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.
Decentralized acceleration, but don't care about the
"differential defensive" part. Basically, be an e/acc,
but decentralized. There are plenty of people who take this
approach, some who label
themselves d/acc but helpfully describe their focus as "OFFENSE", but
also plenty of others who are excited about "decentralized AI" and
similar topics in a more moderate way, but in my view put insufficient
attention on the "defensive" aspect.
In my view, this approach
may avoid the risk of global human dictatorship by the specific tribe
you're worried about, but it doesn't have an answer to the underlying
structural problem: in an offense-favoring environment, there's constant
ongoing risk of either catastrophe, or someone positioning themselves as
a protector and permanently establishing themselves at the top. In the
specific case of AI, it also doesn't have a good answer to the risk of
humans as a whole being disempowered compared to AIs.
Differential defensive acceleration, but don't care about
"decentralized and democratic". Embracing centralized control
for the sake of safety has permanent appeal to a subset of people, and
readers are undoubtedly already familiar with many examples, and the
downsides of them. Recently, some have worried that extreme centralized
control is the only solution to the extremes of future technologies: see
this
hypothetical scenario where "Everybody is fitted with a ‘freedom
tag' – a sequent to the more limited wearable surveillance devices
familiar today, such as the ankle tag used in several countries as a
prison alternative ... encrypted video and audio is continuously uploaded
and machine-interpreted in real time". However, centralized control is a
spectrum. One milder version of centralized control that's usually
overlooked, but is still harmful, is resistance to public scrutiny in
biotech (eg. food,
vaccines),
and the closed source norms that allow this resistance to go
unchallenged.
The risk of this approach is, of course, that the
center is often itself the source of risk. We saw this in Covid, where
gain-of-function research funded by multiple major world
governments may have been the source of the pandemic, centralized
epistemology led to the WHO not
acknowledging for years that
Covid is airborne, and coercive social
distancing and vaccine
mandates led to political backlash that may reverberate for decades. A
similar situation may well happen around any risks to do with AI, or
other risky technologies. A decentralized approach would better address
risks from the center itself.
Decentralized defense, but don't care about
acceleration - basically, attempting to slow down technological
progress, or economic degrowth.
The
challenge with this strategy is twofold. First, on balance technology
and economic growth have been massively good for humanity, and
any delay to it imposes
costs that are hard
to overstate. Second, in a non-totalitarian world, not advancing is
unstable: whoever "cheats" the most and finds plausibly-deniable ways to
advance anyway will get ahead. Decelerationist strategies can work to
some extent in some contexts: European food being healthier than
American food is one example, the success of nuclear non-proliferation
so far is another. But they cannot work forever.
With d/acc, we want to:
- Be principled at a time when much of the world is becoming tribal,
and not just build whatever - rather, we want to build
specific things that make the world safer and better.
- Acknowledge that exponential technological progress means that
the world is going to get very very weird, and that
humanity's total "footprint" on the universe will only increase. Our
ability to keep vulnerable animals, plants and people out of harm's way
must improve, but the only way out is forward.
- Build technology that keeps us safe without assuming that
"the good guys (or good AIs) are in charge". We do this by
building tools that are naturally
more effective when used to build and to protect than when used to
destroy.
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:
- Focusing on the challenges of superintelligence, I proposed a path
(far from original to me) of how we can have superintelligence without
disempowerment:
- Today, build AI-as-tools rather than
AI-as-highly-autonomous-agents
- Tomorrow use tools like virtual
reality, myoelectrics
and brain-computer interfaces to create tighter and tighter feedback
between AI and humans
- Over time proceed toward an eventual endgame where the
superintelligence is a tightly coupled combination of machines and
us.
- 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:
d/acc: one year later
2025 Jan 05 See all postsSpecial 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.
Decentralized acceleration, but don't care about the "differential defensive" part. Basically, be an e/acc, but decentralized. There are plenty of people who take this approach, some who label themselves d/acc but helpfully describe their focus as "OFFENSE", but also plenty of others who are excited about "decentralized AI" and similar topics in a more moderate way, but in my view put insufficient attention on the "defensive" aspect.
In my view, this approach may avoid the risk of global human dictatorship by the specific tribe you're worried about, but it doesn't have an answer to the underlying structural problem: in an offense-favoring environment, there's constant ongoing risk of either catastrophe, or someone positioning themselves as a protector and permanently establishing themselves at the top. In the specific case of AI, it also doesn't have a good answer to the risk of humans as a whole being disempowered compared to AIs.
Differential defensive acceleration, but don't care about "decentralized and democratic". Embracing centralized control for the sake of safety has permanent appeal to a subset of people, and readers are undoubtedly already familiar with many examples, and the downsides of them. Recently, some have worried that extreme centralized control is the only solution to the extremes of future technologies: see this hypothetical scenario where "Everybody is fitted with a ‘freedom tag' – a sequent to the more limited wearable surveillance devices familiar today, such as the ankle tag used in several countries as a prison alternative ... encrypted video and audio is continuously uploaded and machine-interpreted in real time". However, centralized control is a spectrum. One milder version of centralized control that's usually overlooked, but is still harmful, is resistance to public scrutiny in biotech (eg. food, vaccines), and the closed source norms that allow this resistance to go unchallenged.
The risk of this approach is, of course, that the center is often itself the source of risk. We saw this in Covid, where gain-of-function research funded by multiple major world governments may have been the source of the pandemic, centralized epistemology led to the WHO not acknowledging for years that Covid is airborne, and coercive social distancing and vaccine mandates led to political backlash that may reverberate for decades. A similar situation may well happen around any risks to do with AI, or other risky technologies. A decentralized approach would better address risks from the center itself.
Decentralized defense, but don't care about acceleration - basically, attempting to slow down technological progress, or economic degrowth.
The challenge with this strategy is twofold. First, on balance technology and economic growth have been massively good for humanity, and any delay to it imposes costs that are hard to overstate. Second, in a non-totalitarian world, not advancing is unstable: whoever "cheats" the most and finds plausibly-deniable ways to advance anyway will get ahead. Decelerationist strategies can work to some extent in some contexts: European food being healthier than American food is one example, the success of nuclear non-proliferation so far is another. But they cannot work forever.
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:
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: