The D/ACC Vision: Balancing Progress and Protection

Transcript

The Core Idea of D/ACC

decentralized Democratic differential defensive acceleration so Dak is this philosophia that was in this post that I wrote on techno optimism back in late 2023 and then I followed up on it with a post at the start of this year and the goal here is that it's about accelerating Technologies but it's about accelerating some specific Technologies to build to a specific vision of the future a future which is technologically great and also great for us as people so one of the core ideas in D is

that technological landscape that is more defense favoring so in the sense of being one where defense is easy and attacking is hard is something that is both safer uh for obvious reasons and at the same time is more naturally favorable toward a free and open and pluralistic future so this is a bit of an interesting Insight right and so in my original post on techno optimism last year one of the examples that I used is Switzerland um where it's this amazing classical liberal Utopia everyone has very positive opinions about its

governance it's uh the country where nobody knows who the president is and then you ask well how was it able to how was something like this able to survive here and not in other places and a big part of the answer is that Switzerland is surrounded by mountains and so Switzerland gets defense almost for free right and then in the meantime if you think of the Eastern European and Siberian steps well that's the exact opposite of Defense favoring and so those lands basically keep on getting um taken over by Bloody dictators fighting other bloody dictators and so this is an analogy that like you can take and you can find examples of it across lots of

other different contexts right so if you think about cyber secur for example then there's basically two ways to do cyber security right one way is the um like attacking the Wolves strategy and that basic means well you try to identify you know who are the hackers and you have some Central Authority that comes to an opinion of these people are the attackers these people are not the attackers and then you go after them and then that Central Authority needs to be able to spy on everyone else and then you have different groups that try to find and Accord vulnerabilities in each other systems and you end up getting

something which is like not actually all that safe right right and the other approach is the armoring the Sheep strategy right and that strategy basically says to try to upgrade cryptography as much as possible to upgrade user security as much as possible and in general try to take advantage of the abilities that these Technologies give and actually build systems that are secure without depending on some particular Central actor enforcing their opinion of of what secure means right um You can think about this also in the info space for example right so the difference between

Armoring the Chief Strategy

info defense being something like Community notes versus or for example info defense being tools that try to more automatically you put like expose people to more s more sources of information in a relatively neutral way versus info defense being like we as a society try to anoint one centralized group of fact Checkers that then push forward one perspective of what is true and false and what is good and bad right and so basically from a technological perspective try to develop the technology that tries to solve all of these problems of defense and and safety

and Truth in a way that is much more um incorporated into our ba into our basic infrastructure in a in a neutral W as opposed to through having like B basically one big hob Hobs and Leviathan that everyone that fights over to control and so defense favoring te technology again is safer and so if we can adjust and build technology is to try to make all the different aspects of the world look more like Switzerland and like the Eurasian steps then we get a world that is safer and we get a world that is more favorable toward a free and pluralistic future and so let's build this technology and let's make it open

source and available for everyone so this was the slide that I had at di day in the Bangkok and this is basically showing the D Technologies across a couple of different spheres right and so you see a few different dimensions here right so one of those spheres is the world of bits versus the world of atoms right and you know the very famous age-old distinction from Peter teal um and the other distinction is uh between or well within the world of atoms you can talk about micro versus macro right and generally when people use and think

Balancing Acceleration and Safety

about the world the word defense they mean like macro scale physical defense and even there actually like often people mean things like weapons but like there there's macroscale physical defense that has nothing to do with weapons right so like for example just resilient forms of Agriculture like for like methods to make sure that the world can survive a massive collapse of Supply chains and still keep everyone fed that also counts as physical defense biod defense protecting against pandemics cyber defense um and so this is uh things keeping computers secure keeping blockchain secure keeping encryption secure and uh info defense um so protecting against things like scams

and misinformation and this distinction between cyber and info defense is something that as far as I can tell is unique to myself but the core difference here that I think is important is basically that cyber defense is a defense where every reasonable person agrees who the attacker is and who and who the defender is info defense is where well one man's misinformation is another man's UNF unfairly censored valid point right and so here it's especially important to try to create mechanisms that are not trying to pre- encode in favor one particular side now one new dimension that we have here is the survive versus Thrive Dimension and this is one of the realizations that

I've had and other people working in these spaces have had over the last year which is that the technology that help protect us when times are tough are often in many ways have deep connections to the technologies that will let us Thrive when times are more cooperative and so I'll talk about each of those things uh in this presentation so first of all cryptotech is a subset of DC right so Bitcoin ethereum and so robust decentralized networks applications built on these robust decentralized networks can keep running and keep surviving in very yet harsh situations uh they ethereum's and bitcoin's record of not going down is far stronger than

Real-World Examples

the same record of basically any centralized system um computer security technology um So within the crypto space Sy includes things like wallets but wallets are just crypto version of a bigger cyber security problem which is identity and authentication and authorization um then uh benef and uh also zero knowledge proofs let us benefit from people's data and get a lot of guar like benefits out of data data being able to train on it being able to personalize services from it without actually violating anyone's

privacy or actually collecting that information so on the bio side right Co was a great example of how centralized biod defense can fail right and we can look at this from a whole bunch of different angles right so first of all very early info suppression right so there was a info suppression about covid in China at the beginning then from the World Health Organization there was uh the uh this Infamous tweet that Co is not airborne and uh basically what happened there was that there was an there was argument made that it a lot of uh like people were scrambling and

trying to hoard like like masks and so you have to tell this like white lion basically yeah like tell people that Co is not Airborne to get people to stop going after masks so that the doctors can get them but the problem is that uh these kinds of approaches are incredibly fragile they really easily overfit to present day situations and so circumstances changed became unpredictable and they just created this three year meme where a lot of people just ended up having the opinion that is not almost entirely an Airborne virus which is which is actually the truth and so people wasted a lot of time on scrubing surfaces and we didn't actually get like air quality you figur it out um centralized social distancing mandates

ended up getting a lot of people angry ended up being very bad for a lot of people's mental health ended up failing in a lot of ways vaccine mandates so vac themselves are great but the info culture again basically Tred to paint a much more perfect narrative about the vaccines than what could actually be justified by the science and this is of course was not able to meet the like actually much more messy reality and so we now we have large groups of people that just end up hating entirely and also at the same time um like the

governments just like most World governments have just completely stopped even trying the fund so the Dak and in particular baly which is a group that I helped to fund thanks to some money from dog coins back in 2021 actually helped support some potentially much better Solutions so one is Clean Indoor Air so basically yeah um all of the most dangerous diseases are airborne and dangerous in terms of ability to cause like huge amounts of damage to huge numbers of people quickly and unexpectedly and uh you look we have done a huge amount of progress over the last few centuries in making our

Risks and Trade-offs

services clean making our water clean we have done basically nothing for air and so we have different Technologies so ventilation um is the most obvious a low tech one uh then filtering um and then uh ultraviolet light so basically ultraviolet light is of the more risky one but the uh and it's more experimental but if the studies showed that it works well then it could be extremely cheap and extremely powerful but filtering also works well then passive testing so there are breathalyzer tests that are coming very soon that you'll be able to just breathe into and they'll tell you whether or not you have some disease um open source

epistemics um and then open-source uh vaccines um and easily manufacturable anywhere anywhere in the world and and uh also a lot of research and treatment and all of these things that are being developed are actually open source and they're designed to be accessible to anyone in the world even at very low income levels so that's all bio so we can also think about decentralizing info defense right so info defense has been a Hot Topic the last 10 years a lot of concern about how do we even tell what is true and what is not true and the natural solution that a lot of people just instinctively gravitate to is hey

this particular group of experts looks trustworthy let's just give them the right to Define what is good and bad and what is true and false this of course ends up making a lot of people angry and doesn't actually work that well and that group of experts um often ends up being very wrong on important things so what might you do that's different so one of the things I'm a big fan of community notes it's this system that got introduced to Twitter a couple of years ago and it uses this algorithm to try to have this like Democratic voting method to identify notes that makes sense to add additional context to a post and it uses this really clever mechanism where it's not just a naive vote but it

Community Notes

actually tries to elevate notes that are agreed upon by people who normally disagree with each other so it intentionally tries to be anti-polar and Community notes is amazing because like it really goes after everyone right it goes after left leaning people it goes after right leaning people it goes after the US it goes after enemies of the US it goes after even cor corporations even like Twitter advertisers often get community notes saying like hey this thing's basically a fraud slapped on it which is one thing that I like really respect Elon for continuing to out um then we have prediction markets right so prediction markets are also a

technology for identifying probabilities which can tell you to what extent some particular concern is actually a big deal they can help you plan for the future and so here you know you have Elon saying Civil War is inevitable and here we have a market UK Civil War in 2024 and it was saying 4% chance this will will Spike here I think I actually bet on this market and I earned a bit of money about a nice 8% apy and helped knock it down to 3% uh so it's potentially very powerful tool and I also recently wrote a post on info Finance trying to explore this kind of

idea further diac in other theaters so safe and decentralized AI is an interesting one um so the way that you think about D from an AI safety perspective is basically if you ask the question well how concretely might a superintelligent AI actually do something really crazy that's uh close to killing everyone or taking over the world or doing something a step less bad but still extremely harmful and the most obvious vectors are you know one it launches a super pandemic two it hacks into all of the computers and for the for for the first one we have bodc and for the second one we have uh cyber DIC um secure operating systems secure

hardware and zero knowledge proofs and so another recent new um theme is Bridges between Technologies for surviving and Technologies for thriving so interesting examples here so first of all some of the biotech work against long covid um so has shown the importance of viral persistence so viruses um staying in reservoirs in the body for extremely long periods of of time and this actually potentially has ties to Alzheimer's and so it's relevant to longevity research and the kind of scanning work that can detect these kinds of things is actually the same types of scanning work that can support brain computer interfaces so open

Survive and Thrive Technologies

waterer um open source company that's doing Medical Imaging very like personal sized and Avail easily available it could work for diseases scanning and detecting whether or not you have cancer micro similar types of things and it could also be used for BCI then epistemic technology is for high threat environments prediction markets Community notes has tie in to epistemic Technologies for low threat environments so pist for example which is meant to help relatively High trust groups but that that still have some polarization find consensus has a lot of shared principles with Community notes prediction markets actually get used

internally at a few companies a yeah I have some information that even major AI Labs use them internally uh then open Hardware gets you benefits in terms of security and it also gets you benefits in terms of accessibility right so a lot of different themes here uh and generally like the underlying idea here right is that there is this whole array of Technologies a lot of which you would be familiar with if you come from and care about crypto but also a lot of other different and interesting ones that are all organized around the

like same vision right which is basically how do we create this world that can survive and thrive in a way that respects the values of pluralism in a way that helps us solve some of the challenges and some of the risks that new technologies bring without requiring a centralized gate gatekeeper that is put in charge of them and so I invite everyone to help uh build uh Technologies in any of these areas also come to the upcoming D Summit in SF where we'll be talking about these things in a couple of weeks and we help make the world more decentralized

democratic and prosperous so thank you