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In a new essay, Ethereums creator splits the difference between Effective Altruism and Effective Accelerationism with a reiteration of crypto principles of both independence and democracy.

Posted November 28, 2023 at 12:52 pm EST.

For a crypto veteran like me, the bull market between 2020 and 2022 was most notable for what was missing: Vitalik Buterin. The thoughtful, unassuming creator and intellectual figurehead of the Ethereum ecosystem was largely pushed out of headlines by bombastic, performative (and fraudulent) caricatures like Do Kwon and Sam Bankman-Fried.

But with such charlatans and their allies now discredited well beyond crypto circles, Buterin is back in a big way with a lengthy essay he published on Monday entitled My techno-optimism. Though the message is broad, it arrives as a specific response to the recent public rift at OpenAI. That fight was broadly driven by a split between Effective Altruists, or EAs the group Sam Bankman-Fried allied with and helped fund and Effective Accelerationists, or (e/acc), a far more free-market oriented faction that includes people like Marc Andreessen.

In the recent OpenAI leadership fight, the EAs seemingly took the role of techno-pessimists, trying to slow the spread of AI tools, while the e/acc faction backed Sam Altmans focus on growth. But Buterin sees both sides as having far too many plans to save the world that involve giving a small group of people extreme and opaque power and hoping that they use it wisely. As Ive written elsewhere, the two factions are branches of the same underlying Silicon Valley ideology, and both have deep conceptual flaws that ultimately sum out to authoritarianism.

Buterins response appears in many ways far more nuanced than the positions he is reacting to. He calls it d/acc, or defensive accelerationism.

Buterins counterpoint leans most of all on decentralization and democratic decision-making in the management of human progress. Buterin says that The d stands for defensive acceleration, or perhaps decentralized, or differential acceleration. It could just as easily, based on Buterins ideas, stand for democratic accelerationism.

Vitalik argues that those various Ds are linked. A society that develops in a defensive way is a more just and fair one, because its decentralization discourages attacking others, in turn leaving democracy free to flourish at the local or small-group level specifically. He uses the example of Switzerland, whose mountainous terrain historically helped it maintain a more horizontal and localized system of political power, since the various sub-national polities cant easily attack each other, or be attacked.

In more contemporary technological terms, Buterin specifically emphasizes privacy and autonomy, as well as cybersecurity and infosecurity as key principles of development on d/acc lines. He fully endorses a security-focused open-source movement, rather than closed and proprietary corporations and venture capital funds. This seems a specific knock on the EAs, who have been resistant to making AI tech more accessible.

On a related note, Buterin seems viscerally repulsed by the enthusiasm for military technology among the effective accelerationist crowd. On this point, he accuses the e/accs of making the same egotistical mistake as the EAs: Supporting the advancement of military tech, Buterin writes, requires believing that the dominant technological power will reliably be one of the good guys in most conflicts, now and in the future.

The essay also explores other important topics, like pandemic preparedness, and lays out decentralized approaches. At a very high level, Buterin praises systems like prediction markets and X/Twitters community notes feature, specifically because theyre structured to usefully integrate feedback from any member of the public. No surprise, Buterin also emphasizes the value of blockchains and cryptocurrency in his notion of digital defensive infrastructure, for instance for their ability to prevent centralized chokepoints for data.

Buterins D does not, crucially, stand for deceleration. He opens the essay with a strong argument for technological progress as a boon to human well-being, and explicitly connects that to the beneficial potential of artificial intelligence. And though he also accepts the risk of superintelligence dominating human life, he thankfully gives short shrift to the sci-fi fantasies of destructive AI that seem to haunt the Effective Altruists and their AI Doomer allies. Hes far more concerned with the realistic, here-and-now threat of AI turning humans into passive pets, simply because the AIs will make objectively better decisions.

But even given such risks, Buterin rejects the idea that any small group like the OpenAI board should control technological progress. Notably, this echoes close to a decade of Buterins own proactive efforts to reduce his own power over Ethereum. He rightly identifies reliance on central authority as an implicit element of contemporary Effective Altruism, and generally he seems to have the least affection for that set of ideas.

Buterin is more clearly allied with the effective accelerationists, and calls d/acc a subspecies of e/acc just one that is much more selective and intentional. But he rightly pushes back against their most extremist tendency, too their belief that unstructured free markets in themselves lead to human progress. Buterins objections here include the uncontroversial fact that many markets have proven to be natural monopolies. Following the e/acc free-market doctrine, he writes, seems likely to lead to a monopoly on artificial intelligence specifically, with disastrous implications for human freedom and flourishing.

Theres much more breadth and subtlety to Buterins dense disquisition for instance, he includes transhumanist ideas like brain-computer interfaces in his idea of defensive technological development. But its not hard to see d/acc as a rebranding of the left-wing libertarianism that has come to define the political ethos of the Ethereum community. Buterins pitch also reflects the same basic optimism and openness that defines the actually-existing Ethereum community today.

I believe humanity is deeply good, Vitalik writes in closing. Yes, human beings are often mean, but we much more often show kindness and mercy, and work together for our common benefit.

Two billion years from now, if the Earth or any part of the universe still bears the beauty of Earthly life, it will be human artifices like space travel and geoengineering that will have made it happen, Buterin continues.

We need to build, and accelerate.

See the rest here:

Vitalik Buterin's 'Defensive Accelerationism' Fits Squarely Into the ... - Unchained