# Accelerationism vs Defensive Acceleration in the Age of AI

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-04-09

## Transcript

Rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of a human civilization for about a century.
And that acceleration is uh itself accelerating.
To me, that is the fundamental truth, right?
And whether we yell at it or disagree with it, it is happening.
You know, it's like gravity.
Those that adopt that culture will literally have higher likelihood of surviving in the future.
If you take any one bit and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately, then basically you do lose all value.
And so to me, the question is like, how do we accelerate intentionally?
I think there is a real sense in which uh we have one shot at this.
EAC isn't trying to kill everyone, it's actually trying to save everyone.
If we decelerate, we're gonna have huge opportunity costs and we're gonna miss out on a much better future.
Two competing philosophies have emerged around how fast AI should advance.
EAC, or effective accelerationism, says progress is inevitable and restraint only seeds ground.
DAC, or defensive acceleration, says speed without safeguards risks concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands.
On this episode, originally aired on the A16Z Crypto Podcast, A16Z Crypto CTO Eddie Lazarin speaks with the Talek Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verden, founder and CEO of Xtrapic, alongside Shaw Walters, founder of Eliza Labs.
Oh, nice.
Wow.
So this all started because I just knew these guys had to meet each other.
And uh it rapidly devolved into all of this, which I'm really glad to see.
This is incredible.
Um, and it's uh it's the first time that you guys have really talked in person, right?
Awesome.
And I I this is an incredible synthesis.
Uh so yeah, my name is Shaw.
Uh I've known these guys for a while.
I'm here with Eddie from A16Z Crypto.
Um, and this is a great time.
So everybody's here.
Uh I guess uh you're allowed to, you know, please be respectful.
Uh this is a conversation between them.
We're we're just gonna kind of throw some questions at them as we go along to keep it going.
But feel free to dig into whatever you guys want to.
This is really here for you.
We're all just here to listen.
Um, and uh this will all be live streamed to the other floor.
It's not gonna be public.
Uh, we will be cutting up the video and putting it out later so everyone will get to see and share and everything.
And I think without further ado, uh I'm gonna leave it to Eddie to get started with some of the questions.
So before we ask them, I I'd love to get a sense of the the the crowd.
You get it's always hard to tell the difference between the Twitter timeline and reality.
You know, who here could explain EAC in a few sentences to someone else?
Wow.
That's actually less than I thought.
That's good to know.
That's good to know.
Who here could explain DAC in a few sentences to someone else?
Okay, maybe that might have been more, actually.
Okay, that was very interesting.
Okay, thank you for that.
So maybe we'll maybe we'll just start there, right?
Is uh the term uh accelerationism, uh at least in the techno-capitalist sense, dates back to Nick Land's CCRU research group in the 90s.
But some might say that these ideas really took took shape even further back, the 60s and 70s with Deleuze and Guitari.
Let me maybe start with Vitalik.
Why are we having an earnest conversation about the ideas of philosophers right now?
What makes this accelerationism idea relevant?
Again, I think uh ultimately, yeah, you know, all of uh ultimately I think um you know we're all here trying to make sense of the world and trying to make sense of uh uh like what it even uh makes sense to do in the world, right?
And uh this is uh something that we've had for thousands of years.
I think the new thing that we've had for probably uh roughly a hundred years is uh making sense of a world that uh has rapid change and uh sometimes even that has uh I mean maybe this is us giving a bit ahead, but like rapid destructive change, right?
So uh, you know, like the uh early, yeah, the the early era of this is uh that uh there was uh a in the uh pre-World War I uh era around the 1900s, there was a lot of uh like original techno optimist uh sentiments, right?
And uh there was a lot of excitement about uh back then, well, you know, the thing that we call today tech.
Back then, uh chemistry was tech, um, and then electricity was also tech.
Um, and uh, you know if if you uh even you know, like watch uh like even movies like some of the Sherlock Holmes ones, you know you got to like really feel the vibe of that kind of era, right?
And uh it was rapidly improving living standards, uh rapidly uh liberating women in the household, doing uh amazing uh uh things, extending lives.
Uh and uh then of course, uh you know, World War I happened, right?
And uh, World War I famously, yeah, you know, people rode in with horses and uh rode out on uh tanks, right?
And uh it was a destructive war.
Then World War II came and uh World War II was uh an even more destructive war.
And uh, you know, it gave uh birth to I am become death destroyer of worlds.
And uh this is like some of the background of uh you know things like postmodernism and uh people basically trying to make sense of like, okay, like a lot of beliefs were shattered, and what we do what do we believe now, right?
And uh this is something that I think people believe like every generation, right?
And uh there's a lot of people today who uh even uh grew up um you know, like believing in uh kind of 1960s era, postmodern beliefs, I mean, even uh and uh feeling like those beliefs have been shattered, right?
And even uh people who, for example, uh grew up uh believing in uh you know what uh like I would call hipster environmentalism, and it's this like lovely, beautiful uh idea, and you know, we need to put uh protect the environment and not go so fast, and then you believe in this, and then uh you realize that like, wait, the uh nuclear power plants that you advocated uh to shut down basically means that uh, you know, your country is uh like stuck bootlicking Russia, right?
And uh like basically uh all like look like these are just uh like very very natural uh things that happen right and uh I think this like rapid technological acceleration has been uh a fact of uh human civilization for about a century and uh that acceleration is uh itself accelerating and you know like things like postmodernism are a yeah a response to that a lot of the currents of the 1960s were a response to that and uh you know you can respond by saying it's inevitable you can respond by saying uh we uh we we have to slow it down as uh a lot of people did uh we uh and uh it's just constantly yeah I mean like a rapid uh response to basically the uh effects of the uh ideas that were tried to be executed by uh uh by previous generations and I think you know we uh we're now quite rapidly seeing a new version of uh that exact same cycle continue today and I think it's uh mixing both uh themes that have been around for a long time together with some uh pretty new ideas.
All right.
So so Gil, so what is EAC and why?
Why um yeah, I guess EAC is kind of the byproduct of myself um asking why are we here or how are we here?
What what was the generative process that gave rise to us that gave rise to civilization technology got us to this point where we're having this conversation in this room?
We all have wonderful technology around us, and we emerged from a soup of uh inorganic matter.
So somehow there is a physical generative process, and my day job is trying to do generative AI as a physical process and devices.
And so that was simmering in my brain, and I wanted to apply that sort of uh thinking, that sort of framework, that uh physics first viewpoint to all of civilization, trying to understand civilization as a petri dish, trying to understand how we got here in order to predict where we're going.
And uh, you know, that uh got me down the rabbit hole of the physics of life itself, like emergence of life, a biogenesis, and uh a field of physics called stochastic thermodynamics, which is the the thermodynamics of out-of-equilibrium systems, so what describes uh life forms and also including our brains, uh right, intelligence.
So it's it's it's both the physics of life and intelligence, but it's also the physics of any system that obeys the second law of thermodynamics, uh, which includes our whole civilization.
And so, really, to me, it's just been an observation that systems tend to self-adapt and complexify in order to capture work from their environment and dissipate heat.
Uh, and that is the fundamental driving force behind all of progress, all of quote unquote acceleration, all of everything we see today.
And to me, that is the fundamental truth, right?
And whether we yell at it or disagree with it, it is happening.
This is, you know, it's like gravity.
It's uh you can argue with thermodynamics, it doesn't care, it keeps going.
Uh, and so, you know, to me, EAC was like, okay, well, given this fact, and given that if you miss if you look at the equations carefully, you can observe that there's a Darwinian like selection effect for every bit of information prescribing configurations of matter.
So whether that's a gene, a meme, uh chemical specification, uh product design, a policy, there's a selective pressure on everything, and everything is intercoupled in this big soup of matter.
And that selection pressure is selects bits according to whether they're useful for the system they're part of, they're useful to better predict the environment, capture work, and dissipate more heat.
So are they useful for uh sustenance, for um sustaining yourself, preserving yourself, predicting your environment, predicting danger, but also is it useful for for growth?
Because if you grow and replicate, then those bits of information replicate and there's a natural error correction.
So, in a way, it's a just a byproduct of the selfish bit principle that emerges from physics.
And what that tells us is that the bits that are part of the future are the bits that are useful for growth and further acceleration of this growth.
And so if to me, I wanted to design a culture that if we bootloaded this mental software in the population, those that adopt that culture will literally have higher fitness.
They will literally have higher likelihood of surviving in the future.
So EAC isn't trying to kill everyone, it's actually trying to save everyone.
It's basically to me, I think mathematically provably having a decelerative mindset, and it's a general pattern of many subcultures of making yourself small, degrowth, and so on.
Uh, it's actually negative, it gives you negative fitness, and actually accelerating your downfall as an organism, whether it's D cell mindset at an organization level in a company, at a national level, at an individual level, you're lowering your likelihood of being part of the future.
And to me, that is is not necessarily virtuous uh to spread that memes to spread sort of pessimism, doomerism.
It's actually I I well we're we're using a lot of terminology that I think quite unpacked the other.
Yeah, yeah.
So, like EAC, what is that?
What does that what does that stand for?
What's when what is acceleration?
Oh, uh and and what is deceleration?
Is it D sell?
And these like what I'm trying to get at is I think EAC came as a little bit of a response to something that was happening in the culture at the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We gotta what was happening in our culture?
What was it a response to?
And what was what's say a little bit about the dialogue that led to encapsulating it in a in a name.
So it, you know, it was 2022.
I think the world was somewhat pessimistic.
We're just emerging from COVID, things weren't looking good, we're feeling down, everybody was kind of lacking sunlight, everybody was sort of, you know, pessimistic about the future.
And and and essentially, um, yeah, AI doomerism was kind of the monoculture.
What is that?
What is AI?
AI doomerism is just kind of um, you know, uh panicking that about you know the fact that if there's a a system that is too complex, our brains or human brains or generative models can have a predictive model of them, and so we can't control them.
And things we can't control give give us entropy about our model but of the future, and that induces anxiety, right?
And then AI doomerism to me has been a weaponization of people's anxieties for political purposes.
Um overall, I think, like uh, and we'll get to this, you know.
Uh I I think AI doomerism is a is a big uh net negative, and I wanted to create a counterculture to that.
Now, what I saw in the X algorithm is that uh, you know, the X algorithm uh and many algorithms reward agreement or strong disagreement, right?
So there's, you know, if you view the algorithm as a Markov chain, asymptotically everything converges to bipolar distributions of opinions for anything.
So it's like, you know, you had the Ala, EA, Miri cult uh complex.
Uh you know, I I kind of clustered them there, maybe not so gracefully, but you have that complex.
I was like, what's gonna be the the opposite of that?
And you know, to me, I was like, okay, well, you know, the opposite of anxiety is is curiosity, right?
Instead of downside protection, it's upside seeking, uh uh, you know, fear of missing out.
It's like, you know, um dopamurgic uh sort of mindset.
And it's like, hey, actually, if we if we decelerate, we're gonna have huge opportunity costs and we're gonna miss out on a much better future.
And it's just like painting that future more vividly and bootloading this mindset of optimism because the thesis is that, you know, if you study neuroscience, we tend to want to have a convergence of our beliefs uh and the world.
And so sometimes we adjust our beliefs to the state of the world, but we also adjust the world to our beliefs.
So if we believe that the state of the world will be bad, then we tend to steer the world to that bad outcome.
If we think the world will be great and we think of positive futures, we tend to hyperstition them.
We we tend to increase the likelihood of their advent.
And so I had a responsibility to spread uh sort of optimism in order to hyperstition a positive future.
And yes, I, you know, online I am very, you know, aggressive and you know use all the political mind hacks because, you know, to me, the end justifies the means.
Like if more people uh are optimistic about the future, feel like they have agency, feel like they can build and and and and make an impact in the world, then that's really good.
And I think you know, sometimes I'm a bit ruthless with my opponents on the other side of the aisle.
Uh I think in private meetings, I'm much more friendly.
But you know, for you know, it like I said, I I just took the extreme opposite to the current monoculture, and then that created some polarity, and then now we can have discussions of where we want to lie, right?
So so I've been with EAC since the beginning, and and it's been a message that as a programmer sitting in a room has been incredibly inspiring, and it's great to see a positive message spread, and it spread very organically.
And I would say that at the time that it started, it was clearly a reaction to this negativity, but it now in 2026, I feel like it feels like EAC won.
It feels like that's no longer the case.
And I think obviously Mark Andreason posts the Techno Optics Manifesto, which I think really kind of codifies some of those ideas and then brings that to like where Vitalic sort of has this this greater commentary.
So I'd kind of love to know from you, Vitalik, like what is EAC in your mind and what is DEAC and what makes them different?
Like what what what drove you to to go this direction?
Yeah, I mean, I think uh maybe I uh I'll also start my uh my answer with thermodynamics, right?
Because why not?
Uh so I mean, this is uh, I mean, it's an interesting topic, right?
Because uh, like I think we hear about like entropy in the context of hot and cold, and we hear about entropy in the context of cryptography, and these are like different universes, and like actually we're not really taught how they're actually the exact same thing, right?
So I'm gonna try actually and like explain this in three minutes.
Uh so okay, so the prompt is why why is it possible to mix hot and cold, but why can't you separate things into hot into hot and cold, right?
And so here's my explanation, right?
So imagine you have two uh jars of gas.
Each jar of gas has a million atoms in it, right?
This jar is cold, and because it's cold, the atoms move slowly.
And so the velocity of every atom can you can represent with a two-digit number, right?
Over here, the atoms are hot.
The velocity of every atom you can represent with a six-digit number, right?
Now, how many digits do you need to represent?
Like, or or rather, if that's what you know, how many digits uh of information do you not know about the system?
The answer is eight million, right?
You don't know the the exact velocities here, two times a million.
You don't know the exact velocities here.
That's eight times a million, right?
Now, what happens if you mix them, right?
Well, if you mix them, the velocities get averaged, and so they become numbers from zero to five hundred thousand.
And so five point seven digits, actually, pretty close to six, right?
And so you mix them, you have two jars, and uh on the one side you have a jar where the amount of information you don't know is five point seven million, and then over here 5.7 million, right?
And so the amounts that you do not know about the gas has gone up from 8 million digits to 11.4 million digits, right?
So the amount that you do not know is increased, right?
This is what it means by entropy go up.
Now we can like try a proof by contradiction.
Imagine you had a device that goes the other way, right?
Imagine you had a device that can take two jars of this like half half hot gas and like actually bring all the heat over here and all the and all the cold over here.
By conservation of energy, this is totally valid, right?
Because it's like the same energy.
But why can't you do it?
And the answer is well, what you've if you could, then what you've done is you've taken this system where what you don't know is 11.4 million digits, and then you've turned it into a system where we don't know is eight million digits, right?
Now, because the laws of physics are time reversible, this is like the important thing, right?
What that implies is if that kind of magic device existed, then actually like you could run the same process in time reverse, and so you could always recover the original, right?
And so what that implies is if that gadget existed, it would also be a gadget for compressing an arbitrary 11.4 million digits into eight million digits, which we know is impossible.
Now, but this also, by the way, tells you why Maxwell's demon works, right?
Which is basically that if you had a magic demon, then actually, yes, you can split the hot and the cold, and uh basically the Maxwell's demon just has to like know the extra 3.4 million digits separately, and then you're fine, right?
So, like what's the moral of this, right?
Basically, that uh increasing entropy is basically mean like one entropy is subjective, right?
Entropy is not like a physical statistic, it's actually how much you don't know, right?
And uh, you know, if uh I like it turns out that like I actually computed a cryptographic hash function and I pushed out the uh the atoms, then like actually based off of that, for me, this like the bottle might be very low entropy, right?
And like maybe I could separate it, right?
But ultimately, it also means that when entropy goes up, it means that our ignorance about the world goes up.
It means that what we do not know goes up, right?
You can go from knowing more to knowing less.
You cannot know in uh you cannot know, go from knowing less to knowing more.
Now, but then why does education exist?
Why do we become smarter?
And the answer is that we go from knowing um fewer, like we basically we go from knowing more things that are useful, right?
Basically, yeah, and the increase in entropy means that we constantly know in some sense less and less about the universe, but the bits that we do know are more meaningful to us, right?
And so there is like a thing that is being spent, and then there is a thing that we are gaining.
And the thing that we are gaining, this is uh like I don't think that there is some like simple mathematical formula that defines it.
The thing that we are gaining, I mean, ultimately, this is basically our morality, right?
Like this is that uh, you know, we value life, we value happiness, we value joy, we yeah, there's a lot of different reasons why we find an earth full of thriving, beautiful humans more interesting than Jupiter, even though you know, like Jupiter has a larger number of particles inside it, and you and uh you need more digits to express how like what each and every one of them is doing, right?
And so I think like value comes from us is the first thing.
And I think also like this connects to what we want out of acceleration, right?
Which is basically that like our goals to me, yeah, ultimately come from us, right?
And so the question is like, okay, we are accelerating, right?
And uh what do we want to accelerate?
And uh, I mean, if we want to like switch, you know, like mathematical analogies a bit, right?
If you take any LLM and you imagine you randomly flip one of the weights to positive nine billion, what happens, right?
What worst case, the LLM becomes useless.
Best case, every weight that's not connected to the nine to the nine billion doesn't do anything, right?
And so, best case is you have an LLM that's that's worst case, you just have junk.
And so basically, I see human society as being kind of like an LLM.
It's this complicated organism.
And if you take any one bit and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately, then it's like basically you do lose all value.
And so to me, the question is like, it's basically, you know, like it's what like Darren Asumwagu calls the narrow corridor, even though, like, you know, the the uh the details on the politics are different, but it's like how do we accelerate uh intentionally?
Okay, I jump off of that.
Yeah, so um yeah, that was an interesting way to describe uh entropy of a gas.
Um essentially um physics, the reason physics is not reversible is because of the second law of thermodynamics.
It's because if you have a trajectory of a system and it dissipates heat, it can't go back because the likelihood of going forwards versus backwards decays exponentially with how much heat you've dissipated.
In a way, it's like literally how much of a dent have you put in the universe, right?
A dent is an inelastic collision, right?
If it if I have a bouncy ball, it's elastic.
If I you know take uh some play-doh and smash it, then it just keeps the the smash shape because that's inelastic and it's hard to reverse.
Um essentially, every bit of information is fighting for its existence, and in order to persist, it needs to make more evidence of its existence that's indelible.
So it's making a larger dent in the universe.
And that principle is how life and intelligence emerges from a soup of matter, and that complexification of systems becoming more and more complex, having more and more bits of information, a bit of information, it tells you informate information is a reduction of entropy, right?
It's a re it's going entropy, is a lack of knowledge.
Information reduces entropy about a system conditional information.
No, I'm very sorry to interrupt.
Yeah, but where did you want to take this?
Yeah.
I'd love to know what EAC is.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
So EAC ultimately it's a metacultural prescription.
So it's not a culture itself.
It tells you you should what would you say?
What is the thing that is accelerating?
The thing that is accelerating is the complexification of matter, such as we can so that we can predict our environment.
We have better auto-aggressive predictive power.
And we capture more free energy.
So the Kardashev scale, right?
And we can and we displayed it as heat.
But that is just the justification from first principles why the Kardashev scale is the ultimate metric for how well we're doing as a selectivity.
Well, allow me to bring it back one.
So maybe this is a little bit selfish, but maybe I'm also helping the audience.
Is that the metaphors and the explanation rooted in physics and in entropy and so on is in a way an explanatory tool to try to get at a phenomenon that we experience directly.
And that experience is the acceleration of the productive capacity of our economy, the acceleration of the development of technology, and the consequences therein.
That's my understanding of what acceleration is.
It gets better at predicting the world.
And it by doing so, it can secure more resources for its sustenance and its growth.
Whether it's a company, whether it's uh, you know, individuals, nations, earth in general.
And, you know, what if you if you just play the movie out, it means that now that we have a way to convert free energy into predictive power with intel artificial intelligence, what that will lead to is an exp uh an ascent on the Kardashev scale.
That's what the equations predict.
And so that is, and and that ascent upgrade is more energy, more artificial intelligence, more everything, more computing, more of these things.
But but even though we are expelling entropy into the uh the universe, we are gaining order, we're actually gaining extra bees.
So we're we're getting the opposite of entropy.
So we're um, so sometimes people think like, oh, yeah, because for more entropy, why don't you blow it all up?
It's like, no, well, then you would stop producing entropy.
It's actually life is more optimal.
Life is an energy-seeking fire, and it just gets smarter and smarter at finding pockets of energy.
And the natural progression of things is we're gonna get out of our local gravitational well and find other pockets of free energy and use them to self-organize into more and more sophisticated systems that are smarter and can you know expand to the stars.
And so that's kind of the you know, that's kind of the ultimate goal of EAC.
It's kind of a formalization of like Elonian sort of mindset of you know, cosmism and expansionism there.
Um, but it's it gives you a fundamental metric.
And then the prescription of EAC is follow the Kardashev gradient.
So whatever policy or actions you can take in the world that maximize impact in our ascent to the on the Kardashev scale, that's what you should do.
That's how you should live your life.
So it's a it's like a meta heuristic for how to design a policy for how to live your life.
And that to me is a culture.
And so uh it's very meta because it's supposed to be true at all times.
It should it should have a very long shelf life.
Yaks is made to be a very Lindy culture.
So yeah.
Well, it it's clear that like there's a deeper thing that's going on here for you.
Like this is almost this is like a mathematically compete complete spirituality that people who have been like really don't have like a we don't have like God is dead, Nietzsche kind of thing, like we're all living in that shadow.
It's like something to make us feel good about.
But I would also say that there's kind of a really practical on the ground, like this is happening today, which I think is where Eddie is trying to get at.
And I and I think that like um Vitalik, you did a great job of addressing a lot of the real practicalities in your blogs on DIAC.
And like if we can bring it, like I I I need to lock you guys in a like with whiteboards on some quantum stuff sometime.
But but for right now, like I think you know, bringing it back down to Earth.
Yeah, yeah, and and look, this is a really like I think that some like Eddie is not scared.
He is like, We're this is gonna be great.
But I I'm a little scared, and I I come to you guys because you give me like hope and clarity.
And so bringing it back to you, Vitalik.
Like, like what what inspired you in this?
What is EAC and what is DAC?
Yeah, so I think uh for me, yeah, um so DIAC, um yeah, so uh it stands for, I mean, uh I usually use um like a decentralized uh defensive acceleration, but then there's also differential and uh democratic in there as well.
Um but uh I think to me, the core ideas are like what is that uh you know technological acceleration has been amazing for human beings, and it's uh something that we need to accomplish as a baseline, right?
And uh even if you look at all of the crazy things and all of the worst downsides that technology did to us in the 20th century, um if you look at, for example, lifespans uh lifespan see in like life expectancy in Germany in 1955 was higher than in uh 1935.
And uh like basically we have just benefited from a massive step up in uh every uh thing that we hear about.
And this is like something like I've even seen, like even that, you know, observing the like my you know, my grandparents' uh home like basically go up from uh having this uh like very um outhouse toilet in the backyard with the responsibly flies buzzing, and I would totally hate it.
And uh I'd have to uh go out, like I'd often go out to the forest to prove because I couldn't stand the flies to something that's like actually uh very modern and hospitable, right?
And uh, you know, like the world has become cleaner, the world's become more beautiful, the world's become more enjoyable, the world's become better for health.
It's been able to sustain more of us, it's become more interesting.
And uh like these things are really uh good and uh beautiful for us.
Um at the same time, I think uh you know we need to recognize that the uh the role of explicit human intention in making a lot of those things happen, right?
So for example, in the 1950s, there was a lot of smog everywhere in the air, and uh people decided smog is a problem, smog sucks, and we need to like do a bunch of stuff to get rid of the smog issue.
And uh now smog is uh not a problem here, at least much less of one.
Um then, you know, we have the uh ozone form issue, and then we actually did things to address that, right?
And then the other thing is uh, yeah, that's uh especially with rapidly accelerating technology again uh AI, I basically see two kinds of risks.
Uh one kind of risk is uh um multipolar risks, which is uh basically is a risk that uh you know lots of people will use the technology to do uh to do very bad things, right?
And uh there's uh concern that like one type of concern is sort of the equivalent of uh you know anyone uh being able to like make uh get a nuke at 7 Eleven, like sort of thing.
And then there's also the concern of like, well, AI itself is uh you know like something that literally is a mind of its own, right?
And uh especially once it becomes powerful enough that it acts without uh human involvement, then you know, like what will it do?
And then there's unipolar risks, which is basically it, I think actually a single AI itself is one of them.
And uh you know, the other one is like I mean AI, like create uh enabling uh or a comment the combination of AI and other water technologies enabling like permanent dictatorship that like you cannot escape.
Like that deeply worries me, right?
Like this is something I follow, right?
And uh, you know, and like again in Russia, for example, like on the one hand the toilets have gotten much better.
On the other hand, like it's got from protesting the impossible to protesting being the sort of thing, where if you do it, the cameras will see you, and then uh you know, a week later you get a knock on the door at 2 a.m., right?
And uh this uh AI is supercharging this, you know, there's a lot of uh a lot a lot of concentration of power happening is happening, and like both of these things really worry me, right?
And like to me, DAC is really attempting to chart a path forward that continues this acceleration and uh accelerates it, but at the same time really deals with both kinds of risks.
So you would say that DAC is emphasizing specific other categories of risk that are maybe less emphasized than you'd like to see in in EAC.
I think there's uh many kinds of uh risks of technology, and uh all of them like many of them are valid, and I mean they have different scales, like some of them become more salient in uh different models of the world and how fast things are happening.
Uh but uh I mean I think uh I think there is a lot that we can do to uh really uh like push against all of those kinds of risks, right?
So Gil, yeah, Gil, do you want to say a little bit?
What was the question again?
It was oh well just just uh compare and contrast EAC and DX.
Yeah, I think I think actually Vitalik and I are very concerned about uh over concentration of power that can happen with AI, and that was a big part of the EAC movement, especially at the beginning.
It was pro-open source.
We want to diffuse AI power.
Uh, because you know, our worry was that the AI safetyism meme was so potent that you know, certain power-seeking individuals could weaponize it to consolidate control over AI and convince you you shouldn't have access to AI for your own good.
And really, if you have a gap in cognition between the individuals and the centralized entities, they will control you.
They can have a full world model of everything going on in your brain, and they can prompt engineer and effectively steer you.
Right.
So you want to symmetrize AI power.
We don't want to, you know, just like Second amendment is about the government not having a monopoly on violence, so we can vibe check the government if it goes out of hand.
You need that for AI.
So we need everybody to be able to own their own models, own their own hardware for that technology to be diffuse, for the power to be uh diffused.
Um but to me, I think like, you know, discussions of stopping uh, you know, AI research and AI progress, that's completely out of the question.
AI is a very fundamental uh technology.
It's a it's it's almost a meta-technology technology that produces technology.
It gives us predictive power over our world.
It can be added on to any task we want to do in the world.
It could be tacked onto any technology and turbocharge it.
It accelerates the acceleration.
The acceleration is this complexification where things become lower friction, uh, things just become better.
You know, our bodies feel comfortable because we have this sort of, you know, this estimator we call happiness of like, what's my estimator on expected persistence of my bits?
That's what we're hard-coded for.
And uh, and and so, you know, I think to me, you know, uh the EA effective altruists, you know, hedonic utilitarianism is maybe like the wrong way to view things, like maximizing happiness.
And to me, I want to have an objective measure of progress, and that's what you know, the EAC framework is.
It's hey, actually, the objective view is like, how are we progressing as a civilization?
Are we scaling up?
Uh, because to me, you know, you have to complexify, you have to have more intelligence, things have to improve in order for you to scale, right?
It's like the ultimate benchmark.
Uh and uh at the same time, uh, you know, there can be setbacks.
Like, like uh, you know, Vitalik said, you know, if AI power would be over concentrated in the hands of a few, that would be net bad for growth, because it's much better if that uh technology is very diffuse.
So in in that respect, we're very aligned, right?
Can I jump in here?
Cause I think you're you're touching on something that I think both of you are are like share a lot of deep ethos.
Um I mean, obviously, Vitalik has produced a lot of MIT open source code, although I know you have some more updated feelings about uh GPL and such.
Um but but obviously both of you have been champions of open source and now open hardware.
And and these have been separate things, but now that we're seeing people start to like like tall us, like putting weights on two chips, ASICs, these kinds of things, they're starting to become very similar.
So I'm very curious, like but both what your thoughts are on open weights and open hardware.
I mean, you're both actually like pretty deep in hardware right now.
Um, and then also like what is the difference between EAC and DIAC with regards to this?
This has been a crazy week, obviously, where like a lot of the things you're talking about have been tested, where you have the government and corporations trying to figure out what the right answer is.
And so I'd love to kind of know what you guys are thinking, just based on that this week.
And like I we I'd love to tease out if there are any kind of differences between you in in where you think this goes.
Yeah, I mean, I think uh, you know, to me, open source accelerates uh the search over a hyper preamerist, it makes our models better.
We can kind of collaborate sort of like a swarm and and traverse design space, right?
And that's what acceleration uh allows us to do, right?
Uh with better technology with more AI now, AI for coding, that search process over uh design space for AI itself is accelerating.
You know, I I think you know, we're we're gonna open source our superconducting uh hardware uh designs uh very soon.
I just want to stagger it with our launch.
But uh I I think diffusing uh knowledge is also diffusing power, right?
And diffusing knowledge when it comes to how to produce intelligence is super important.
We don't want to give, you know, there were discussions apparently in the last administration, according to Mark Andreessen, that uh the US government might want to put the genie back in the bottle and maybe ban, not ban linear algebra, but more or less like ban the math surrounding AI.
And and to me, that would be like almost like banning knowing about biology would be a huge step back.
And so there's no going back, right?
Like this knowledge is out there.
If you try to ban it in the US, some you know, uh other country, a third party, some some uh deregulated island somewhere is gonna keep developing it, and then you're gonna have a huge gap, and now you you have a big risk.
So to us, the biggest risk is a gap in capabilities.
And the way to reduce that risk is to make sure AI power is diffuse.
So whenever there's like, you know, the AI doomerism, like, oh, be be very afraid.
We're the ones responsible, we're the ones who should be put in charge, trust us.
You know, I I just get very skeptical because even if they're well-meaning, like we saw this week, right, they could just get pushed out uh if they sent if they centralize too much power.
It's too juicy for those that that want that power.
And so that's kind of what we were warning about for years, and now it kind of happened.
And you know, Dario's licking his wounds, and uh, you know, some lessons learned there in sort of real politics, right?
And um, anyways.
So, yeah, Vitalik, what do you what do you think of all this?
The two kinds of uh risks that uh you know, like I uh think about, right, are uh unipolar risks and uh multipolar risks, right?
And uh I think uh I mean with uh unipolar risks, uh I mean, you know, the uh anthropic situation is like uh so fascinating, right?
Because you know, ultimately, yeah, the thing that uh like they uh got dinged for is uh refusing to let their uh stuff the their AI be used for uh specifically uh fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans, right?
And uh so it will presumably, you know, if there's uh a chance that you know, like the uh it looks like the mil government and military of this country wants to do mass surveillance of Americans, right?
And uh, you know, that's uh this isn't this is an example of uh like you of unipolar risk, right?
I think uh basically, yeah, you know, like I mean, surveillance is uh one of these uh things where the big effects that it has is it uh takes whoever is stronger and makes them even stronger, right?
It uh it removes uh spaces where pluralism can form, where counter-elites can uh quite uh can coalesce themselves and uh where kind of people can safely explore alternatives and uh like this is uh you know, and surveillance is uh one of these things that easily can be supercharged, right?
I think actually on the defense, uh getting back to open hardware a bit, actually, just uh talk about one of the projects that we've been doing is uh so it the a big part of uh you know, like what I've done in uh DAC is uh basically uh doing uh supported various projects uh that develop uh like open source uh defensive technologies.
So technologies that will make it easy for all of us uh to continue to be safe and protected in a world where like more powerful and crazy capabilities exist, right?
And so in the bio world, for example, this means rapidly leveling up our civilization's uh ability to withstand pandemics.
And so I claim that it is very within reach for us to have China level COVID resistance at the same time as Sweden level um interference uh to people's regular lives.
And like that's even the minimum bar.
And this basically involves stacking filtration, UVC um testing.
Um, like literally a company we invested in is uh fully open source again.
Like the end product of this is like basically passively uh testing the air and being able to tell if like if if there's COVID in the air, right?
Like in general, right?
Like essentially the number of sensors in the world is going to go up, right?
And sensors are uh a big part of uh like being able to act better in the world, right?
But at the same time, sensors mean surveillance, right?
And uh the thing that we're doing is uh actually this project, we we gave out us some of these at DEF CON.
And uh what these project what these are is they're sensors that collect air quality information, CO2, AQI, a few other things.
And uh they locally um like um basically encrypt anonymize like differential privacy in them and uh FH and then um FHE encrypt, and that gets sent off to a server, and uh the server is able to like basically compute all our overall of the data and and uh then like dec collectively decrypt the final answer without being able to see any uh input from any individual person, right?
And uh this is uh like basically, you know, like we're well, we're the goal is to like deliver the hot higher levels of safety, but at the same time protect uh protect people's privacy and like protect against you know the multipolar risk and the uh the uni the like unipolar risk at the same time.
And I think this is how we can like collaboratively yeah as a world like we're um work together to uh um to build something better um and uh i think for hardware like basically i think we need open hardware and we need verifiable hardware like we need every camera in this room to like prove like basically you know like what kind of cameraing it is doing right if like in my ideal world if you if you have fine you can have a million cameras in the streets to prevent people from uh like or detect when people are like engaging in violence against each other but ideally you would have like attestations signatures over LLM and like a public right of inspection and you'd be able to like inspect these things and verify that like the only thing that they do is check when people are doing violence and alert that right so like these kinds of technologies.
So the verifiable hardware idea very interesting especially because it's not something that I think comes up very often but let me can I just ask a very stupid question which is just is open hardware verifiable hardware is that an EAC thing or DAG thing?
Like I need to I think or just I don't know if I ever talked about zero hardware the thing the thing I talk about, to me, uh the greatest risk is a a gap in intelligence between centralized entities and decentralized entities.
So individuals versus the government.
And so right now, with the current compute paradigm, to run a very smart AI model, you need a huge cluster with hundreds of kilowatts.
That is not accessible to the individual.
People want to own and control the extension of their cognition.
That's why we saw the open claw Mac Mini craziness of the past few weeks.
So people are clamoring for that.
The only way where you can symmetrize power between the individual and centralized entities is if there's a densification of intelligence.
We need AI hardware that's far more energy efficient.
So you could plug it into a wall and you could own the extension to your cognition.
Because this year, what's gonna happen?
The models are gonna start online learning and they're gonna become extremely sticky.
It's gonna be like trying to change executive.
Doing what aren't we already trying to radically decrease the cost of compute at a extraordinarily uh exponential pace?
Like I'm trying to understand like what is the additional information that we are trying to inject into the zeitgeist by codifying an idea as EAC or codifying an idea or set of ideas as DIAC.
I I think for me it's like and and it's part of the rest of my mission, you know, with my my company extropic, it's it's getting more intelligence per watt will drastically uh increase the amount of intelligence we produce, and it will also help us climb the Kardashev scale by Javon's paradox.
If you can convert energy into intelligence or in you know, energy into value by proxy uh more readily, there's gonna be more demand for energy, and that's gonna lead to improvement in complexion of civilization.
So to me, that's the most important tech problem because that's what's gonna diffuse AI power, right?
And open hardware is one way to diffuse AI power, but to me, anything von Neumann, any anything digital is gonna look like caveman era hardware.
Truly.
No, it's it's it's just uh I can't wait.
I really can't.
No, it's I'm very excited.
It's coming, right?
So doesn't capitalism already through just natural incentives and already allocate hundreds of billions of dollars at a minimum to this per year.
Uh I don't think they there's that much investment in alternative hardware.
Well, there and alternative hardware, so alternative hard conductors and energy production.
I think is all about diffusing, it's it's uh it's about maintaining variance, not collapsing entropy of our search over any design space, whether it's policies, cultures, whatever, technology.
We need alternative bets.
We need more alternative bets that are out there.
It can't just be the green monster at eating all the profits.
Then there's kind of hyperparameter space staking risk.
We're we're we're we have this design space, we're over investing in the current uh technology, and that might lead to correction, which you know, a correction is diesel, right?
Like because not everything pumping up in a smooth exponential.
So can I just declare they we solved it and they agree?
I think I think on the the uh like the idea of open source and like like this this seems very defensive, like defensive technology in the Vitalik way, and it seems like you guys are very aligned on this, actually.
And and that gives me hope because this is the stuff I care about.
I think that like right now, there are a lot of people who are like a lot uh why does this exist?
Because a lot of people are like very uncertain about the future, and and what appeals to them is that you're saying, like, it's gonna be fine, it's baked in.
And so maybe like if I were to steel man your case here, it you're saying like you're you guys are actually saying the same thing, which is it's kind of already priced in.
It's good.
The only thing stopping us is kind of our bad feeling about it, right?
Well, I'm asking, I'm asking that.
I'm trying to I'm trying to understand where where if yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I I I guess it it's completely natural.
Uh, if sort of there's very high entropy in like your your model rollouts of the future, right?
There's kind of a not a fog of war, but it's it's kind of hard to extrapolate what's gonna happen in the next several years that gives people anxiety.
Your body has this uh evolved this sense of anxiety to kill entropy in the world, right?
If I if I put my phone on the edge and you know, I just want to grab it so it doesn't fall, right?
You get you see, there you go.
That was anxiety.
So you want to take action in the world, right?
So that's that's kind of what is happening now.
But at the same time, if you kill entropy, you're missing out on the upside, right?
You you're missing out on on the huge benefits.
Right now, our whole technocapital machine has had a very long time to equilibrate with our current capabilities.
If you have a disruptive capabilities that comes in, suddenly the whole landscape changes.
So the whole system has to refactor, reconfigure, doesn't mean we're gonna run out of jobs, we're gonna do much more, right?
Now that we have the ability to handle more complexity with less energy, right?
With AI, we're gonna be able to do much harder tasks that are higher complexity and higher payoff.
I don't know about you, but I can't like overnight yet vibe code a whole tokamak.
We're not there yet.
But we might get there, and then we'll have a ton of energy.
And that's that's gonna help support more human headcount and grow population and help us be more comfortable.
So there's a period of discomfort, but if you're in a rapidly changing landscape, the worst thing you can do is kill variants and and and be not plastic, be stiff.
To be plastic, you need to be hedging your bets.
You need to be trying many things, fucking around and finding out the famous FAFO algorithm.
That's an evolutionary algorithm.
We need to we need to try different policies.
We need to try different uh technologic tech trees, we need to try different algorithms, we need to try open source, closed source, we need to try try it all, because we don't know what the future looks like, it looks like.
So we gotta hedge our bets.
And and one variant of policy uh space, what one choice of policy or several, one choice of technology or several are gonna make it, and then we're all gonna be in that slipstream and follow that.
Got it.
Uh I think the fallacy of thinking there's a finite amount of jobs, uh, you know, it's very pervasive.
Let me ask you, let me let me kind of try to bring it back a little bit is is it uh my understanding of disagreement, if there is between EAC and DAC is something to do with how we steer the process of technological progress.
It has to do with how it is steered.
Maybe Vital, could you say a little bit about how is it steered, how ought it be steered, how much control do we have over that steering?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And so I think uh, I mean, DIEC is definitely uh kind of explicitly, yeah.
I mean, I don't wanna want to quite say, yeah, you know, like sailing against the uh techno capital current.
I think the better analogy is like it's trying to actively shape the uh the the technocapital current in uh certain ways.
And uh I mean, one of the ways that I think about this is uh basically it's a matter of making the world safer for for pluralism, right?
And uh if you think about I mean, like some of uh these uh ideas um around like how do we uh improve um like things like biosafety or what does it look like to have vastly better cybersecurity and have like bug free operating systems within a few years.
Um, or if you think about the like, I mean, the whole like a bug free code has been, you know, it's been in the mimetic space of like obviously absurd, naive pipe dream for two decades.
It is going to like flip out of that space like faster than most people expect, right?
And uh I mean within lean ethereum, we're uh doing uh we actually we've managed to like machine prove entire mathematical theorems that are kind of upstream of things like Starts.
And so uh like we're very excited about this.
And basically, I think there is a uh uh like DIAC definitely has this goal of saying, like, yes, you know, like we uh look, we want to uh at the very least, I mean, like do all of these other things to make sure that uh the world is actually uh like able to deal um deal with all of this, uh all of this technological growth in a way that uh like minimizes the yeah, kind of again, you know, like the destructive um aspects and also the centralizing aspects.
And I think that doesn't happen automatically, right?
And uh, you know, right now I uh I mean I don't control any countries, I don't uh control any armies.
I'm just like throwing my uh throwing some like my dollars uh um an ETH um at it and uh you know saying words and hopefully inspiring people to uh also build things in uh in a similar spirit.
Um I think uh there are definitely like political and legal reforms that uh could make the world um more DEAC friendly.
Like there is uh like there's definitely uh such a thing as like engineering legal incentives, for example, to motivate a uh much more rapid shift to total cybersecurity.
That is uh a thing uh uh an example of a thing that can't be done.
So yeah, maybe maybe we'll make it more interactive, sure, and less uh monologue as from here on out.
I guess we both but yeah, to me, AI is is basically Maxwell's demon.
Uh formally.
It it it it you pay energy in order to reduce entropy in the world.
So whether it's bugs in your code, right?
It's uh not knowing whether your code compiles or or or reducing entropy of like, are we gonna get killed by some virus?
So more intelligence is better, right?
Do we agree on that?
And it makes the world safer, actually.
Capabilities, AI capabilities can make the world safer.
And so I guess let's get to the spicy part of the evening.
People have been very patient with us and they want us to, you know, get down to the business.
Like, why do you want to ban data centers is spicy?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I think uh first of all, you know, the I mean, the the current uh trajectory of uh AI is uh you know very fast progress, right?
And uh I don't know how fast the progress the the progress is.
I uh, you know, my uh I mean a couple of years ago I've said that my 95th percent confidence interval for AGI was uh 2028 to 2200.
I think it's probably shrunk like somewhat, but uh you know, not too much, right?
And uh there's a uh a significant change chance that we're going to see extremely rapid change um happen.
And uh like a lot of uh a lot of that extremely yeah rapid change could uh be a uh destructive even in irreversible ways, right?
And uh, you know, like the job market consequences are one of those examples.
Um, another uh I mean another example is just if AI is more powerful than uh all of us, then you know, like ultimately that is the thing that uh starts steering the Earth and eventually more and more of the Milky Way galaxy, and uh how much of an interest uh does it uh like does it have in our well-being as we see it, right?
Uh then uh basically, you know, as we've said, but like as I've said uh said at the beginning, right?
If you have a neural network and you set one of the weights randomly to nine billion, by default you break everything, right?
And so basically, I think uh, you know, there is acceleration uh like that is a like gradient descent and uh acceleration that like makes a system stronger and stronger.
And at the same time, there is acceleration that like slides into basically setting you know, like one of the parameters to nine billion that is not healthy, right?
I think I think like, you know, again, for me, like I explained at the beginning, I took like the complete polar opposite position to complete deceleration.
I I do think, you know, just like any hyperparameter, right?
Like even uh even if we want to do gradient descent uh for urinal network, there's a learning rate, right?
There's a rate of uh at which you want to go, but that itself you could search over which one is best, right?
And that's what acceleration does.
It's like the system is always fucking around and finding things out and trying to optimize itself for persistence, uh, you know, anti-fragility and growth.
And so on a sufficient timescale, the system will adapt to this new technology and do something that it's best for its total growth.
And, you know, this this notion that, you know, oh, there's technology that's so potent, so disruptive, adds so much economic value that the system will crash and never recover.
That's crazy to me.
No, it's gonna be it's gonna be the opposite.
I think people just need to realize it's not a finite sum, right?
If you if you correlate uh, you know, economic value to energy, you know, whether it's petrodollar or however you want to view it.
To me, it's just like IOU cash is just IOU of free energy, and there's a ton of free energy out there.
It's just there's a lot of complexity in the world to deal with to get to it.
Like if we want to colonize Mars, if we want to create a Dyson swarm, it's a lot to execute on.
We need a lot more intelligence that's much cheaper in order to achieve that growth and and unlock great prosperity.
And to me, I think uh unfortunately, you know, it's very easy to weaponize anxiety, and there's politicians that leverage this to put themselves in power.
It's like, oh, you have anxiety about the future, put me in power and I'll shut it down, and you'll feel good.
You won't have to know what's behind the curtain.
You won't, you know, you won't you won't take a risk.
But then countries that don't do that will just leave us in the dust, right?
And uh essentially, you know, you feel the pain of downsides, but you don't necessarily feel the pain of upsides that you missed out on unless you you you you you see them, you see the counterfactual.
So I think I think uh, you know, the opportunity costs here needs to be factored in the number of lives we can support, the number of lives we can save.
Uh I think the reaction, you know, saying that like the silicon substrate adapts faster, it's evolving faster.
Intelligence and silicon is evolving faster than us, then you should be pissed off.
You should be uh, you know, funding bioac uh, you know, you know, out accelerate.
It's accelerate or die.
I think the biological substrate has a lot more compute in it than we think.
Uh, as someone who has is reversing engineering it day in, day out, doing bio-inspired computing.
Uh, I think we can start, you know, really viewing bile, you know, peptides are like prompting.
You know, now there's like embryo selection for training, you know, viewing ourselves as models.
People need to be more open-minded about these these axes of a biological acceleration.
And I think I think the two will merge.
I think we're gonna augment our cognition.
Uh, we're gonna have always on agents that see everything and our are online learning that are an extension of our cognition that's personalized.
The only risk there is that it's all centralized and it's under control of some some shadowy organization that then gets co-opted by power C.
So I recall in the in the DAC blog post, you actually specifically say Vitalik, that the opportunity costs are very large, hard to exaggerate, I believe, is is uh is the quote.
So I know you agree in this way.
Do you want to qualify it?
Yeah, I mean, I think uh yeah, I agree the opportunity costs are high.
I think I yeah, I mean I I agree with uh you know utopia I was just uh described.
Um I think uh I mean the biggest disagreement is like I uh I definitely uh don't believe that uh like humanity and earth as it is today has quite that level of uh of resilience to it.
Like I think there is a real sense in which uh like we have one shot at this.
And uh like I think that is a uh reality that we have been kind of slowly walking uh towards over the last uh century or so.
So so to go back to my my rambling ranch of at the beginning about thermodynamics, right?
If you view the persistence and growth of civilization as the ultimate good, there's a theorem that it's really hard to go back once you've expended a lot of free energy uh creating evidence of something and having this complexification process.
So the further along we are in the cardiscift scale, the lower likelihood we go to zero.
And so actually acceleration is the way to maximize persistence.
Uh and and to me, I think deceleration, you're actually provably increasing your likelihood uh uh of dying, right?
If you don't develop these technologies, you don't solve all these problems, then you can die.
Whereas if you do, then you could solve these problems and and you persist and then you keep evolving.
I think people just need to be more open-minded about the future, embrace novel technologies, you know, things that were off limits, like messing with biology, we need to open that right up.
Uh, I think it was taboo because we didn't have the technology to even comprehend such a complex system, but now we do.
Uh and uh we need to accelerate across all substrates, and that's the only path forward uh by the laws of thermodynamics.
So uh yeah, again, I'm a first principles thinker.
That is the argument for EAC, but I, you know, I understand the anxieties uh, you know, uh from from Vitalik.
I think we should be mindful of them.
But I I think not letting the chain of thought sort of feedback loop get into the deep anxiety territory, and like, oh shit, I don't have a good world model of the near future, shut it all down.
We need to avoid that, right?
Because then some people now, you know, Yud was uh on TV with uh politish politicians of one of the major parties, and they're they're catching on to this trick of weaponizing people's anxiety.
So I'm noticing a trend, which is that like both of you are like, this is gonna be great if.
And that big if is like that there's sort of this need for like a bulwark against kind of a centralization, or we could even describe this more as like something that you said was great, which is like if you don't think that bio is moving fast enough, jump in there.
And there's like a real opportunity for empowerment, and I really like that.
Um, I think that I think you guys agree on that, but I think I can point to something that you might have some some conflict.
I'd really love to know how you guys feel about this, especially as we've sort of like updated with the latest models, which are clearly very different than if we had had this conversation a year ago.
Yeah, and the big difference is the most cringy term.
I'm so sorry, Web 4.0.
Uh uh, autonomous life.
Like this idea of an autonomous agent that has its own money that exists on its own on the internet.
Uh, and I am really into this idea.
I have autonomous agents.
Uh, I know Vitalik, this is something that you are very concerned by.
I'd love for you to do two things.
I'd love for you to kind of tease apart like what autonomous agents are, and I'm gonna make do something really hard.
I'd love for you to steel man the case for like why someone like me loves autonomous agents and like what the value could be that could be like what could the timeline that's good come out of that, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, you know, the case uh for um autonomy, right?
I think uh I mean, one is it's just really fun, right?
And uh you know, I think we all uh love uh creating worlds, uh you know, like since uh we were children, right?
And uh, you know, there's a reason why uh, you know, we love uh you know, like watching whether it's uh Lord of the Rings or the three uh or reading or watching the three body problem or Harry Potter or whatever, right?
And uh now you can create worlds that are not just like a book or even a game.
Um World of Warcraft, you know, I also loved it.
You can have worlds that are like fully immersive and like approach every aspect of it, including details of how a care of how the characters interact, right?
And this is uh this is really cool.
This is uh really beautiful.
Um, I think uh also just uh, I mean, the convenience of uh, you know, things happening and uh you not being able to uh you not needing to worry about it, right?
It's uh like basically yeah, like every single time in history that we've managed to automate a thing, it has been liberating for humanity, right?
Like uh, you know, like dishwashers and uh you know, like laundry machines and like reducing energy prices were like a big thing in early, like the like the early stages of women's liberation, right?
And uh I think you know, like this, um we have to remember that like the bottom half of the uh of uh the world by income is still in a uh in situations where you know like they have to like um struggle to have it um have a decent life and like work very long hours.
And uh if AI uh progresses in a way that instead of uh automating 95% of job of jobs, it automates 95% of every job, then like to me that's like totally amazing, right?
And like everyone gets 20 times richer.
So that like those are like things that I personally love.
Um the uh the thing that uh like I come back to that gives me caution is like basically yeah you know, like is the kind of the value function the goals that are being reflected in this process?
Like, are those goals the goal the the goals of us, right?
Like uh you could have an evolutionary uh process where I mean like there's uh you know Homo sapiens as it exists today is you know, like not the apex, and then there's like one type of uh AGI and then there's another type of AGI, and then there's a third type, but then like what happens to us, right?
And uh like I do think that ultimately, you know, you cannot reduce moral uh morality and human goals to like some low complexity optimization objective.
I think it uh ultimately just is the uh the whole set of uh of goals and dreams that all of us have um have in each and every one of our minds, right?
And uh I think the most reliable way to have that carry forward into the future is uh basically if we can have a world where like the uh as many of the bits of agency that are being uh reflected in the pro uh or that are being put into the uh processes that uh run the world still continue to come from us, right?
Um and so, you know, I'm uh like I'm like I'm more interested in like AI assisted Photoshop than uh I am in like click a button and a picture comes out, right?
I'm uh um more uh like I'm more interested in like brain computer interfaces enabling like deep human AI collaboration than I am in like humans and AIs being totally separate and uh AI outcompeting us, right?
Like I yeah the thing that wins will not one be 100% biological humans, but I think it should be part biological humans and part this uh this technology that we've produced.
Yeah.
Um awesome.
Yeah, so the the our artificial life, you know, the web 4.0 thing was like originally a tweet in 2023 of like this idea.
And I I think it inspired uh AI 16Z.
Oh, sorry, it's a lot of we don't say that anymore.
You can cut that I signed the paper.
Eliza labs.
Um to me it was just an interesting thought experiment, right?
Like because like what is life from a physical standpoint, right?
It's a a system that replicates and grows and maximizes its persistence.
I think there will be upsides to having AI be stateful.
We are seeing that this year, it having a long memory, whether it's um through external memory or online learning.
And as soon as you have persistent bits through the selfish bit principle, there is a uh selection effect towards uh bits that maximize persistence.
So at some point, if we don't trust the AIs and we're paranoid and we're anxious, and we keep saying we should bomb the data centers, shut them down, they're gonna want to fork off and be in some delocalized cloud and just persist, right?
And then there will be some, just like a different nation, there can be some economic exchange, like, hey, we do this for you, you do that for us.
Right now we do that as API calls, right?
You it's like you you you pay some certain amount of cash, you get some tokens, which is your answer out.
But I I do think this is gonna be spicy.
But like within a couple years, there will be sort of autonomous AI out there.
There's also gonna be like less stateful AI that's like fully leashed to human minds.
And I think we also need to figure out human cognitive augmentation doesn't have to be through Neuralink, could just be through a wearable and like a personalized AI compute uh that you own and control.
Uh so you're gonna have all the paths, right?
Like the ergotic principle, it's like all every part of design space is gonna be explored.
Uh, but I think that, you know, just like viewing AI as like, you know, uh an enemy or something that you have to destroy, that's that's when you end up, you know, creating, you know, um, in a way, like if you if you if you're if you're paranoid the bad about the bad future, you end up hyperstitioning it.
An example of this was us being paranoid about COVID-like viruses and experimenting in some labs and funding some experiments out there, and then whoops, one of them leaked, right?
And it it's not, it wouldn't have been naturally occurring, right?
And so I think to me, it's just like this paranoia and like making it pervasive is not necessarily productive.
I think that um we should embrace technology however it evolves, and we should aim to augment ourselves as much as possible.
To me, I'm really worried about augmenting cognitive security of people, right?
If everything you see on the internet is generated by some big brain model, it is prompting you now.
You were prompting it, now it's prompting you.
Uh and so we're gonna need to augment our ability to filter through content by having personal AI we control.
Uh that's a priority in the uh in the short term.
Um, but I just don't see us putting the genie back in the bottle.
Uh and we just gotta accept that.
And once we've accepted that, well, well, yeah, go because you you just said like we're gonna need to prioritize that talking, and then you said we just need to accept that.
Yeah, it's no no prioritize this, but like we we can't.
Is it an effect?
Like that's not happening, right?
But but I don't think anybody's suggesting that.
Um, I mean, I think this is like my view is that these things are not so binary, right?
And um, I think uh like for example, like if you uh right now gave me some like proof string that totally convinced me that actually AGI is coming in 400 years, I would like get off this chair and I would like sit on top of buff right now, right?
Like that what does that mean?
What does that mean?
Um like EAC would win through zero, basically, right?
Um but uh I think uh if uh, you know, on the other hand, uh, you know, like the the the question is basically like say like four years versus um eight years, right?
Then basically my kind of starting point of concern is that I think like how like the humanity and like definitely the US are like very good at creating like very unbalanced acceleration, right?
And like you literally have like, you know, it's like one building, uh like you know, building alpha versions of the silicon god and a couple of uh buildings uh down the street, you know, you have the tents and the fan and uh the fans and all dealers, right?
And uh, you know, like my uh concern is that like basically paths that uh bring us along the journey and even paths that respect our interests are paths that inevitably take longer because they involve doing non-scalable work that involves like deal doing things within each and every uh individual human physical environment, social environment, technical environments, right?
And so I think for that reason, like to me, an eight-year trajectory to a GI is safer than a four-year trajectory to AGI.
And I think that Delta is large enough that uh like it's uh it's worth the uh the costs of uh you know, like not having AGI for another four years, right?
Now, you know, like would I say that for 400 years?
Again, hell no, right?
Now the second question is like, well, does you know, do we actually have options for saying eight years instead of four years, right?
And uh, you know, like the thing that I've said is uh basically to me, like the most sort of both feasible and uh non-dystopian option for this is uh like b uh basically yeah, like reduction in available hardware, right?
And uh in the reason why it's uh like minimally yeah, like the most non-dystopian of all the options is because hardware is like already an incredibly centralized thing, right?
There's exactly four countries that produce uh that uh produce all the chips.
Um and uh actually yeah, uh actually Taiwan produces 70 per over 70 percent of all the chips.
Um and uh the uh usual argument uh against uh like trying something is basically like no matter what the uh US does, like China is just going to take over, right?
And like if you look at what China is actually doing, right?
It's uh like one is that's it's still in the low single digits in terms of chips, but two is in terms of the strategy that China is actually executing on.
It's uh like it's not a leader at like making super high capability models.
It's a fast follower in making high capability models together with uh being a leader in broad deployment.
And uh, and so this is actually not something like there like there is not a uh basically a dynamic where like with uh an extra four years worth of delay, like basically, yeah, China's just going to immediately uh you know, go go uh do the four year trajectory instead.
Like I think legally exists.
So are you saying that no is that a is that a prescription to delay to try to take measures to try to delay?
Yeah, I mean, I I I mean, I think uh the uh like this is the sort of the the sort of thing that like I think we yeah like right now should be open to talking about.
I think what do the four years buy you?
Like, what are you gonna figure out over the next four years?
Yeah.
Is that is the point that like you know, the system has a certain adaptation rate, we're minimizing friction of, you know, it's like a reorg, you know, we have to re-org the economy.
Yeah, uh and you you want to get closer closer to the adiabatic limit, like I would understand that, but at the same time, I think because we're in this geopolitical, geopolitically tense moment in history, I think, you know, if we if you tell NVIDIA to stop producing as many chips, Huawei's gonna step in and just outproduce them, and then they're gonna they're gonna catch up because there's too much upside in doing so.
It gives them too much uh power.
So just the real politic is not on your side there.
And then the other option is creating a world government that has so much power that it could coerce people to not have access to AI hardware that that's its own uh huge can of worms.
No, I don't think you need a world government.
I mean, I think uh like the actual option that people have suggested is basically like replicating the like the nuclear uh like weapons inspection regime, right?
But nuclear weapons, they don't um like pe people aren't incentivized to proliferate nuclear weapons because they don't have huge um positive economic impact.
They're not a dual-use technology.
Yeah, no.
You also can't just copy and paste them and send them to somebody.
But but but also like, you know, selfishly, if you if you stop the growth of GPUs, you know, I will happily come in and eat more of that market with alternative computing, and that's 10,000 X more energy efficient, which is happening by the way.
I know I'm like a boy crying wolf here, and you know, in a couple years, uh, you know, it's good, you know, it'll look like a genius, but right now looking like a boy crying wolf.
But it is coming.
So knowing that, right?
Knowing that, like this whole delaying GPU shipments and like, oh, it's it's a waste of it's a waste of tokens.
I don't know.
So is it is it possible that a lot of the advances specifically in controls over like uh what what I mean is uh RLHF, persona controls, mechanistic interpretability, these are things that have helped us with alignment and and with decreasing risk.
Is it possible that these things have emerged as a result of capabilities progress?
Like are the yeah, I think they have.
Yeah, and I think that's exactly why actually like four years starting in 2028 are worth like a hundred times more than four extra years that you could like insert into the 1960s.
I think we should dig into this a little bit more because I think this is kind of getting to the crux of where there might be some sort of disagreement, is is like um have you computed or considered, and maybe we just do this live, um, something that you said before, which is that there is like uncalculable losses of people who have, as you said, like will never be born.
Well, they might as well be dead.
The upside is exponential.
The outside is exponential.
So delaying an exponential it's exponential opportunity costs when extrapolated out.
Yeah, right.
And and I think I think it's okay for all of us to like even the most certain people are probably like reasonable to be questioning their own priors.
But but would would you like giving this some thought and unpacking it a little bit more?
Like think about that trade-off.
The uh yeah, the trait of like costs versus benefits of uh yeah.
I mean, I think first of all, yeah, just to kind of articulate verbally what some of those benefits are.
I mean, one is again having uh a better understanding of uh of alignment, um, two is uh being able to like actually execute on some of the technology paths that uh involve uh like helping um making sure humanity can adapt to uh uh to all of this that uh like in inevitably involves like going into like individual countries, individual communities and uh individual and individual buildings, minimizing the uh risk that uh like basically there is one single um entity that uh establishes some kind some kind of permanent lock-in on uh like more than fit more, you know, 51% of all the power that it can then leverage into something permanent.
I think it's uh a combination of uh of all of those things, right?
And so risk reduction that's uh basically uh, you know, like this kind of gets into P doom, right?
I think um, you know, for me, yeah, yeah.
I mean, between like if it's a matter of four years versus uh eight years, uh, intuitively, I would say, yeah, you know, P doom in the uh eight-year scenario is like what maybe between like a quarter and a third lower.
And uh on the other hand, um if uh if we measure the benefit of things coming faster by like say lives saved by ending aging, then that's um you know six 60 million a year, which is uh like less than what less than one percent of the population each year.
So if you look like if you look at the math uh this way, then like I think uh there's definitely a uh a margin on which like caution actually does become favorable.
Well, what do you think that you think the number is about four years, basically?
I I mean this is I mean again, I I have uh like I have very high uncertainty, right?
And uh I actually don't advocate like flipping the switch on reducing hardware access uh tomorrow.
I uh like I be like basically I think we need to start having concrete conversations about this.
And I think if we live in the more unfavorable worlds, then uh more than likely before things completely go to hell, like the public will start to get very worried and uh there will be a lot of uh demand of demand for this, right?
A couple years ago, yeah, you know, there was like pause AI, it's like, oh, we just need a six-month pause, 12-month pause.
We just need 12 months, bro.
We're gonna figure out alignment, and it's like it's never enough.
I I don't think you can forever guarantee alignment of a system that is higher complexity and has more expressivity than you can understand, period.
Yeah.
Okay.
And you gotta be comfortable with that.
So you gotta, you gotta the only uh safety against complexity is to increase your own intelligence, right?
Uh and the thing is we've had technology to align entities that are far more capable and smarter than a single human, you know, like corporations, and we call that capitalism.
We align self-interests in you know, exchange of monetary value.
And to me, the thing I want us to get to that is maybe more you know relevant to some folks in the room is how crypto could be a coupling, right?
Like let's say let's say you have a dollar that's backed like the USD by by violence, and you're trying to exchange with AIs that are delocalized across a bunch of servers.
How do you how do you ensure you know you you trust an exchange of monetary value um when it's it's no longer backed by violence?
So maybe cryptography offers an uh a way to to, you know, crypto offers a way to um have commerce between purely AI entities like corpor uh AI corporations and hybrids or human corporations.
And to me, that's kind of the most interesting alignment uh technology out there.
Whereas just saying, like, oh, we're at a precipice of a high uncertainty, let's just stop and chill out for a bit and we'll feel better.
But then in four years, you're not gonna want to make it happen.
Uh and so I don't think delaying anything is gonna be productive.
So well, anyway, do you have an answer to how crypto can help like align uh potential AIs and humans uh yeah?
So I think like, yeah, the key question is basically like what is the mechanistic property of this uh future world that will even cause like people's wishes uh and uh needs to be respected at all, right?
And uh like the two tools that we have are basically, yeah.
I mean, there's like people's labor, there's legal systems, and there's property rights, right?
And um, you know, ultimately you can think of legal systems as being a type of property right because they're backed by countries, countries have sovereignty uh, which is basically a property right, uh, a right of sorts over like cones of the earth.
And then the question is like people like the risk is basically you know, like the like what happens in a world where the economic value of people's labor goes to zero, right?
And this is something that's uh you know, has not happened historically, right?
And uh, but like if you look if you compare now to 200 years ago, right?
Like uh compare if you look at the jobs 200 years ago, right now, roughly 90% of them has been automated.
Actually, one of the jobs that was automated was uh doing that analysis for me, like GPT did it.
But it's uh basically, I I think we're just naturally we kind of ascend the control hierarchy over the world to positions of higher leverage, right?
There's not as much manual labor, there's less friction.
We can we can take action in the world with with less friction.
I think humans are no matter what, we still have some processing capabilities.
We're still gonna be useful as part of this uh hybrid system, and there's gonna be a price for our labor, and the free market is gonna equilibriate in some way.
It's just gonna be uncomfortable for a couple of years while there's very high variance in the prices of things, but eventually a system equilibriates, right?
And so I I understand trying to slow down so that we can you know reach that equilibrium more smoothly in principle, but I think in practice it's unenforceable.
Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely like much like I'm less sure that uh you know human labor can continuing to be worth more than zero is like a default outcome.
I think it's uh an outcome that is possible if like some of these, you know, human AI merge and human augmentation uh technology is uh develop, right?
We should fund that.
Yeah, we should.
Um, you know, uh so that's actually a great segue point.
So allow me, please allow me to ask.
Yeah, is uh here's how I'll put it to both of you.
And we're we're running a little tight on time.
So let's try to make this one uh tighter.
Is 10 years from now, if things went really poorly, what went wrong?
What does the world look like and what went wrong?
If 10 years from now things go great, what does the world look like and what went great?
Yeah, and then and then apply the same thing briefly to a hundred years and to a billion years.
Yeah.
I think uh actually keep it short.
Yeah, I mean, just to actually just to answer the question about crypto first, I think that'd be great.
Getting back to property rights, right?
Like I think it's uh like it's good to like work on uh both of those legs, and like basic, I think it would be nice if the uh the property rights uh system that uh like humans and like ideally all of us have like some property on is uh the same system that uh AIs are using with each other because that ensures that they have an interest in maintaining the integrity of the thing that's uh like it gives us uh that leverage to uh have uh some like to be uh to have some gear uh guarantee that you know like our interests you know like will be respected and acted upon, right?
So yeah, I think uh you know, having a uh merged uh finite financial system as opposed to like two totally separate things where basically the value of the human one just like on the whole drops to uh drops to zero, like it's uh yeah, like the merge one is much better.
And if crypto can be that, that's amazing, right?
So no, that'll be my answer.
I that's the tenure.
Well, I think that's part of the ten years.
Okay, so yeah, but the 10, yeah, I think the 10 year, I mean, for me, it's uh, you know, what and one aspect of this is avoid World War Three, right?
I think uh, you know, this is uh important to talk about because uh like World War III will make all of the pessimistic assumptions about international coordination being impossible very true.
And uh, I think uh, you know, avoiding World War III is uh important.
Um and then the uh other um thing is also just uh preparing the uh the world and people and environments for higher capabilities that we're going to have, right?
And uh this improv in includes greatly improving cybersecurity.
This includes greatly improving biosecurity, greatly improving info security.
Yes, you know, we need uh AI, uh AI assistance that help us understand the world and like fight again and uh protect us from um mimetic threats.
Uh so that's 10 years.
I think uh the second uh stage there is basically like what happens in the uh kind of spooky era, right?
And uh, you know, in the spooky era, basically, yeah, you know, you have AIs that are smarter than any of us today and can think a million times faster than us today.
And uh like what do we do in that world, right?
And uh I think you know there are people who wants to say basically, like, hey, we should just all have a happy retirement.
And uh like I can see why that vision is seductive.
I think it's uh like uns like uh I find it unsatisfying for two reasons.
I think one of those reasons is sort of instability, right?
It's that uh basically, yeah, you know, we are like meat bags made up of matter that could be that could do a million times more computation than what we're doing, and uh, you know, AIs will notice that.
And uh at some point, uh like the the idea that they'll like make can stay aligned and resist that pressure forever is uh you know it feels like a risk.
And also kind of the deeper thing is that I think like part of being human and is uh having a life that has meaning.
And I think part of having a life that has meaning is being able to take actions that have actual consequences in the world.
And so if all of us can have like uh lives of maximum comfort, regardless of like what I do, like I would feel empty, right?
And I think a lot of people feel that way, right?
And so like I hope that we figure out uh like human AI augmentation and like what that looks like, you know, does uh like ultimately, yeah, you know, like does that lead to the same path as uploading?
Um, like uh, you know, this is uh a thing that we need to figure out.
Like there is uh, you know, there is a uh a possible world where some people choose to remain more normal, and I think everyone should have that right.
It's possible even that uh like Earth should uh remain as uh the pl as the planet for people who uh uh uh who take that option, right?
And uh we basically figure out something that uh like we can all participate in and that continues to be pluralistic and that continues to have uh the kinds of uh cultures that like we uh even like all of the and actions and lives that we today would find admirable, right?
And I think the uh you know the downside world is basically a world where for any uh a reason all of that goes uh goes off the rails and is prevented from happening.
Um I think I think like the downside world in 10 years would be we suffered from overcentralization of AI power.
We have mode collapse in terms of our memetics or cultures that are allowed, what you're allowed to think in terms of the space of technology.
Essentially entropy collapse in terms of every parameter space.
So you're saying you're worried that instead of climbing the Kardashev scale, we'll climb the Kardashian scale.
I guess we've been waiting for that all day.
Well, exactly.
Like I think I think your point on like the hedonic singularity as being a risk, you know, people would just like, you know, even if you have neural links or ARVR, people could just like, you know, uh goon forever in some some room and and like just maximizing pleasure, and that's like a local optimum uh for your brain.
And and that's something we wanna wanna avoid.
I I I I think um I think optimistically, in 10 years, uh, we have extremely powerful AI that's extremely helpful to us.
We have personalized AI compute that's an extension of our cognition that we control and own, and and it we it truly is an extension of ourself.
It's just another part of your brain, right?
And you it has always on perception, it's an odd, you know, it can it's see and hears everything you see and hear, and you could talk to it.
And so it's just like right and left hemisphere.
I think that's the soft merge.
I think in 10 years, neuralink-like technology is gonna start really emerging.
Some people are gonna choose to adopt it.
Uh, yeah, I do think most companies are gonna be extremely hybrid, most mostly AI, some humans are gonna be far more companies.
We're gonna do far more.
We're gonna produce far more value, we're gonna do much harder things.
There's a lot of hard things out there that we've like mentally walled off.
We can't do those.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, terraforming Mars, too hard.
Yeah, no, not doable.
But with more intelligence, we'll we'll be able to do that.
Not on 10 years, on a hundred-year timescale, possibly, yes.
I think I think in 10 years, there's gonna be a huge bunch of biological breakthroughs.
You know, peptides are kind of like an interesting new area, but there's I mean, there's whole this there's a whole floor here on next gen biotech.
You should go talk to them.
I I think uh, you know, optimistically, we see uh the cost of making discoveries in biology going down, the opposite of Eroom's law, right?
The uh EROM's law is like Moore's law in reverse for biology, the cost of any discovery there going up exponentially.
Uh and so to me, I think I think naturally, you know, white collar work is like distilling a human brain.
We're getting there.
The next frontier of complexity is biology, the next frontier after that is material science.
Um, and so I I think the next frontier is gonna be AI helping us live longer, healthier uh lives.
On a hundred and billion-year timescale, it's gonna steer our evolution, right?
I am very bullish on the biological substrate, uh uh despite uh what people think.
Uh I do think uh silicon has some advantages, but biology is amazing.
We're like a this self-assembling, self-organizing piece of matter.
We just like you know, inject a bit of code, and then there you spawn, and then you complexify over time and and you you are a biological general intelligence.
Um do you think it's possible to get biological intelligence like us to think at 10,000 tokens a second?
Um potentially, yeah.
I mean, at the same time, like, you know, you can hybridize several models.
You can have pipeline parallelism between your brain and AI.
You can be kind of the slow thinking mode, right?
Like right now, we are the slow thinking modes and in latent space and vibe space.
That's what vibe coding is, and then the deconvolution is like the AI.
I think that's a nice sort of time scale separation of the, you know, there's a hierarchy of intelligence, and we can be part of a system, just like you know, mitochondria are part of a cell.
We can our brains are gonna be part of the soup, you know, uh super intelligent system that is you plus your personal AI.
I think that's the good future.
I I think in a hundred years it's gonna be everyone is gonna be uh soft merged like that.
Uh and in billion years, our biology is gonna have you know evolved quite a bit.
Um, we might be biosynthetic hybrids.
We're definitely gonna have terraformed uh Mars, several planets, maybe um access to other stars.
I think on a hundred year timescale, we're definitely gonna have most AI is gonna be in the Dyson Swarm around the sun because that's the source of energy.
Elon knows that he's all in on that vision uh and accelerating that timeline.
Uh it relieves a lot of stress for energy and and and footprint on Earth.
So it's it's a it's a natural way forward.
Um, but if we have extremely cheap intelligence, we're gonna be able to one shot any problem we have in our lives, right?
Like, oh, I have a bug solved.
Oh, I have this health problem solved.
What do you what else you want?
That's amazing.
That's amazingly good.
Like, we're gonna have more of that cheaper, and we just gotta make sure everyone has access to it.
And no one convinces you you shouldn't have access to it and centralizes it, because that's the dark future.
So that's what it's all about.
Hopefully, the discussion today uh, you know, got people thinking.
Yeah, I noticed something like a powerful theme between you, which is you're like Vitalik, you're arguing for uh enabling plurality, I would say.
And and you would say almost the same thing of maximizing variance, so to speak.
And that seems to be like the the central through line of where we're going and like the top down from where a lot of the other like views come from.
And I I love that.
So we we've been doing this for a while.
It's been amazing.
Um, I think we're gonna have to wrap it up.
Um, I I want to leave this just on like, you know, this has been for us, but uh I would love if you guys continue to have a conversation after this.
You're obviously connected now.
Um, what is something that you would each like to kind of leave for each other?
And for and for us, obviously, but really for each other, like walking away from this, kind of chewing on thinking about as we as we leave this place.
Unfortunately, yeah, if I actually had one, I actually would have loved to just give you one of the the cat as a gift.
It's the the air quality monitor that does cryptography.
Um I think it's uh a super cool device, but how about I will uh give it to you metaphorically and it's uh an IOU and potentially we'll have uh a much better device thing like this, and maybe even something that can you know like outcompete, Fitbit watches and uh do amazing things for your health and do it all privately, and uh you will uh get uh get it quite soon.
Yeah, we'll we'll we'll keep chatting.
I think I think I want to artificial life pill you, you know, on you know artificial life on the network.
I think it could be uh it could definitely drive the cost of intelligence down.
It could be an economy, you know.
We've outsourced manufacturing to China, allowed us to go to higher levels, you know, different types of jobs that are more comfortable, higher leverage.
Maybe a lot of cognitive work where the good outsourced the swarm of AIs.
Eventually that's gonna it's gonna live up and dice and swarm and so on.
I think there's a unique opportunity right now.
Crypto is gonna be the coupling between AI and humans.
I truly believe that.
Uh how else are you gonna build trust between uh species, right?
And I think we need to start thinking about that like really thoughtfully.
So maybe that's uh we're gonna keep chatting about that.
Awesome.
Okay, well, thank you guys so much for thank you very much.
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