Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, currently valued at around $500 billion. But beyond revolutionizing blockchain technology, Vitalik has become one of the most thoughtful voices on AI safety and existential risk.
He's donated over $665 million to pandemic prevention and other causes, and has a 12% P(Doom) – putting him squarely in what I consider the "sane zone" for AI risk assessment. What makes Vitalik particularly interesting is that he's both a hardcore techno-optimist who built one of the most successful decentralized systems ever created, and someone willing to seriously consider AI regulation and coordination mechanisms.
Vitalik coined the term "d/acc" – defensive, decentralized, democratic, differential acceleration – as a middle path between uncritical AI acceleration and total pause scenarios. He argues we need to make the world more like Switzerland (defensible, decentralized) and less like the Eurasian steppes (vulnerable to conquest).
We dive deep into the tractability of AI alignment, whether current approaches like DAC can actually work when superintelligence arrives, and why he thinks a pluralistic world of competing AIs might be safer than a single aligned superintelligence. We also explore his vision for human-AI merger through brain-computer interfaces and uploading.
The crux of our disagreement is that I think we're heading for a "plants vs. animals" scenario where AI will simply operate on timescales we can't match, while Vitalik believes we can maintain agency through the right combination of defensive technologies and institutional design.
Finally, we tackle the discourse itself – I ask Vitalik to debunk the common ad hominem attacks against AI doomers, from "it's just a fringe position" to "no real builders believe in doom." His responses carry weight given his credibility as both a successful entrepreneur and someone who's maintained intellectual honesty throughout his career.
Timestamps
* 00:00:00 - Cold Open
* 00:00:37 - Introducing Vitalik Buterin
* 00:02:14 - Vitalik's altruism
* 00:04:36 - Rationalist community influence
* 00:06:30 - Opinion of Eliezer Yudkowsky and MIRI
* 00:09:00 - What’s Your P(Doom)™
* 00:24:42 - AI timelines
* 00:31:33 - AI consciousness
* 00:35:01 - Headroom above human intelligence
* 00:48:56 - Techno optimism discussion
* 00:58:38 - e/acc: Vibes-based ideology without deep arguments
* 01:02:49 - d/acc: Defensive, decentralized, democratic acceleration
* 01:11:37 - How plausible is d/acc?
* 01:20:53 - Why libertarian acceleration can paradoxically break decentralization
* 01:25:49 - Can we merge with AIs?
* 01:35:10 - Military AI concerns: How war accelerates dangerous development
* 01:42:26 - The intractability question
* 01:51:10 - Anthropic and tractability-washing the AI alignment problem
* 02:00:05 - The state of AI x-risk discourse
* 02:05:14 - Debunking ad hominem attacks against doomers
* 02:23:41 - Liron’s outro
Links
Vitalik’s website: https://vitalik.eth.limo
Vitalik’s Twitter: https://x.com/vitalikbuterin
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s explanation of p-Zombies: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies
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