The d/acc Vision: Balancing Progress and Protection

[Music] I will get straight into the one slide that uh I have today uh so last year I wrote this post that introduced this concept of diac and in general was basically responding to a lot of the discussion that was happening at the time around Techo optimism the need to be more optimistic about technology and to appreciate the very positive impact that techology actually has had over the past 10 Millennia and uh also the extremely positive potential that it has over the next century and at the same time take seriously some of the risks and also really focus on uh like which Technologies are going to do the best possible job of uh giving the kind of future that we want while at the same time minimizing and even actively fighting against the risks and uh one of the arguments that I made is basically that there is this uh important phenomenon which is the offense defense balance right basically is it easier to attack or is it easier to defend and if you have an environment where it's easy to attack then you almost inevitably have this kind of dark Hobs and choice between a very powerful Sovereign and a very destructive state of Anarchy and it just inherently creates all kinds of very bad political effects uh on top of uh creating constant ongoing risk of suffering right and at the same time this is all happening under this backdrop of this discussion about is AI itself and particularly super intelligent AI this very big and massive risk if it is should should we try to slow it down but then if we do slow it down then slowing it down forever basically just creates a world that becomes more and more unstable and so what is the actually resilient and actually long-term stable future that we could be aiming for and uh I think this uh uh to me is uh a near and Midterm uh part of the answer right so in the post that I made last year I talked split up def of Technology into four categories so the first split was uh the split between the world of atoms and the world of bits um so you know very famous distinction might as well just know grab it and use it and within the world of Adams uh split it up between macro and micro and uh so macro defense basically you think about physical resilience um and we'll have some very interesting talks later today including um you know topics on how to massively reduce casualties as if some kind of extremely terrible disaster happens to humanity um micro defense basically means biod defense so anti- pandemics and uh all both myself and a huge number of other really Fascinating People will be talking about how we can make the uh our environments vastly more resilient against actually existing and even potential pandemics all without requiring significant changes in individual Behavior so you might be pleased to know that this room is actually already passively um Airborne uh disease resistant uh so um for example over here you have this you know like little fun little box and the box is Heap a filter we have like a bunch of these all around the room and so basically this uh room be like becomes vastly more safe against Co against any kind of future airborne virus that that comes up without requiring anyone to actually notice and the this is one example of the kinds of uh open and uh widely widely accessible easily Deployable and freedom preserving technologies that we can deploy that can give Humanity or an orders of magnitude boost in its resistance against these kinds of threats these are things that we are not doing today and these are things that with a surprisingly low amount of investment we could actually do a much better job at uh so then on the other side we have the world of bits and the world of bits I uh I this is a a distinction that is I believe unique to me but I talk about the distinction between cyber defense and info defense cyber defense is defense against threats where all reasonable people agree who the attacker is right so if a def protocol gets hacked then obviously the def smart contract doesn't agree that got hacked because if it did it wouldn't have it wouldn't have sent any money out but all reasonable people looking at the situation will agree that like well yes there is a hacker or at the very least someone who used a very unintended mechanism to get uh coins out to get coins out of that system and so we can talk about cryptography we can talk about formal verification blockchains zero knowledge proofs um you know what I call the Egyptian god protocols fhe and aisc and also so another important thing Hardware security and actually deploying all of those Technologies and actually even applying them at the level of operating systems and making sure that things are much safer than they would be today and then info defense so this is uh where reasonable people can actually disagree on who the attacker is so you know one man's misinformation is another man's unjustly suppressed valid points and we need you know technologist to actually help filter through this information and help people identify what kinds of content are more likely to be actually positive and and what kinds of content are more likely to be misinformative misleading things that even they themselves if they better understood it would not want to see and but and uh do so in a way that does not involve empowering a centralized Elite that decides on behalf of everyone else what is what is good and true and what is bad and false now that is all vision of Defense I think one thing that is uh also important to talk about here is I added a third dimension in the year since then right and I call this the survive thrive Dimension and here we talk about not just the Technologies to protect against the bad stuff but also actually enabling the positive future right so in the bio side we have longevity who here is excited about longevity um so now longevity and then beside longevity we also have BCI and BC is kind of conveniently beside longevity and open decentralized compute right so on the left is making sure our compute is safe and or at the top making sure a compute is safe at the bottom is making sure a compute is amazing and compute and biology together we get uh we get BCI acceleration and uh I think one of the really important points that we're going to make is that there's actually a lot of ties between these different spaces it's all one very big integrated field a lot of the viral persistence research does being done in the context of long Co right now actually has a lot of tie-ins that are very applicable to aging right so there's recent new theories that V persistence like actually is a a thing that's a very big contributor to Alzheimer's and then BCI better Medical Technology could contribute like it contributes to fighting diseases it could contribute to living um longer under know quote normal conditions and it's also a uh a BCI accelerator um now physical abundance so you know we want the the big solar Punk cities we want housing to be to be affordable we want you know housing to follow Mo's law instead of following e rooms law for those who know what those are and uh and and then you know we want to go to space we want everything about our physical environments to not just be resilient but also be affordable and amazing and finally collaboration technology so even in situations where people are not attacking each other where you just you actually do have reasonable people and communities that have high trust between each other but they do want to be able to more quickly and more effectively agree on things and come to New consensuses if we want decentralized collectives to like actually be able to act like life players and uh make uh bold choices and keep adapting themselves to rapidly changing circumstances without that collapsing into a dictatorship then much more powerful collaboration technology so this includes all of the stuff we've been doing around public goods funding it includes uh quadratic voting other forms of voting futarchy all kinds of uh all kinds of different governance ideas right so basically I think there there are natural tie-ins at all sides of this uh between technologies that can create an environment where everything is much more safe and much more resilient by default and an Environ where we have open distributed and widely available progress for everyone and so this is what all of the speeches uh that we're going to see today are going to be about and uh I'm very excited to be with you and listen to them thank you and so now I'll uh introduce our next uh speaker El zado