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Digital authoritarianism has been on the rise for a decade, and surveillance technology has already given authoritarian governments powerful new strategies to crack down on opposition: let the protests happen, but then detect and quietly go after the participants after the fact. More generally, my basic fear is that th...
Quoting a semi-famous post on the philosophy of AI and crypto by 0xAlpha:When there is no need for political-ideological work and war mobilization, the supreme commander of war only needs to consider the situation itself as if it were a game of chess and completely ignore the thoughts and emotions of the pawns/knights/...
Furthermore, political-ideological work and war mobilization require a justification for anyone to wage war. Don't underestimate the importance of such \"justification\". It has been a legitimacy constraint on the wars in human society for thousands of years. Anyone who wants to wage war has to have a reason, or at lea...
Today, the \"human in the loop\" serves as an important check on a dictator's power to start wars, or to oppress its citizens internally. Humans in the loop have prevented nuclear wars, allowed the opening of the Berlin wall, and saved lives during atrocities like the Holocaust. If armies are robots, this check disappe...
Over the last few months, the \"e/acc\" (\"effective accelerationist\") movement has gained a lot of steam. Summarized by \"Beff Jezos\" here, e/acc is fundamentally about an appreciation of the truly massive benefits of technological progress, and a desire to accelerate this trend to bring those benefits sooner. I fin...
In addition to my AI-related concerns, I feel particularly ambivalent about the e/acc enthusiasm for military technology. In the current context in 2023, where this technology is being made by the United States and immediately applied to defend Ukraine, it is easy to see how it can be a force for good. Taking a broader...
On the other hand, I see the need for new approaches in thinking of how to reduce these risks. The OpenAI governance structure is a good example: it seems like a well-intentioned effort to balance the need to make a profit to satisfy investors who provide the initial capital with the desire to have a check-and-balance ...
Across the board, I see 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. And so I find myself drawn to a different philosophy, one that has detailed ideas for how to deal with risks, but which seeks to create and maintain a mor...
One frame to think about the macro consequences of technology is to look at the balance of defense vs offense. Some technologies make it easier to attack others, in the broad sense of the term: do things that go against their interests, that they feel the need to react to. Others make it easier to defend, and even defe...
An obvious example of this is Switzerland. Switzerland is often considered to be the closest thing the real world has to a classical-liberal governance utopia. Huge amounts of power are devolved to provinces (called \"cantons\"), major decisions are decided by referendums, and many locals do not even know who the presi...
I discovered a related phenomenon when advising quadratic funding experiments within the Ethereum ecosystem: specifically the Gitcoin Grants funding rounds. In round 4, a mini-scandal arose when some of the highest-earning recipients were Twitter influencers, whose contributions are viewed by some as positive and other...
And this is a reason why even in otherwise highly democratic organizations, decisions of how to respond to negatives are often left to a centralized board. In many cases, this conundrum is one of the deep reasons why the concept of \"freedom\" is so valuable. If someone says something that offends you, or has a lifesty...
At other times, however, the \"grin and bear it\" approach is unrealistic. And in such cases, another answer that is sometimes worth looking toward is defensive technology. The more that the internet is secure, the less we need to violate people's privacy and use shady international diplomatic tactics to go after each ...
This core idea, that some technologies are defense-favoring and are worth promoting, while other technologies are offense-favoring and should be discouraged, has roots in effective altruist literature under a different name: differential technology development. There is a good exposition of this principle from Universi...
There are inevitably going to be imperfections in classifying technologies as offensive, defensive or neutral. Like with \"freedom\", where one can debate whether social-democratic government policies decrease freedom by levying heavy taxes and coercing employers or increase freedom by reducing average people's need to...
Now, let's see how to apply this principle to a more comprehensive worldview. We can think of defensive technology, like other technology, as being split into two spheres: the world of atoms and the world of bits. The world of atoms, in turn, can be split into micro (ie. biology, later nanotech) and macro (ie. what we ...
The most underrated defensive technology in the macro sphere is not even iron domes (including Ukraine's new system) and other anti-tech and anti-missile military hardware, but rather resilient physical infrastructure. The majority of deaths from a nuclear war are likely to come from supply chain disruptions, rather th...
Especially due to its long-term health effects, Covid continues to be a concern. But Covid is far from the last pandemic that we will face; there are many aspects of the modern world that make it likely that more pandemics are soon to come: Higher population density makes it much easier for airborne viruses and other p...
Animal domestication and factory farming are major risk factors. Measles probably evolved from a cow virus less than 3000 years ago. Today's factory farms are also farming new strains of influenza (as well as fueling antibiotic resistance, with consequences for human innate immunity). Modern bio-engineering makes it ea...
This is an area where CryptoRelief and Balvi, two orgs spun up and funded as a result of a large accidental windfall of Shiba Inu coins in 2021, have been very active. CryptoRelief initially focused on responding to the immediate crisis and more recently has been building up a long-term medical research ecosystem in In...
Taking inspiration from the 19th century water engineering movement that defeated cholera and other waterborne pathogens, it has funded projects across the whole spectrum of technologies that can make the world more hardened against airborne pathogens by default (see: update 1 and update 2), including: Far-UVC irradiat...
There is an opportunity to build a world that is much more hardened against airborne pandemics, both natural and artificial, by default. This world would feature a highly optimized pipeline where we can go from a pandemic starting, to being automatically detected, to people around the world having access to targeted, l...
Cyber defense, blockchains and cryptography. It is generally understood among security professionals that the current state of computer security is pretty terrible. That said, it's easy to understate the amount of progress that has been made. Hundreds of billions of dollars of cryptocurrency are available to anonymousl...
Browsers as the de-facto operating system. Over the last ten years, there has been a quiet shift from downloadable applications to in-browser applications. This has been largely enabled by WebAssembly (WASM). Even Adobe Photoshop, long cited as a major reason why many people cannot practically use Linux because of its ...
However, the lack of cyber defense in other spheres has also led to major setbacks. The need to protect against spam has led to email becoming very oligopolistic in practice, making it very hard to self-host or create a new email provider. Many online apps, including Twitter, are requiring users to be logged in to acce...
These are concerning trends, because it threatens what has historically been one of my big hopes for why the future of freedom and privacy, despite deep tradeoffs, might still turn out to be bright. In his book \"Future Imperfect\", David Friedman predicts that we might get a compromise future: the in-person world woul...
This is where my own emphasis on cryptographic technologies such as blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs comes in. Blockchains let us create economic and social structures with a \"shared hard drive\" without having to depend on centralized actors. Cryptocurrency allows individuals to save money and make financial tra...
Zupass, incubated at Zuzalu earlier this year, is an excellent example of this in practice. This is an application, which has already been used by hundreds of people at Zuzalu and more recently by thousands of people for ticketing at Devconnect, that allows you to hold tickets, memberships, (non-transferable) digital c...
These technologies are an excellent example of d/acc principles: they allow users and communities to verify trustworthiness without compromising privacy, and protect their security without relying on centralized choke points that impose their own definitions of who is good and bad. They improve global accessibility by ...
Info-defense. Cyber-defense, as I have described it, is about situations where it's easy for reasonable human beings to all come to consensus on who the attacker is. If someone tries to hack into your wallet, it's easy to agree that the hacker is the bad guy. If someone tries to DoS attack a website, it's easy to agree...
I am also a fan of prediction markets, which can help identify the significance of events in real time, before the dust settles and there is consensus on which direction is which. The Polymarket on Sam Altman is very helpful in giving a useful summary of the ultimate consequences of hour-by-hour revelations and negotia...
Within the blockchain space, there is a particular type of info defense that I think we need much more of. Namely, wallets should be much more opinionated and active in helping users determine the meaning of things that they are signing, and protecting them from fraud and scams. This is an intermediate case: what is an...
Because of its more subjective nature, info-defense is inherently more collective than cyber-defense: you need to somehow plug into a large and sophisticated group of people to identify what might be true or false, and what kind of application is a deceptive ponzi. There is an opportunity for developers to go much furt...
Social technology beyond the \"defense\" framing. To some degree, I can be justifiably accused of shoehorning by describing some of these info technologies as being about \"defense\". After all, defense is about helping well-meaning actors be protected from badly-intentioned actors (or, in some cases, from nature). Som...
Technologies like this could be used to enable more decentralized governance over contentious decisions. Again, blockchain communities are a good testing ground for this, and one where such algorithms have already shown valuable. Generally, decisions over which improvements (\"EIPs\") to make to the Ethereum protocol a...
Carbonvote had its flaws: it relied on ETH holdings to determine who was a member of the Ethereum community, making the outcome dominated by a few wealthy ETH holders (\"whales\"). With modern tools, however, we could make a much better Carbonvote, leveraging multiple signals such as POAPs, Zupass stamps, Gitcoin passp...
So what are the paths forward for superintelligence? The above is all well and good, and could make the world a much more harmonious, safer and freer place for the next century. However, it does not yet address the big elephant in the room: superintelligent AI. The default path forward suggested by many of those who wo...
The main practical issue that I see with this so far is that people don't seem to actually trust any specific governance mechanism with the power to build such a thing. This fact becomes stark when you look at the results to my recent Twitter polls, asking if people would prefer to see AI monopolized by a single entity...
The size of each poll is small, but the polls make up for it in the uniformity of their result across a wide diversity of sources and options. In nine out of nine cases, the majority of people would rather see highly advanced AI delayed by a decade outright than be monopolized by a single group, whether it's a corporat...
The main approach preferred by opponents of the \"let's get one global org to do AI and make its governance really really good\" route is polytheistic AI: intentionally try to make sure there's lots of people and companies developing lots of AIs, so that none of them grows far more powerful than the other. This way, th...
My experience within Ethereum is mirrored by learnings from the broader world as a whole, where many markets have proven to be natural monopolies. With superintelligent AIs acting independently of humans, the situation is even more unstable. Thanks to recursive self-improvement, the strongest AI may pull ahead very qui...
A happy path: merge with the AIs? A different option that I have heard about more recently is to focus less on AI as something separate from humans, and more on tools that enhance human cognition rather than replacing it. One near-term example of something that goes in this direction is AI drawing tools. Today, the mos...
Another direction in a similar spirit is the Open Agency Architecture, which proposes splitting the different parts of an AI \"mind\" (eg. making plans, executing on plans, interpreting information from the outside world) into separate components, and introducing diverse human feedback in between these parts.
So far, this sounds mundane, and something that almost everyone can agree that it would be good to have. The economist Daron Acemoglu's work is far from this kind of AI futurism, but his new book Power and Progress hints at wanting to see more of exactly these types of AI. But if we want to extrapolate this idea of hum...
A first natural step is brain-computer interfaces. Brain-computer interfaces can give humans much more direct access to more-and-more powerful forms of computation and cognition, reducing the two-way communication loop between man and machine from seconds to milliseconds. This would also greatly reduce the \"mental eff...
Directions like this are sometimes met with worry, in part because they are irreversible, and in part because they may give powerful people more advantages over the rest of us. Brain-computer interfaces in particular have dangers - after all, we are talking about literally reading and writing to people's minds. These c...
If we want a future that is both superintelligent and \"human\", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option. There are also good arguments why this could be a safer AI alignment path: by involving huma...
One other argument in favor of this direction is that it may be more socially palatable than simply shouting \"pause AI\" without a complementary message providing an alternative path forward. It will require a philosophical shift from the current mentality that tech advancements that touch humans are dangerous but adv...
Is d/acc compatible with your existing philosophy? If you are an e/acc, then d/acc is a subspecies of e/acc - just one that is much more selective and intentional.
If you are an effective altruist, then d/acc is a re-branding of the effective-altruist idea of differential technology development, though with a greater emphasis on liberal and democratic values. If you are a libertarian, then d/acc is a sub-species of techno-libertarianism, though a more pragmatic one that is more c...
If you are a solarpunk, then d/acc is a subspecies of solarpunk, and incorporates a similar emphasis on intentionality and collective action. If you are a lunarpunk, then you will appreciate the d/acc emphasis on informational defense, through maintaining privacy and freedom.
We are the brightest star? I love technology because technology expands human potential. Ten thousand 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 devic...