My techno-optimism

Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum blockchain, with his own take on "techno-optimism". This whole thread was started with Marc Andreessen's manifesto and branches out with a number of critiques and replies.

I liked reading Buterin's view, and how he thinks through it. His general push toward defensive technology is interesting.

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 more democratic world and tries to avoid centralization as the go-to solution to our problems. This philosophy also goes quite a bit broader than AI, and I would argue that it applies well even in worlds where AI risk concerns turn out to be largely unfounded. I will refer to this philosophy by the name of d/acc.

The "d" here can stand for many things; particularly, defense, decentralization, democracyand differential. First, think of it about defense, and then we can see how this ties into the other interpretations.

Reading through this brought many ideas from Taleb's Anti-Fragile to my mind as well. Investing in defensive technology to make people and society more resilient.