would look like. And that's kind of what we're dealing with when we're dealing with a superintelligence. It's to them, we would be that eight-year-old child. It would have probably no trouble convincing us to do whatever it wants, to fulfill whatever outcome and set of goals that it had.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then the other thing to keep in mind is that like to the extent that there is any notion of competition in this world of the future, like whoever really gives up control of the reins to the AI is gonna outperform the people that don't because you know, like that's what happened in chess, that's what happens in Go, that's you know, just what eventually happens anywhere, right? And so that and then the third risk that I outlined is basically, you know, centralization and surveillance, right? And this isn't even just a risk of super intelligent AI, it's a risk of like basically AI of the type that exists already. And this is

• 42:45Speaker 00

  actually in some cases, situations that happen already, right? So one of the things that's been happening in Russia for the past while, actually, yeah, even quite a bit before the recent war started is that you'd have protests, right? And the unfortunately, you know, the authoritarians discovered this one weird trick, which is you let the protest happen and you you know, you you send the police out and you know, like you do the usual protest versus police thing a little bit, but like you don't aim to crush it right then and there, but you have the cameras out. And then you identify who all of the key people in the protest are. And then at some point later at 2 AM, they get a knock on the door.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  And you know, like repeated and rants about 100 times and five years later, suddenly you have like basically almost no one left to lead the protests, right?

• 43:42David Hoffman?

  And meanwhile, every other single country is like, oh, this is a normal functioning, you know, society who's expressing their desires and they are free to express their desires.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, it's like much less visible, which makes it kind of much more difficult to coordinate against it's and I mean, it makes it much more difficult to even create outrage against it internationally. It's Yeah, I mean, it's a big problem. I mean, I think it's like a big part of the reason why like it feels like protests against authoritarian regimes have been getting less and less effective for the past while. And like if you just extrapolate this trend even further, then the risk basically is that like there isn't a place to hide anymore, right? Like

• 44:36Speaker 00

  there isn't a place where any kind of credible opposition movement to a government could even start because as soon as it starts, the surveillance can detect it. And I mean, you don't even need like physical police. At some point, the AI soldiers could just I mean, I could go and shut it down. And this gets even worse when we think about wars because like the need to get the population on your side has historically like actually been a pretty significant break, at least slowing down people's desires to go to war. But then if your entire army is a bunch of

• 45:19Speaker 00

  robots, then like, you know, the dictator gets drunk at 10:00 PM, they see someone being mean to them on Twitter at 11:00 PM and the drones, I mean, like start flying and raining hellfire on other countries before midnight, right? And so this kind of natural check and balance that comes from the facts that like whatever ultimately there are decentralized humans that have to be doing the executing. And if you try to do something really terrible, then like those humans are going to be demoralized and you know, they're going to be much less, they're going to be much less willing to go along with your plans and even if they do, lots of them are going to leak every single detail of your plans to

• 46:01Speaker 00

  to the CIA or to whoever your opposition is, which is actually yet another thing that you know, fortunately did happen in Russia. Like, let's say, you know, like you have AI armies, like all of those checks and balances go away, right? And so This is my other big concern about AI. Like basically, is this sort of, you know, the ultimate centralization from which at some point there might not actually be an escape. So that, so those three cases are my kind of big, you know, a note of caution on artificial superintelligence in particular and how it's like pretty unique and pretty different

• 46:43Speaker 00

  from all the other technologies that we've dealt with over the past, I mean, like ten millennia.

• 46:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, Vitalik, so David's gonna come and summarize this in a moment. So we're tracking our journey so far through this and then we want to kind of introduce your philosophy here and what you think the counter is and how that applies to crypto. But I have one follow-up question that, to you specifically, that's been kind of burning in me since the Eliezer podcast back in February. And that is, what do you think? Like, so we talked about three different AI risk scenarios. The first is doom. Basically, we all die. The second is we become pets. And I'm like, at this stage, it's better than one. That's not so bad. And then the third is totalitarianism. But I want to go back to the first because that's been giving me like an existential crisis all year. What's your personal take on this?

• 47:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know you've got a spectrum in your article on what you called earlier the probability of doom, the P doom ratio. What's your P doom ratio and why? I'm just curious where you weigh in.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the number I gave in my tweet thread is 0.1. So, you know, 10% chance superintelligent AI is going to kill us all. And I think the reason for this is like, I see both sides of the arguments, right? Like, I see the sort of quote doomer arguments, which basically is essentially what I've already outlined to you guys. And then I think if I had to give the counter doomer arguments, I would basically say something like, you know, look at the kinds of AIs that we have now. Like, those kinds of AIs are not even goal seekers. They basically are things that, you know, like put on human costumes and sort of play

• 48:26Speaker 00

  out roles of the type that, you know, to...

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Uh of like what whatever uh type they sort of pattern matched themselves into thinking that they're in at that particular moment, right? Like uh ChatGPT does not act like something that maximizes any particular objective. Um yeah, like if you uh tell it to make the world more doggy, like it's not going to do anything that looks like, um you know, maximize the assets of dog, right? It's uh going to um you know, just uh do like give you a five paragraph essay that's like a pretty normal and human thing that like expresses like what might it mean to make the world a more doggy place? And uh it's the sort of thing that's like pretty yeah inoffensive and like it looks in real like pretty fine, right?

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Um so basically, yeah, if you just compare, um you know, the specific scenarios that um it peop- uh people worrying about AI yeah feared would happen with AI at current level of capabilities? And then you compare that to like the actual thing that AI at current levels of capabilities does and like it's always quite different, right? And one thing I'm happy about is that I feel like the uh the level of um like harm from deep fakes in particular so far has been much lower than what I think most people expected and even what I expected at current levels of capabilities, right? Like if you explain to someone from uh from back in twenty fifteen

• 50:03Speaker 00

  what the current level of capabilities of AI making deep fakes is, like they're probably going to tell you like, whoa, like we can't trust anything that people say anymore, like this is gonna totally break elections and it's gonna lead to all kinds of horrible consequences. And like some bad stuff has happened, but like the reality is much less than that fear, right? Which is like interesting and surprising and like it's uh, I mean, to some extent, it shows the yeah avail- the um adaptability of mankind. To some extent, it shows that mankind is less evil than some people fear. Um but and then, of course, the doomer would sort of counter by saying, well, guess what? Like with uh superintelligence, neither of those two things even matter, uh because the AI is gonna be doing all the work.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Um but like it does still feel true that sort of. The way that things keep progressing do sort of go in different directions than what, you know, like people's existing worst fears have been and in ways that sometimes feel like we're going further and further away from the kinds of, you know, like hyper optimizers that people are afraid of. So that's the case against. And, you know, if I had to like, again, counter the counter, I would say, well, that's L L M's and it's in looking very possible that like L L M's basically tap out at some level of capability. And, you know, like G P T four and like a little bit better than G P T four is like basically

• 51:33Speaker 00

  what we're going to get. But then there's going to be some next technology which like could be combining L L M's and Q learning, like, you know, it could be something else. And like, we don't even know what what property is that next level of technology is going to have. And so it's like a big washout, right? And so I think like, there is a big probability, uh, chance that the A I doom problem is just like, it's, it, it turns out that it was never that big a problem to begin with. There is like a big chance that it is a really big problem. And within that chance, there is a really big chance that it is a really big problem. But, I mean, with awareness and hard work, we will be able to, um, deal with it and, you know, like, make sure that we don't actually, yeah,

• 52:18Speaker 00

  get doomified, right? So that's where sort of the, I think the balance comes in, right? But like, it's important to keep in mind that like, a 10% probability of doom is still a big deal, right? So like, for example, like, one analogy for this is like, 10% is like, I think, greater by somewhere between a factor of one and three, I forget, like, but it's like that, like, only a little bit greater than the probability that any of us is going to die from a non-biological cause. And so if you think about like-

• 52:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Accident, a car accident or something like this?

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Right, car accidents, homicide, suicide, like, any nasty thing that's not disease. Um, then- Like, if you think about the amount of, uh, just like, care and effort and thought that you personally put into your physical safety, and the amount of like, care and concern that you expect, I mean, like, governments to put into your, uh, physical safety with things like police, then like, roughly that level of care is a reasonable level of care to have about, I mean, the possibility that something really bad is gonna happen out of AI, right? And obvious, like, and that doesn't mean like overturn the entire world to suddenly care about this problem, but it does definitely mean care about the problem more than we do today.

• 53:34David Hoffman?

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• 55:03David Hoffman?

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• 55:45David Hoffman?

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• 56:30David Hoffman?

  in thought as our society is having this conversation. The risks of going forward in time and accelerating our progress with technology. And you've labeled like, well, AI is this exceptional case that we need to consider the circumstances of. Some other examples are like climate change. There seems to be a correlation with the increased risk of climate change and the quickening of technology. And this is the decelerationist camp, if you will. And then the accelerationist camp, which I think you have said that you are more resonant with, says that, well, there as technology advances, we find these occurrences in history, these wars, these increased capabilities to cause harm. But by and large, they are completely drowned out by all the other focuses, all the other developments of technology.

• 57:14David Hoffman?

  We've kind of like set the stage for these different constructs of thought. And like all extremes, they're all relatively blunt, if you will. If you just only focus yourself in one school of thought, it's a blunt tool for the job. And as we progress forward in your article and in your thought, we start to get a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more... We don't have to be so blunt in our thought about the direction of society. We can pick and choose components from different schools of thought and put them all together. We understand that AI has risks. We understand that we have to solve climate change. We understand that technology presents new risks, yet nonetheless, technology also helps us navigate those risks all the same.

• 57:57David Hoffman?

  So rather than having to pick an extreme, pick a tribe, if you will, a school of thought, and be shoehorned in there, how would you propose we think about all of these different things that we've put together here? If we're talking about a unified idea of thought, how would we have a framework for understanding if we are going to go forward with technology, what is the correct path? The more optimistic, more precise path that we can maximize the good? Because really, all of these conversations are all about how do we maximize human welfare and well-being at the end of the day? How would you proceed in this conversation from here?

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think this is where the idea of D-A-C that I came up with in the post really comes out of, right? So A-C is obviously acceleration and D is intentionally standing primarily for defense, but also for decentralization and democratization. And so the idea of this philosophy is to basically look at the offense versus defense balance of the world, right? So basically, look at, you know, like, how easy is it to do things that, you know, like

• 59:13Speaker 00

  harm or go against the goals of other people versus how easy it is to protect yourself or your community against that? And think of that as something that is and has always been shaped by technology, but also something that can be shaped by future choices in technology. And to really focus on building defensive technology. And especially, and I think this is the angle that is really naturally appeals to people in Ethereum and people listening to this. Defensive technologies that work by improving defense in the abstract without kind of coming with a built-in perspect-

• 59:58Speaker 00

  or a built-in enforcer that decides, I mean, what is good and what is bad across the entire world, world or across an entire ecosystem, right?

• 1:00:10David Hoffman?

  Would you say like, phrase differently, defensiveness as a platform or just a technology platform that allows defensive technologies to emerge?

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  The word platform is interesting, right? Because I feel like this is, I mean, like one of those sort of sometimes VC buzzwords that means a lot of different things. The, the part of platform that appeals to me is like this idea that we're, that a lot of this is going to create, involve of creating common infrastructure. And both defensive infrastructure and even common infrastructure that enables building many kinds of defensive infrastructure. The part of platforms that I'm kind of, like, I will, I want, that cautions me against embracing that word is that

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  a lot of things in the modern world that call themselves platforms are things that do contain this centralized actor that controls the thing and that plays this role of deciding who's good and who's bad, right? Like we talk about Facebook being a platform, I mean, like OpenAI being a platform, Twitter being a platform. And like all of these things have centralized actors that run and control them. They have centralized forms of moderation. They have-

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Centralization on all kinds of levels. And this is one of those things that creates a lot of problems, right? And so there's this book that was written recently that talks about this concept of weaponized interdependence. Basically, this idea that the type of technology that we've been building for the past 20 years, and when I say we, like, I do mean, you know, the centralized world. Like, this is the place where the decentralized world gets to pat itself on the back and say, like, "Yeah, no, we're actually better than that." Is that the technology has been a networks technology, and it's networks technology that creates centralized choke points

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  where the creator of the technology has ongoing power over the users, right? Like, if you think about just going back to the year 1970, and let's say, like, let's pick, you know, like, a random country that has powerful technology that we don't trust. Actually, let's just, like, not say anything bad about anyone in the physical world. Let's say you have, like, Mordor, right? Like, let's say, you know, like, you have literal Mordor, and it just, like, pops up in the middle of the Atlantic, and it turns out that that's what Atlantis was the whole time, and it's a technological superpower, right? And imagine you're in the 1970s,

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  and you're buying cars and forks and knives and all kinds of things that are made in Mordor. And we ask a thought experiment of, like, what is the worst that the Mordorians can do to you? And I think probably the worst that they could do is, one, they could do false advertising. They could create things that look like they satisfy certain properties, but actually, like, way underperform on durability or on safety, for example, right? And, like, that is bad. Probably the most evil thing that they could do is, like, what we call the razor blade model, right? Like, basically, sell you devices, but then those devices end up kind of depending on these sort of attachment parts

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  that have to constantly get renewed. And it turns out that Mordor is the only vendor of those. So. Like, that's the closest that you could, that Mordor could do to like, to like, really getting power over you just by being a vendor, right? Otherwise, it's like, even if you're like, very, um, you know, um, you know, like, anti-Mordor, and you have a, um, you know, a Sauron must die, um, you know, like, poster on your wall, and, uh, you know, like, you go around wearing, uh, you know, Free Seraph on Gold t-shirts, like, Mordor can't really do much to hurt you, right? Um, but, then fast forward to 2020, right? In 2020, we have network technology, and if Mordor builds smartphones, and you use a

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  smartphone from Mordor, well, the smartphone can spy on you. Um, if you use internet platforms from Mordor, those platforms can censor some political viewpoints and, uh, promote other political viewpoints, right? And it's gonna tell you that, like, hey, yeah, you know, this, uh, Free Seraph on Gold thing is, like, actually, yeah, a bunch of terrorists, and, uh, you know, like, nobody's allowed to support them anymore. It can affect, uh, you know, the domestic politics of other countries. It, uh, can, uh, um, at any particular moments, just like, flip a switch and, uh, take, um, like, take away the technology from any subset of its users, right? Um, and so, the amount of power that you have over users by being the producer in a central,

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  in, at least if you're building this kind of centralized network technology, has just gone way up now compared to what it was in 1970, right? Um, and so, the, yeah, like, that's the aspect of platforms that actually, yeah, it's one of the things that this is even reacting to, right? It's even one of the things that the, yeah, I think crypto space is really, yeah, reacting to, right? Um, and so, the goal here is to build defensive technologies that are not like that, right? Defensive technologies that do not assume that, like, they are being built in America, and, and they are going to be good because everyone in the world agrees that America is good, right? Because, uh, you know, unfortunately, this kind of consensus does not exist in the world, right?

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  And, uh, like, what we want to do is, we want to build, um, technologies where people can trust them, even if they have different, uh, opinions on, um, like, what's good and what's bad. And these are technologies where there exist a lot of really interesting examples of already, right? So I split defensive technology into four different parts, right? Where I like the first split is the split between the world of bits and the world of atoms, right? And in the world of atoms, you have defense against big things and defense against small things. And defense against small things is of course bio defense. And then in the world of bits, we have what I call cyber defense,

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  which is like defense against things where if you look at them hard enough, it's obvious that they're attackers. And then what I call info defense, and this is like a very specific distinction that I think other people haven't quite made in the same way, that basically is about defending against things where there is much less consensus about who the attackers are, right? And the big example here is what we call misinformation, right? Like, people don't want to be misinformed, people wants to know the truth and not know false things. But a lot of the sort of quote anti misinformation ideas that have been proposed by the, you know, the mainstream world or what we might call the centralized world,

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  they all involve there being a particular actor who understands what's right and what's wrong, and basically forces that perspective across an entire ecosystem, right? And so the question is like, well, can we build tools that actually avoid having that central point of like deciding what's good and what's bad for everyone? And so in the case of like the world of atoms, this is kind of somewhat easier. So I, like in the world, for macro, for example, I talk about building resilient physical infrastructure. So, you know, even like the facts that we have solar panels and the fact that we have such amazing batteries now is like amazingly good, right?

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  And if every household had those kinds of things, then like the amount of disruption that would happen to people's lives, even as a result of, you know, cyber war or even regular war, would just would already be significantly lower, right? If we had much more distributed agriculture, then like that would improve things even more, right? So there's things that are just like obviously defensive without having to like...

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  Come with an opinion attached of like, who is the one that you're trusting to do the, to do the defending for you? And then in the biospace, like there's vaccines, there's other kinds of prophylactics, there's things that boost your immune system, there's like, and then like I basically talk about how there's like this entire set of things that we can do that we totally are not putting enough resources into right now that could totally create a much more airborne pandemic resistance world, where we have much less COVID, much less long COVID, and even much less, you know, colds and flus, and where lots of diseases would basically stop before they even start because there are zero, would it, would it end up even being less than one in this kind of world?

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  But we just need more funding and more efforts to actually make this work, this happen. And then in the world of bits, this is where crypto stuff really starts coming in somewhat, right? So like, one of the things that I began this whole episode with is like, asking the question, well, you know, crypto needs to also think about some of these issues that people are really thinking a lot about in 2023, and what is the way that crypto has placed into some of those concerns? And like, here it is, right? Like, basically, yeah, we want to create a world that has much more digital hardness baked into it by default,

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  and where digital attacks become much harder, and digital defense becomes much easier, right? And what's interesting about like the cryptocurrency and blockchain space is that it's great at doing that without relying on a single centralized party, right? So, you know, we, we are creating financial systems that work without relying on any specific country. We are creating

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  Forms of privacy that work without relying on a central actor to like hold the everyone's information in custody for them. We are creating forms of accounts recovery that don't depend on, I mean, you know, Google or Twitter having everyone's master keys. Um, so, and that's happening with social recovery wallets and account abstraction and ERC 4337. We are creating zero knowledge proof technologies that let people prove that they are trustworthy without revealing any more information about themselves beyond that. Right? So we're creating all of these really powerful tools that in a lot of cases are substitutes for more centralized forms of trust.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  And one of the arguments that I make in that section is basically that like, one of the reasons why the internet has become more centralized and a less free place over the last 15 years is basically because like the, there are threats and the easiest and laziest responses to threats that you could implement are responses that involve centralization, right? Like require everyone to have a Google account to sign in and like that's your anti-symbol mechanism, right? And the question is like, well, how can we actually bring privacy back? How can we actually bring, you know, the ability for anon's to participate in the internet back?

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  How can we actually let people do all of the things that they need to do without creating these mechanisms where like if you're in one of the, you know, quote, good countries, then you're trusted, but if you're in, um, you know, like one of the untrusted countries, then like you're screwed. Right? And like, these are things that actually happen, right? Like, I mean, I love community notes, for example, and I talked about community notes very positively, but I remember there was this one thing about it that at least when I checked a couple of months ago, in order to join community notes, you needed to have a phone number from a quote trusted carrier. And I remember seeing a tweet from someone in India basically saying like, hey, guys,

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  you just made like one of the major carriers and carriers in India that serves hundreds of millions of people untrusted. And like, there's this big population that's like 5% of the world that's like locked out of being a community notes participant. And like, You can see how those kinds of problems just naturally come out of this centralized perspective on trust. And so if we can create like better and decentralized alternatives, then like this ends up really solving that kind of problem as well, right? So that's cyber defense, right? Basically, all of the stuff that we've been working on in terms of, you know, creating more decentralized and more robust financial systems, in terms of creating these zero

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  knowledge proof systems that let us, you know, prove that we're good guys without revealing any other information that let us prove computations, like all of these things, they make a much more defense favoring world. And so it's amazing that, I mean, our space has been accelerating these technologies so much, right? And so that's kind of the core of the, you know, the way in which crypto fits into the DACT vision.

• 1:13:43David Hoffman?

  I'm getting a notion, Vitalik, of Daniel Schmachtenberger and his metacrisis concepts, where we have the increasing capabilities, increasing capacities of technology to do stuff, good or bad, doesn't really matter, just stuff generally, neutrally. And some of that stuff sometimes ends up as like bad outcomes or just problems that need to be solved. And the concern here is that when technologies introduces new problems to society, that society just comes up with centralized solutions to that problem. Or corporations and entrepreneurs can just move quickly and solve problems before humanity can come together to coordinate on a mutually assured platform, mutually assured defensive technology to answer this.

• 1:14:26David Hoffman?

  And I think what I'm hearing from you is that, well, certain elements of cryptography, coordination via Ethereum allows for a solution space to emerge that isn't merely just, you know, some large company slapping on that that patch onto society at large by say, hey, here's our solution. It seems to be like, what you are illustrating here is like, there is a middle ground between the chaotic production of highly capacity, high capacity technology and just like centralized companies solving that that problem space. Is that a fair illustration?

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think, like, the really important piece of this is basically

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Creating these technologies that kind of improve the baseline defensiveness of the world while at the same time allowing the world to remain and, you know, it could be even more of a pluralistic place, right? So avoiding the usual trap where, you know, you basically have danger all the way up until one group just takes over everything and imposes its will on everyone else.

• 1:15:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Vitalik, you know, what you're proposing here is maybe a philosophical framework for where crypto fits, right? And the reason I really like this is because it seems to be like kind of a big tent and it's something that I personally resonate with. So you're basically saying you don't have to pick the effective accelerationist, you know, the techno utopians version of the world. You don't have to pick the techno-phobes vision of the world and kind of the Luddite dumerism picture either. This is a third way and you're calling this defensive or decentralized.

• 1:16:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  The D can stand for all sorts of different things or democracy or differential accelerationism. So this is D I A C, basically. And crypto fits under the defensive technology in kind of the cyber type of use case. And it feels very much like what you're advocating for is technologies that increase and enhance human freedom. And so this can also be a bulwark against maybe your AI risk scenario of a probability three that, you know, the AI brings about totalitarian technologies and now we have this defense, you know, against it. The other thing I would say is it seems like it's a very broad tent. It's like, who can't get behind some good old fashioned defense, right? We're not talking about something that could destroy the world.

• 1:17:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're just talking about regular individuals and societies being able to defend against something that can destroy the world. And I want you maybe to talk about this as a philosophical framework. Like obviously people in crypto are hearing this. I'm sure they resonate. Are you telling me that there's a, you know, a way to express, you know, my Beliefs about crypto and this defensive and freedom enhancing and decentralized technology. You call it D I A C, like sign me up. There's also, I think, some other camps that could listen to this and be interested. So you've got this section in your essay saying, is D I A C compatible with your existing philosophy? If you're an effective altruist, this is a rebranding of the idea. If you're a libertarian, there's something here for you. If you're a pluralist, if you're a public health advocate.

• 1:17:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm wondering if you'd talk to the specific camps here and the value that they might find in subscribing to the D I A C belief. Of course, I know you're not, you're pushing it. You're not trying to necessarily convert people, but in order to explain it, maybe, can you talk about the wins for these various camps?

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  Sure, I mean, any specific camp you want me to start with?

• 1:18:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would love you to start with the libertarians, actually, because I think we have more than a few listening, maybe.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  Sure, I mean, I think the best way to think about this is it's a pathway to like basically preserve menelik liberty going into the, a much more technologically advanced 21st century, right? And I think the challenge that D I A C is looking at is basically that like, there are lots of technologies, including technologies that are being developed by governments or by corporations that are increasingly working with governments, right? Like, there was that recent, you know, like A16Z post that was like talking pretty enthusiastically about,

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  you know, like American dynamism in defense, which of course, you know, can be in military tech. And basically looking at like, how do we create a world that with through all of these changes and through all of these pressures, doesn't just kind of maneuver itself into being this incredibly centralized place? Where you've basically got these.

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  Probably two, somewhere between one to four of these sort of big, you know, like super states worldwide that are in full control of their tech ecosystems and like regular people basically have no option except for, you know, like being stuck inside of one of these with no other real, you know, options for getting out of that equilibrium, right? And so we can talk about like the possibility that, you know, we'll have much more, you know, like a offensive AI in the hands of governments, where you can also just look at existing trends

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  in how like the internet is not going the way that a lot of us hoped, right? Like the concept of internet anonymity, for example, which was like a big hope of people, I think, like 10 or 20 years ago, but then the internet is obviously becoming an increasingly difficult place to actually be anonymous. And a lot of the reason why is definitely just all of these, you know, like cybersecurity issues and people just kind of naturally grappling for, you know, the centralized solutions for those problems because they're the easy ones.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  And DIAC basically tries to ask the question of like, well, there are threats and you can go after a threat either by hunting down all the wolves or by putting armor on the sheep, right? And putting armor on the sheep is like philosophically much better if you can do that, right? Because the problem with hunting down all the wolves is like, well, we have, the wolves are some of us and like we have to agree on who the wolves are and like there is a risk that, you know, the government's going to decide one day that you're one of the wolves, right?

• 1:21:23David Hoffman?

  And also the wolves don't want to be hunted.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  Exactly. And If we instead say, like, let's make the world a more defense-favoring place by default, then that is something that is much harder to twist into a narrative for why governments should just go after all kinds of people that they don't like.

• 1:21:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So DIAC has some wins for libertarians here. How about the SolarPunks? How about the Kevin Iwaki regen-type community who are very oriented on collective action and human coordination? Are there wins in DIAC for that community?

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think SolarPunk, again, is, I think, a school that values human flourishing, it values cooperation, it also values decentralization as well. I think ultimately, there is a punk in SolarPunk. It's not like solar monolith, right? And I think a lot of people in that camp are concerned about the resilience of the

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  world going forward, our ability to survive different kinds of risks, and are probably very cognizant of the fact that all kinds of centralized actors, including both corporations and governments, can be a big problem in making a lot of those risks larger. And what DIAC basically says is it says, like, here is a set of tools that we can use to just cut down on a lot of those risks just across the board and make the world one that is much more friendly to human flourishing without having to construct any

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  of those kinds of monoliths, right? So if you think about the idea of, like, let's say, the biodefense side of this, right? We can basically make a world that is much more protected against diseases, natural and artificial pandemics, all kinds of things, natively, just by having cleaner air. And this is...

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  It's a much more natural solution and it's a it's a yes, it's a solution to that problem that really avoids some of the downsides of things like lockdowns that we've seen, which can be justified if there's enough of a health risk in a particular situation, but which also are just kind of massive forced changes in the way that people just like live their regular lives with their with their families and their regular relationships and their work. I mean, and so it's something that like it's an approach that allows us to be in

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  in harmony with each other. I would also even say in harmony with nature because I think defense includes protecting the environment, absolutely. It's an approach that leverages local communities instead of trying to put power into these kind of big super states that decide, you know, like what is good and what is bad on behalf of like the entire world or on behalf of much larger groups of people. It's a world that really empowers the local coordination much more.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  And so I think there's a lot of technologies within the D I C umbrella, especially if you look at the kind of info defense category that we didn't go too much into that like really talks about improving social technology that can really make society both more defended against attacks and much more of the kind of society that has the kinds of relationships that solar punks would want us to have.

• 1:25:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  The D can also stand for democratic and yeah, we didn't have a chance to delve into that. But okay, so we got the libertarians, we got some wins in D I C for libertarians, we got some wins for the solar punks. Let's talk about the original group that we started this entire episode with, which is on the one side. Is someone like Marc Andreessen, who is an EAC, he's effective accelerationism, full throttle, pedal to the metal, let's just do technology. And the other side is, you know, somebody who's maybe in the EA community, the effective altruist community. Can you get Marc Andreessen on board with DAC? And can you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on board with DAC? Could they both agree about this one, you know, like narrow subset of technology accelerationism, do you think?

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  I mean, the post got retweeted by, you know, Marc Andreessen and by AI not kill everyone is a meme.

• 1:26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some success?

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you know, it's pretty successful already. I mean, I think the really big piece of it here is that I think for the EAC side, the thing that it brings that a lot of the previous philosophies don't bring is, I mean, one is there's just optimism about technology in general, but then there also is an alternate path forward, right? So the message is not just pause. The message is like, we proceed and here are some alternative routes for how to proceed differently. And so if you are a builder, then like you're like, the perspective does not kind of frame you as being an incorrigible enemy, right?

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  Like you can continue being a builder and there's plenty of amazing roles for builders to do really great things within the DAC context. And the final stage of DAC being successful, like if we imagine going out to the year 3000, like really does look like a, you know, like post singularity, you know, like Kardashian type 2, like super advanced technological society of exactly the type that EAC and Shred's humanist people have been dreaming about. And for people who are

• 1:28:01Speaker 00

  And in the AI safety camp, I mean, the concept of differential technology development is something that a lot of effective altruists have actually been already been talking about, right? So I included a link to one of those posts. Um, but I think the thing that it adds is this kind of emphasis on a more democratic political approach. And like this probably is one of the big areas that, you know, like effective altruists do get I get criticized for, right? And like, sometimes the criticism is, um, um, you know, like unfounded because like,

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  if you put, you know, the governments in charge of like distributed public health funding, then like realistically, it's going to be rich people, countries, governments and like there's, I mean, you're going to like, like national governments have a huge track record of like not even caring about what's going on in Africa. Whereas effective altruists like actually already have put a lot of money in, right? But at the same time, once effective altruism starts going away from putting money into obviously good, but we just might disagree on how good things and into kind of manipulating like big political objects, then like you start really needing to care much more about legitimacy.

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  And to me, I feel like both of the big effective altruist related, um, you know, like fails, if you can call them of the last two years, where right where one is the OpenAI situation and the other is F2X, FTX, I mean, to me, they both have to do with underrating legitimacy, right? Like SBF was clearly, yeah, I mean, he had all kinds of, I mean, like massive problems, but one of them is definitely that he just overrated the extents to which he could become a massively negative value actor just by like delegitimizing the ideas that he deeply cared about, right? And then on the OpenAI side, like basically, you know, what we saw was we saw

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  a seemingly earnest and well-intentioned effort to kind of create a kind of clamps on OpenAI, the OpenAI effort that could try to kind of reduce its

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  Potential to become super harmful by creating this board that could push things in the other direction. But the problem is like, it tried to do all of this through a completely undemocratic and unaccountable board of five people that saw no need to even try to explain its actions to the wider public, right? And then what happened was like, well, it fired Sam Altman. And then, basically, within three days, well, it was like, in some ways, like, a pretty unprecedented political fail, because what happened was, the employees of the company, who are probably, you know, like capitalist, libertarian leaning, just like tech software types in a lot of cases,

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  formed an impromptu union to side with the billionaire CEO against the board, right? Like, that's like a pretty big fail, if you think about it that way, right? Like, congrats, you got software engineers to unionize, except they're standing behind the billionaire, right? And, you know, if, and so I think the thing that like D I C ideas can really bring here is basically bringing back some of these concerns about legitimacy and like, understanding that, you know, you're not just spending money points, but you're also spending social capital points. And like, you really need to take that seriously. And like, bringing that in in a way that's not

• 1:31:51Speaker 00

  just sort of an adjunct, but that is a really core part of the philosophy, right? Like, it's a core part of the D I C philosophy that we are trying to create a world that is more defense favoring from in anyone's perspective, regardless of whether or not you agree with any specific actor that is going to be, that would enforce like its own idea of, you know, who the wolves are and who the wolves are not, right?

• 1:32:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Vitalik, the last group to ask you about here on kind of compatible philosophy that's near and dear to our hearts is how about the crypto tribes? So we have Bitcoiners, we have Ethereum's, we have people who are into Solana and Cosmos, and there's a A lot of tribalism. Do you think something like DIAK, we can all stack hands on something like DIAK and say, "Hey, these are a common set of core values, defensive decentralization technology that we all agree on." Yeah, we have our differences with respect to implementation, but can we all unite behind something like DIAK? Is it that wide of a tent to bring the crypto tribes together?

• 1:32:58Speaker 00

  I think it absolutely could be. And I think this is one of those places where I think it's good to give a positive shout out to like some of the positive aspects of the Bitcoin community, which is that like there definitely is a strong sub-community in there that cares about non-blockchain decentralization tech, right? Like there's Bitcoiners who really support things like Noster, there's Bitcoiners who support Tor and you know, like things like internet freedom tech. There's Bitcoiners who have supported more secure operating systems. There's, and then there's Ethereum people who have also supported, you know, like all kinds of things in each of those categories as well, right?

• 1:33:43Speaker 00

  And so I think the idea of viewing the blockchain world as being one part of this somewhat larger thing, which is a decentralization favoring vision of cybersecurity, and then seeing that itself as being one picture in a broader vision of, you know, decentralization friendly, like pushing the offense-defense balance strongly toward defense is something that Ethereum people and Bitcoin people and Solana people as well can absolutely get behind.

• 1:34:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Talk, I'd like to throw a different candidate for what the D means for in DIAK. Mine might be directional acceleration.

• 1:34:28David Hoffman?

  I thought you were gonna say David.

• 1:34:31Speaker 00

  I was gonna say that too.

• 1:34:34David Hoffman?

  That can be a different topic with the Dave Dow. But so to me, there's like the tribal debates between decelerationism and accelerationism, or effective altruism and accelerationism. And when there is these tribal debates, usually the weaknesses inside of one tribe never really get addressed by that tribe because they only ever really argue in relation to a different tribe. The way I hear this blog post and hear you speaking about is like, hey, we're going to move forward in scientific progress. We're going to have technology that has higher capacities. And now it's really just a matter of picking our direction, our priorities, and where we want to go and what technologies we want to prioritize first. Because I think generally,

• 1:35:18David Hoffman?

  most people accept that technology has helped the world over the grand arc of time. And now it's really more about choosing which direction we go in, rather than blindly saying, yes, it's forward. It's more about saying, yes, forward and over here in this particular direction. How would you feel about directional accelerationism?

• 1:35:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think with the caveat that like, it's totally possible to create a directional acceleration story that I totally disagree with. But, you know, as long as we

• 1:35:53David Hoffman?

  We still have to debate in which direction.

• 1:35:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. As long as we understand which direction is, I mean, I think, yes, absolutely.

• 1:35:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Vitalik, as we maybe conclude this episode, you've given us a fantastic tour of this whole debate, this societal debate in this context in crypto, and a great definition of D-A-C, which is, I think, just a fantastic philosophy that I think Bankless listeners will probably take some time to mull over. But your article concludes with this. It includes with some optimism for human potential here. You say, "Human beings are deeply good." And I got to confess, like, in my darkest moments, of course, I sometimes doubt whether that is actually true. And if you look at, you know, even crypto in 2022, I feel like we all came out of that collectively as an industry pretty beat up, pretty...

• 1:36:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doubtful that human beings are deeply good. But you say this, "I love technology because technology expands human potential. We are the brightest star. 10,000 years ago, we could build some hand tools, change which plants grow on a small patch of land and build basic houses. Today, we can build 800-meter-tall towers, store the entirety of recorded human knowledge in a device that we can hold in our hands, communicate instantly across the globe, double our lifespan, and live happy and fulfilling lives without fear of our best friends regularly dropping dead of disease." Zooming out, we have come quite a ways, haven't we? What grounds your belief that human beings are deeply good, Vitalik?

• 1:37:27Speaker 00

  I mean, I think just like what other thing even remotely compares to us, right? Is the question to ask, right? You know, the universe is a very lifeless and unforgiving place, right? Where we've had, you know, like first 9 billion, or 7 to 9 billion years of the just stars and planets crashing into each other and randomly creating supernovas that would just completely wipe away everything within light years without thinking about it. And then we had 4 billion years of life, but life that was very nasty, very brutish, very short,

• 1:38:12Speaker 00

  and that basically involved, you know, like predators constantly running around and eating prey and everyone being on the brink of the dropping dead of disease and starvation. And, you know, there is not a single example of a cat that modifies its eating behavior because of a principled stand that killing mice is wrong, right? Like, that is just not a thing that happens. Whereas with humans, there are plenty of humans that have written entire screeds on why this is the case and that have made like huge personal sacrifices to, you know, protect the people or animals or plants that they care about.

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  And I think- To the extent that this happens, it's incredibly amazing and incredibly beautiful. And I think if humanity continues on a positive trajectory, then the amount of good that we can do just multiplies even further exponentially from there, right? Like, in the 21st century, I think there is a big chance that we're finally going to turn the corner on factory-farmed animals. And probably the biggest moral catastrophe that you still can blame humans for is something that we will actually end up moving beyond. And then, you know, 1 billion years from now,

• 1:39:40Speaker 00

  the sun is scheduled to get bright, get so bright that life on Earth is not going to be possible anymore, right? And, you know, does the sun think about the moral consequences of this act that it's going to make? Well, no, it does not, right? But humans, well, what can we do? Well, you know, we can sprinkle, you know, calcium carbonate or sulfur into the air and compensate and reduce the amount of light that reaches the surface. We can, you know, like build giant mirrors in space to reflect the light. We can go and terraform Mars. We can do all kinds of things. And so if, you know, the beauty of earthly life is still going to shine 2 billion years from now, it will be because of us, right?

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  And so I think we carry the torch of this just enormous potential that is unparalleled in any other thing in the universe that we currently have evidence of the existence of. And it's our job to do a good job of carrying that torch and carry the torch forward.

• 1:40:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  What a fantastic way to end it. I think that's what the the D A C movement, it sounds like, is all about. And I, you know, I could say Bankless is certainly part of that movement. And I'm hopeful with crypto, we can help carry that torch further. So I'll leave maybe Bankless listeners with with this line from your article. "We are the brightest star. There's a lot of good that can come from ongoing human progress into the stars and beyond, but there are big forks in the road, and we need to choose carefully. Accelerate, but accelerate carefully and well." Vitalik Buterin, thank you so much for joining us today. Some action items for you, Bankless Nation. A link to the tweet thread that we discussed today. My techno optimism, that's Vitalik's article. Include a link to that and also the article itself. Risks and disclaimers, of course.

• 1:41:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto is risky. So is philosophy. So is technology. So many of the things we talked about. Yeah, I think so. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.