d/acc: one year later

2025 Jan 05 See all posts


d/acc: one year later

Special thanks to Liraz Siri, Janine Leger and Balvi volunteers for feedback and review

About a year ago, I wrote an article on techno-optimism, describing my general enthusiasm for technology and the massive benefits that it can bring, as well as my caution around a few specific concerns, largely centered around superintelligent AI, and the risk that it may bring about either doom, or irreversible human disempowerment, if the technology is built in the wrong ways. One of the core ideas in my post was the philosophy of : decentralized and democratic, differential defensive acceleration. Accelerate technology, but differentially focus on technologies improve our ability to defend, rather than our ability to cause harm, and in technologies that distribute power rather than concentrating it in the hands of a singular elite that decides what is true, false, good or evil on behalf of everyone. Defense like in democratic Switzerland and historically quasi-anarchist Zomia, not like the lords and castles of medieval feudalism.

In the year since then, the philosophy and ideas have matured significantly. I talked about the ideas on 80,000 Hours, and have seen many responses, largely positive and some critical. The work itself is continuing and bearing fruit: we're seeing progress in verifiable open-source vaccines, growing recognition of the value of healthy indoor air, Community Notes continuing to shine, a breakout year for prediction markets as an info tool, ZK-SNARKs in government ID and social media (and securing Ethereum wallets through account abstraction), open-source imaging tools with applications in medicine and BCI, and more. In the fall, we had the first significant d/acc event: "d/acc Discovery Day" (d/aDDy) at Devcon, which featured a full day of speakers from all pillars of d/acc (bio, physical, cyber, info defense, plus neurotech). People who have been working on these technologies for years are increasingly aware of each other's work, and people outside are increasingly aware of the larger story: the same kinds of values that motivated Ethereum and crypto can be applied to the wider world.



Table of contents

What d/acc is and is not

It's the year 2042. You're seeing reports in the media about a new pandemic potentially in your city. You're used to these: people get over-excited about every animal disease mutation, and most of them come to nothing. The previous two actual potential pandemics were detected very early through wastewater monitoring and open-source analysis of social media, and stopped completely in their tracks. But this time, prediction markets are showing a 60% chance of at least 10,000 cases, so you're more worried.

The sequence for the virus was identified yesterday. Software updates for your pocket air tester to allow it to detect the new virus (from a single breath, or from 15 minutes of exposure to indoor air in a room) are available already. Open-source instructions and code for generating a vaccine using equipment that can be found in any modern medical facility worldwide should be available within weeks. Most people are not yet taking any action at all, relying mostly on widespread adoption of air filtering and ventilation to protect them. You have an immune condition so you're more cautious: your open-source locally-running personal assistant AI, which handles among other tasks navigation and restaurant and event recommendation, is also taking into account real-time air tester and CO2 data to only recommend the safest venues. The data is provided by many thousands of participants and devices using ZK-SNARKs and differential privacy to minimize the risk that the data can be leaked or abused for any other purpose (if you want to contribute data to these datasets, there's other personal assistant AIs that verify formal proofs that these cryptographic gadgets actually work).

Two months later, the pandemic disappeared: it seems like 60% of people following the basic protocol of putting on a mask if the air tester beeps and shows the virus present, and staying home if they test positive personally, was enough to push the transmission rate, already heavily reduced due to passive heavy air filtering, to below 1. A disease that simulations show might have been five times worse than Covid twenty years ago turns out to be a non-issue today.


Devcon d/acc day


One of the most positive takeaways from the d/acc event at Devcon was the extent to which the d/acc umbrella successfully brought people together from very different fields, and got them to actually be interested in each other's work.

Creating events with "diversity" is easy, but making different people with different backgrounds and interests actually relate to each other is hard. I still have memories of being forced to watch long operas in middle school and high school, and personally finding them boring. I knew that I was "supposed to" appreciate them, because if I did not then I would be an uncultured computer science slob, but I did not connect with the content on a more genuine level. d/acc day did not feel like that at all: it felt like people actually enjoyed learning about very different kinds of work in different fields.

If we want to create a brighter alternative to domination, deceleration and doom, we need this kind of broad coalition building. d/acc seemed to be actually succeeding at it, and that alone shows the value of the idea.

The core idea of d/acc is simple: decentralized and democratic differential defensive acceleration. Build technologies that shift the offense/defense balance toward defense, and do so in a way that does not rely on handing over more power to centralized authorities. There is an inherent tie between these two sides: any kind of decentralized, democratic or liberal political structure thrives best when defense is easy, and suffers the most challenge when defense is hard - in those cases, the far more likely outcome is some period of war of all against all, and eventually an equilibrium of rule by the strongest.

The core principle of d/acc extends across many domains:


Chart from My Techno-Optimism, last year


One way to understand the importance of trying to be decentralized, defensive and acceleration-minded at the same time, is to contrast it with the philosophy that you get when you give up each of the three.

With d/acc, we want to:

Another way to think about d/acc is to go back to a frame from the Pirate Party movements in Europe in the late 00s: empowerment.



The goal is to build a world where we preserve human agency, achieving both the negative freedom of avoiding active interference (whether from other people acting as private citizens, or from governments, or from superintelligent bots) with our ability to shape our own destinies, and the positive freedom of ensuring that we have the knowledge and resources to. This echoes a centuries-long classical liberal tradition, which also includes Stewart Brand's focus on "access to tools" and John Stuart Mill's emphasis on education alongside liberty as key components of human progress - and perhaps, one might add, Buckminster Fuller's desire to see the process of global solving be participatory and widely distributed. We can see d/acc as a way of achieving these same goals given the technological landscape of the 21ˢᵗ century.

The third dimension: survive and thrive

In my post last year, d/acc specifically focused on the defensive technologies: physical defense, bio defense, cyber defense and info defense. However, decentralized defense is not enough to make the world great: you also need a forward-thinking positive vision for what humanity can use its newfound decentralization and safety to accomplish.

Last year's post did contain a positive vision, in two places:

  1. Focusing on the challenges of superintelligence, I proposed a path (far from original to me) of how we can have superintelligence without disempowerment:
    1. Today, build AI-as-tools rather than AI-as-highly-autonomous-agents
    2. Tomorrow use tools like virtual reality, myoelectrics and brain-computer interfaces to create tighter and tighter feedback between AI and humans
    3. Over time proceed toward an eventual endgame where the superintelligence is a tightly coupled combination of machines and us.
  2. When talking about info-defense, I also tangentially mentioned that in addition to _defensiv_e social technology that tries to help communities maintain cohesion and have high-quality discourse in the face of attackers, there is also progressive social technology that can help communities more readily make high-quality judgements: pol.is is one example, and prediction markets are another.

But these two points felt disconnected from the d/acc argument: "here are some ideas for creating a more democratic and defense-favoring world at the base layer, and by the way here are some unrelated ideas for how we might do superintelligence".

However, I think in reality there are some very important connections between what labelled above as "defensive" and "progressive" d/acc technology. Let's expand the d/acc chart from last year's post, by adding this axis (also, let's relabel it "survive vs thrive") to the chart and seeing what comes out: