200 - Vitalik's Philosophy: d/acc

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 the inform everyone's information and custody for them we are creating forms of accounts recovery that don't depend on I you know Google or Twitter having everyone's master keys um so that and that's happening with social

recovery wallets and account abstraction and Arc 4337 um 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 welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet Finance this is Ryan Shan Adams I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more

bankless falic butan on the episode today he's sharing his philosophy with us he calls it diac and he explains what he means by it in this episode I think there's uh really three reasons we wanted to have this conversation on bankless um 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 accelerationist that's the eak community we've got the tech d accelerationist that's the EA community and the debate is whether we should continue on this

path forward towards AI the way 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 vitalic brain on this for quite a while ever since we had our episode with eler owski who informed us very politely that we're all going to die so we asked falic what's his probability of AI Doom the second reason for this episode is I think the philosophy that vitalic lays out is something everybody body in crypto can align on it's 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 soul and getting to the bottom of things and the third reason we're having this conversation it's vitalic butterin okay that's enough he's always got interesting things to say David why was this episode significant to you 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 like guys you solve problems via technology the acceleration and the speed of Technology will help others catch up as well and this ation of how fast we want to go collectively as humanity is causing tension in in society at large and well as podcasters

what do we do we try and Define the landscape Define The Contours of the conversation help people learn the perspectives of other sides uh 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 vitalic 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 uh and so that's why this episode is significant to me all right

guys we're going to get right to the conversation with vitalic on diak 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 bank the nation I'm extremely excited to introduce you to vitalic buter and 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 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 vitalic recently wrote this post uh 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 Bank list vitalic welcome back thank you guys it's good to be here this post that you wrote vitalic which uh you 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 of crypto and just immediately outside uh 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 Rel relationship to the globe's technology sector so can can we set up the conversation uh and kind of set the table if we will because this it's happening Society wide two camps are forming there's what is known as now recently the accelerationists uh the

Protech and then the deceleration is the anti-tech I'm not sure if anti is fair um how would you set the table of This Global conversation that's being had yeah I mean I'm not even sure if uh two camps is the right way to describe bit uh because I think what I honestly see in the the world and some of the discussions that have been happening in the world is like people being confronted with these completely new issues with made by completely new

people that they are not used to paying attention to with completely new uh memes and uh you know weird vocabulary like sha goth and P doom and timelines and all of these things and like 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 um like if you think

about the even uh most recent iak versus effective altruist debate to kind of uh give very uh approximated crude labels to 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 woke versus anti-woke right this is uh

basically 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 you know like Tech forward um AI leaning uh gray tribe uh people who went and in many cases contined to go to the same dinner parties or in the same uh Social Circles and like suddenly

there's this issue that has basically pulled them in very different directions and like if you're coming at it from the outside then like existing tribal mirrors don't really tell you much about it right because like if you're the type of person who for example thinks that tech people are bad be and you know these are rich white male dominated uh fields that uh are totally out of touch

with the rest of reality then like well guess what like both of these camps have a a a very large number of people that fit both of those descriptions right and both of those camps have I think a large number that do not that also get uh that also gets underappreciated right like there's a huge International audience for um a lot of these AI focused things because similarly to how within the crypto space um things

like you know ZK EVMS and ERC 4237 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 you know do also see AI as that kind of opportunity right and then if you're a left-leaning person uh who is uh very skeptical of Corporations and who is uh like Pro um governments to put

it crudely but most skeptical of governments when that government is being influenced by corporations like well guess what you know the e and e camps are both you know doing a lot of influencing of government and there's like lots of money on both sides right um and so I think uh the way that uh like this conflict really is doesn't map to these existing tribal mirrors is uh 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 what actually is their own perspective on the particular issue and like how do they actually think about this uh totally new thing that was uh not even on most people's Radars given two years ago right and I think like within crypto it's uh um the same thing right um in the sense that I feel like crypto has uh

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 uh 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 uh 2008 era context uh where I you know

we're talking about like the second uh the chancellor being on the brink for the second bailout for banks as the uh Bitcoin Genesis block says um you know like literally as part of the block body uh we um the discussions around like ending the FED um creating an alternative to central banks and all of these things and a lot of the big discussions in 2023 are just totally not related to that at

all right it's like uh you know I'm sorry but like the like you know the Israel Gaza situation is not going to be better if those if those lands ran on sound money right you know and uh you know like same with AI you know sorry like sound money is not going to make you know like P Doom go down right uh so it's and now I I mean it is possible to kind of overstate this right I mean I think like for

example the with the recent um election of Argentina where like I feel so so far totally you know like unqualified to give a kind of like Grant you know this this is good this is bad perspective um on it but what I have noticed for the from the sidelines that fascinates me is that like m is actually talking about economics and like Argentinian people do actually care about economics right and there definitely is an extent to which kind of the US and the rich country is

in general we have I think like asy has pointed out moved from caring about the economic access to caring about the cultural AIS right it's um like like the issue that emotionally arouses people in the in the US these days like it's not um you know like pensions and healthare and uh like savings right or at least like that's not what the newspapers report about but you know in places like artina at you know

it still is and there's a like a refreshing sort of grounded in reality aspects to it 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 kind of goals and dreams that extend um you know like Beyond like like fairly narrow details of like this is you know what the structure of the money is going to look like 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 so I 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 you know like this past year and 2023 is that like I have a lot of beliefs about like blockchains and cryptocurrency and c 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 um also have my beliefs about effective outro ISM but like these sets of beliefs were not really talking to each other in a lot

ofes right and like asking the question of like what really uh look what is your actual take on like how crypto fits into this larger picture of 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 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 like it is a like a question that actually needs to be asked right um and so yeah like the so like I was thinking about um a lot of these topics and then of course about a month and a half ago Mark Andre's technal Optimist Manifesto came out and then of course an entire spectrum of replies to the Techo Optimist Manifesto came out um and then I started uh um at least thinking about

how I would write this kind of piece and then you knowu connect and Def connect deleted a bunch and then finally you know the uh open AI situation just kind of like blasted basically the exact same topic into focus in a lot of people's minds again um and so I decided like I'd actually need to like get document out there and here we are yeah that that's what I very much saw in your post vitalic is is kind of like it it accomplished this goal of maybe creating

a a unified Philosophy for crypto in the broader context of this societal conversation and and I want to set that up because you know this year is I think the year that this societal conversation between this acceleration view what you called uh eak which stands for effective accelerationism for folks that are not familiar and this more kind of anti-tech type view um uh effective altruism maybe like to your pointal 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 of stuff is the problem to everything and you know ignore the nonte the the non-technical and immeasurable side of life right um and 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 it it is fascinating and and there does seem to be like to your point this is

all the same tribe that has maybe like in crypto we'd call this a fork maybe a social Fork right where we've got now these accelerationists coming out and saying whoa whoa whoa uh we don't subscribe to kind of some of the anti-tech philosophy of of some in the AI safety movement I I would say that um bankless listeners maybe and from you David myself s'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 eler owski that is like what I would say imprinted on my soul vitalic

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 and now here it was with chat GPT that the AI posed actual existential threat to um to humanity and so we went on a quick side quest up you know uh from our regularly scheduled crypto uh channel to to explore that a bit and we uncovered that this is not just a a question that um Bank list and people in crypto are facing but it's a society level question and it feels like the rest of society is

is you know the reason David um put this into two camps I I realize that there's a lot of you know subtlety and and granularity between the two camps but it's almost like society's being asked to choose right what do you think about technology do you want to hit pedal to the floor and fully accelerate or do you want to just stop slow it down and just like be cautious and so I I'm wondering uh vitalic if you could give a quick definition for folks that are unfamiliar what is uh the accelerationist view I think you have a u a meme of this that opens your article uh and it says like

dangers behind Utopia ahead that's the accelerationist view for 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 uh you know uh we're journeying into this dangerous Frontier I guess I would say is the anti-tech view could you just illustrate the the core viewpoints of of both camps to to ground Us in this episode sure um so the way that I would think about the effective acceleration as perspective is

basically uh like it's all about recognizing the invisible graveyard right um The Invisible graveyard is a phrase that I think either Alex stabo or someone else came up with in the context of uh 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 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 a um you know about about 60 million like literally a World War II scale a number

of people every year and if technology doesn't massively accelerate the base case is that literally all of us are um including everyone listening to this podcast right now is going to die right um and and uh the gains that come from technology are just massive right like if you just think about the difference between the kind of life that we have now and the life that we have um a thousand years ago or even 50 years ago

there's just a whole number of both measurable and immeasurable things that have um massively improved and like the these improv bits are incredibly large and these improv bits can even overshadow um uh some of the worst things that um happened 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 um so like for example if you um

look there's like a whole bunch of correlated dips in the 1910s and obviously that's World War I in the case where there was a double dip the second dip is the Spanish Flu we're looking by the way Bank list listeners at a life expectancy chart over the past 120 years or so yeah and it has I think about eight lines for various countries you know us Europe Asia um so there's some dips in the 1910s where there's double dips it's uh World War I and Spanish Flu in the uh 1940s there's dips which is

obviously World War II then um China's got a dip in 1960 which is the Great Leap Forward and so there's like very visible disasters um along here but if you just zoom out even a bit they all of these um dips ultimately are overshadowed by just like the incredibly large gains from Medical Technology right and so grow like growth in technology does um a lot and even growth in wealth uh does a lot for example

right 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 uh 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 you know screeching and complaining that things could end up going in the opposite direction right so that's the accelerationist case um 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 antich case it's one that I admittedly am know unbalance very

not sympathetic to and know like I've written about this in the article but I think if I had to illustrate kind of the the really biggest and most important um like the strongest parts of that case um obviously the environment and climate change are um a really big aspect of this right um so there's this chart of how temperatures are suddenly rising in a way that's like totally unprecedented in any uh um know historical natural

situation except possibly for like know like asteroids that like fell know like many tens of millions of years years ago or something similar right yep there's a there's the graph right it just over the last century and a half it's just gone vertical there's graphs of a species Extinction that are pretty bad there's graphs of uh 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 would make the risk worse but that even is a risk of like present Ai and like present day

surveillance technology um then there is just the fact that like easier communication um creates greater economies of scale and that creates greater centralization which uh creates opportunities for political conflict of a scale that uh totally did did not exist before so you could try to make that argument though I think at the same time like genas Khan would be a pretty big counter argument to that right this is uh 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 Jing Jing J is yeah so you know there's a but uh the um and then I think um on the climate side like my uh my counter arguments 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh you know like six years that I went to to to visit over and over again um since then

um so and then you know there's like ozone and like some reforestation in some areas um and so forth right so like that would be the counter to the counter um but then the anti-tech argument that is more compelling to me personally is like this what this like specific one about super intelligent AI right and super intelligent AI to me is uh 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 the wheel guns um 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 know there's 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 there's an interesting argument that some historians make that uh guns are sort of more democratizing than the previous wave of military technology which was Bose which uh you know required like 10

years of uh training to be able to use well and so kind of enabled um more centralized forms of government but uh know even even still right like military technology is like the other big um exception in general right but uh 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 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 if you think about humans right humans have been able to take over and utterly dominate the world and even um accidentally genocide all kinds of

species of animals um in most cases milk without even intending or even realizing that that's what we're doing and humans got into this position of power entirely because of know our minds right like our minds enabled us to create you know 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

by a factor of know like a 10,000 right then the question is like well what's going to happen to humans and the risk here is the um comes from this um argument of let I call um well two arguments right one argument is the difficulty of alignment and the second argument is instrumental convergence um so the difficulty of alignment is basically the difficulty of uh 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 and like there have been um 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 um you know famously Got The Touch to turn everything into gold and then of course you know he ended up dying of starvation um then there was uh

I I forget who but the Greek um mythical figure who wished for immortality but forgot to wish for Eternal youth right and so there like the problem that if you don't perfectly specify what you want then like there's lots of ways for that to be just like slightly satisfied in a slightly different way do you guys remember that I think it was an Edgar Alan Poe short story called like the mon monkey paw or something like this where the character receives a monkeyy paw

that that gives him three wishes and so he would wish for things like one of his wishes was um you know his uh his um he wished for money uh and what what ended up happening is the monkeys 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 were fulfilled it reminds me of that as well yeah now I mean I think um one kind