d/acc: A Review and Outlook One Year Later

Preface

Special thanks to the volunteers for their feedback and reviews.

About a year ago, I wrote an article on technological optimism, outlining the overall enthusiasm for technology and the immense benefits it can bring, while also expressing a cautious attitude towards certain specific issues, primarily focusing on the risks that superintelligent artificial intelligence may pose.

The core idea of the article is to uphold a philosophy: decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration. It is necessary to accelerate technological development while focusing on technologies that enhance defensive capabilities rather than cause harm, and to promote the decentralization of power. The mode of defense should be like democratic Switzerland, rather than the model under medieval feudalism.

Over the past year, these ideas and concepts have undergone significant development and maturation. I have shared these thoughts on multiple platforms and received a lot of responses, most of which are positive, though there are also some critical voices.

This work continues to advance and has achieved tangible results: progress has been made in several areas including verifiable open-source vaccines, healthy indoor air, community notes, prediction markets, and zero-knowledge proof applications.

Last autumn, we welcomed our first significant d/acc event: "d/acc Discovery Day". The event brought together speakers from various pillar fields and lasted a full day. People became increasingly aware of a larger vision: the values that drive the development of Ethereum and cryptocurrency can extend to a broader world.

The Connotation and Denotation of d/acc

The core idea of d/acc is simple and clear: decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration. It aims to develop technologies that can tilt the balance of offense and defense towards defense, without relying on transferring more power to central authorities during implementation. There is an inherent close connection between these two aspects.

One way to understand the important significance of simultaneously achieving decentralization, defensiveness, and acceleration is to compare it with the ideas generated by giving up any one of these three aspects:

1. Decentralization accelerates, but overlooks the "differentiated defense" part.
2. Differentiated defense acceleration, but neglecting "decentralization and democracy"
3. Decentralized defense, but exclusion of acceleration

Through d/acc, we are committed to achieving the following goals:

• Upholding principles in the increasingly tribalized world today, building specific things to make the world safer and better.
• Recognizing that exponential technological advancements mean the world will become extraordinarily peculiar, our ability to protect vulnerable groups must continue to improve.
• Build technology that can genuinely protect us, rather than relying on the assumption that "good people control everything."

Another perspective on thinking about d/acc is to return to the framework of the European Pirate Party movement in the late 2000s: empowerment. Our goal is to build a world that can preserve human agency, achieving negative freedom and positive freedom. This resonates with a classical liberal tradition that has lasted for centuries.

Challenge: AI Safety, Urgent Timelines, and Regulatory Dilemmas

Last year, the most persuasive counterarguments to my article came from the artificial intelligence safety community. Their argument was: we may only have a short time to develop general artificial intelligence and superintelligence. Therefore, we cannot just accelerate the development of beneficial technologies; we must also slow down the development of harmful technologies, which means strong regulatory measures are needed that may anger the powerful.

If we find ourselves in the least ideal world, where the risks of artificial intelligence are extremely high and the timeline may be as short as five years, I would support the following regulatory measures:

1. Responsibility
2. Global "soft pause" button on industrial-scale hardware

Both of these strategies have flaws, and it is evident that they are merely temporary measures. Therefore, we need more stable measures to buy time. Many d/acc technologies are relevant here and can respond to the possible takeover by artificial intelligence.

The Role of Cryptocurrency in d/acc

There are some important connections between cryptocurrency and d/acc:

• d/acc is the extension of the fundamental value of cryptocurrency to other technological fields.
• The cryptocurrency community is a natural early adopter of d/acc technology.
• Many cryptocurrency technologies can be used in the d/acc thematic field.
• There are also win-win cooperation opportunities in technologies adjacent to cryptocurrencies.

d/acc and Public Goods Funding

Powerful decentralized public goods funding is essential for the d/acc vision. We must do the hard thing, which is figuring out how to fund public goods in a way that addresses criticisms.

Deep funding is my latest effort to address this issue. It features two main innovations: dependency graphs and artificial intelligence as human judgment after refinement.

The fundamental goal is to create a social tool that can fund public goods with a level of accuracy, fairness, and open access that is at least close to the market's ability to fund private goods.

Future

The coming decades bring significant challenges: a powerful wave of new technologies is rapidly approaching, and the world is becoming increasingly uncooperative.

However, each of these challenges has a glimmer of hope:

1. We now have very powerful tools to complete our remaining work faster.
2. Many of the principles we cherish can be reclaimed by a broad alliance that welcomes anyone in the world to join.

The acquisition of tools means we are able to adapt and improve our biological characteristics and environment, while the "defense" aspect in d/acc means we can do so without infringing on others' freedom to do the same.

Building a brighter 21st century, while protecting human existence, freedom, and agency in our journey towards the stars, is a challenging task. But I believe we are up to it.