## https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html Tech companies with huge user base as showing potential for tech enabled totalrin govt. my basic fear is that the same kinds of managerial technologies that allow OpenAI to serve over a hundred million customers with 500 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI) will also allow a 500-person political elite, or even a 5-person board, to maintain an iron fist over an entire country. With modern surveillance to collect information, and modern AI to interpret it, there may be no place to hide. Across the board, I see far too many plans to save the world that involve giving a small group of people extreme and opaque power and hoping that they use it wisely. And so I find myself drawn to a different philosophy, one that has detailed ideas for how to deal with risks, but which seeks to create and maintain a more democratic world and tries to avoid centralization as the go-to solution to our problems. Yay democracy?! creating decentralized governance mechanisms to deal with negative externalities is socially a very hard problem. There is a reason why the go-to example of decentralized governance going wrong is mob justice. There is something about human psychology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion) that makes responding to negatives much more tricky, and much more likely to go very wrong, than responding to positives. And this is a reason why even in otherwise highly democratic organizations, decisions of how to respond to negatives are often left to a centralized board. Résilient physical infra is underrated defence tech. Building tools to help people survive and even live comfortable lives independently or semiindependently of long international supply chains seems like a valuable defensive technology, and one with a low risk of turning out to be useful for offense. ZK SNARK lets you prove things about yourself eg citic]zen ship without revealing who you are.` Vitalik working on primitives like this. The default path forward suggested by many of those who worry about AI essentially leads to a minimal AI world government. Near-term versions of this include a proposal for a "multinational AGI consortium" (https://www.conjecture.dev/research/multinational-agi-consortium-magic-a-proposal-for- international-coordination-on-ai) ("MAGIC"). Such a consortium, if it gets established and succeeds at its goals of creating superintelligent AI, would have a natural path to becoming a de-facto minimal world government. Longer-term, there are ideas like the "pivotal act" (https://arbital.com/p/pivotal/) theory: we create an AI that performs a single one-time act which rearranges the world into a game where from that point forward humans are still in charge, but where the game board is somehow more defense-favoring and more fit for human flourishing. The main practical issue that I see with this so far is that people don't seem to actually trust any specific governance mechanism with the power to build such a thing. Mind up;lads as the lest implausible desirable outcome. ### Humans are good I believe that these things are deeply good, and that expanding humanity's reach even further to the planets and stars is deeply good, because **I believe humanity is deeply good**. [...] It is common to argue that humans are bad because we cheat and steal, engage in colonialism and war, and mistreat and annihilate other species. My reply to this style of thinking is one simple question: compared to what? Yes, human beings are often mean, but we much more often show kindness and mercy, and work together for our common benefit. Even during wars we often take care to protect civilians - certainly not nearly enough, but also far more than we did 2000 years ago. The next century may well bring widely available non-animal-based meat, eliminating the largest moral catastrophe that human beings can justly be blamed for today. Non-human animals are not like this. There is no situation where a cat will adopt an entire lifestyle of refusing to eat mice as a matter of ethical principle. The Sun is growing brighter every year, and in about one billion years, it is expected that this will make the Earth too hot to sustain life. Does the Sun even think about the genocide that it is going to cause? And so it is my firm belief that, out of all the things that we have known and seen in our universe, we, humans, are the brightest star. We are the one thing that we know about that, even if imperfectly, sometimes make an earnest effort to care about "the good", and adjust our behavior to better serve it. Two billion years from now, if the Earth or any part of the universe still bears the beauty of Earthly life, it will be human artifices like space travel and geoengineering that will have made it happen. ## Eric Weinstein interview VB ses himself as a social technologist. All about trying to increase provision of public goods.