d/acc: A Review and Outlook One Year Later

Last year, I wrote an article about technological optimism, outlining my overall enthusiasm for technology and its immense benefits, while also expressing a cautious attitude towards certain issues, mainly focusing on the potential catastrophic risks posed by superintelligent artificial intelligence or the risk of humanity irreversibly losing power.

One core point of the article is to uphold a decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration concept. It aims to accelerate technological development while distinctly focusing on technologies that can enhance our defensive capabilities rather than inflict harm, and is committed to promoting the dispersion of power rather than concentrating it in the hands of a few elites. The model of defense should be akin to the democratic Switzerland and the historically quasi-anarchist Zomia region, rather than the model represented by lords and castles under medieval feudalism.

In the year since then, these ideas and concepts have undergone significant development and maturation. I shared these thoughts on the "80,000 Hours" platform and received many responses, most of which were positive, though there were certainly some critical voices.

This work has continued to progress and has achieved tangible results: we have witnessed advancements in the field of verifiable open-source vaccines; the awareness of the value of healthy indoor air has deepened; "community notes" continue to play a positive role; prediction markets have had a breakthrough year as an information tool; zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge have been applied in government identity verification and social media; open-source imaging tools have found applications in medicine and brain-computer interfaces, among others.

Last autumn, we welcomed the first major d/acc event: "d/acc Discovery Day". The event brought together speakers from various pillar areas of d/acc, including biology, physics, networking, information defense, and neural technology, and lasted an entire day. Over the years, people dedicated to these technologies have come to better understand each other's work, while outsiders have become increasingly aware of a larger vision: that the same values driving the development of Ethereum and cryptocurrency can extend to a broader world.

The Connotation and Denotation of d/acc

As time flows to the year 2042, you see a report in the media stating that a new epidemic may break out in your city. You have become accustomed to such news: people often overreact to every mutation of animal diseases, and in most cases, these mutations do not lead to an actual crisis. The previous two potential epidemics were detected early through wastewater monitoring and open-source analysis of social media, and they were successfully contained in their infancy. However, this time is different; prediction markets show a 60% probability of at least 10,000 cases, which leaves you feeling anxious.

Just yesterday, the genetic sequence of the virus was identified. A software update for the air tester in your pocket was promptly released, enabling the tester to detect the new virus. Meanwhile, open-source instructions and code for generating vaccines using equipment available at any modern medical facility around the world are expected to be released in a few weeks. Most people have not taken any action yet, as they mainly rely on widely adopted air filtration and ventilation measures to ensure their safety.

Due to your own immune issues, you act more cautiously: the open-source locally running personal assistant AI you use not only undertakes regular tasks such as navigation, restaurant, and activity recommendations but also takes into account real-time air quality test data and carbon dioxide data, thereby recommending only the safest places to you. This data is provided by thousands of participants and devices, minimizing the risk of data being leaked or misused for other purposes through the use of ZK-SNARKs and differential privacy techniques.

Two months later, the epidemic miraculously dissipated: it seemed that 60% of people followed basic epidemic prevention protocols, which included wearing masks when the air tester sounded an alarm and indicated the presence of the virus, and isolating at home if an individual tested positive. This measure was sufficient to further reduce the transmission rate, which had already been significantly lowered due to passive strong air filtration, to below 1. A simulation showed that a disease that could be five times more severe than the COVID-19 pandemic from twenty years ago has not caused serious impacts.

The d/acc event held by Devcon achieved an extremely positive outcome, which is that the d/acc concept successfully brought together people from different fields and effectively sparked their strong interest in each other's work.

Holding an event with "diversity" is not difficult, but having people from different backgrounds and interests truly establish close connections is quite a challenge. I still vividly remember my experiences in middle school and high school being forced to watch lengthy operas, which I personally found boring and tedious. I was well aware that I "should" appreciate them, because otherwise, I would be seen as an uncultured computer science sloth, but I failed to resonate with the content of the operas on a deeper level. However, the atmosphere of the d/acc day event was completely different: it felt like people genuinely enjoyed learning about various work from different fields.

If we aspire to build a brighter future than domination, deceleration, and destruction, we must necessarily embark on this broad alliance-building. d/acc seems to have achieved significant results in this regard, and this alone is enough to highlight the precious value of this concept.

The core idea of d/acc is clear and straightforward: decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration. It aims to build technologies that promote a balance between offense and defense leaning towards defense, without relying on granting more power to central authorities during the implementation process. There is an inherent close connection between these two aspects: any decentralized, democratic, or free political structure tends to thrive when defense is relatively easy to implement, but faces severe challenges when defense encounters significant difficulties.

One way to understand the significance of simultaneously achieving decentralization, defensiveness, and acceleration is to compare it with the concepts arising from the abandonment of any one of these three aspects.

Decentralized acceleration, but ignoring the "differentiated defense" part

Essentially, this is similar to becoming an effective accelerationist ( e/acc ), while simultaneously pursuing decentralization. Many people adopt this approach, some of whom call themselves d/acc, but they beneficially describe their focus as "offensive." Additionally, there are many others who show a more moderate enthusiasm for "decentralized artificial intelligence" and similar topics, but in my view, their focus on the "defensive" aspect is clearly lacking.

In my opinion, this approach may help avoid the risk of specific groups imposing dictatorship over humanity as a whole, but it fails to address potential structural issues: in an environment conducive to aggression, there is always a persistent risk of disaster, or someone may position themselves as a protector and permanently occupy a dominant position. Regarding artificial intelligence, it also cannot adequately address the risk of humanity's overall power being weakened in relation to AI.

Differentiated defense acceleration, but ignoring "decentralization and democracy"

Accepting centralized control to achieve security goals has always had a certain appeal for some people, and readers are undoubtedly familiar with numerous such examples and the drawbacks they bring. Recently, some people are concerned that extreme centralized control may be the only way to respond to future extreme technologies: for example, imagine a hypothetical scenario where "everyone wears a 'freedom tag'—this is a follow-up product to today's more limited wearable monitoring devices, similar to the ankle tags used as alternatives to imprisonment in several countries... encrypted video and audio are continuously uploaded and interpreted in real-time by machines". However, centralized control has a degree problem. A form of relatively mild centralized control that is often overlooked but still harmful is reflected in the biotechnology field's resistance to public oversight, as well as allowing this resistance to go unchallenged through closed-source norms.

The risks of this approach are evident, namely that the center itself often becomes the source of risk. We witnessed this during the COVID-19 pandemic, where functionally gain-of-function research funded by multiple major world governments may have been the root cause of the pandemic. Centralized epistemology led many institutions to refuse to acknowledge for years that the COVID virus was airborne, while mandatory social distancing and vaccine mandates triggered political backlash that could last for decades. Similar situations are likely to occur again in any risk scenario related to artificial intelligence or other risky technologies. In contrast, a decentralized approach would more effectively address the risks stemming from the center itself.

Decentralized Defense, but Reject Acceleration

Essentially, this is an attempt to slow down technological progress or promote economic recession.

This strategy faces a dual challenge. First, overall, technological and economic growth is extremely beneficial for humanity, and any delay in this will incur incalculable costs. Second, in a non-totalitarian world, stagnation is unstable: those who "cheat" the most and can find seemingly reasonable ways to continue advancing will gain an advantage. The strategy of slowing down can work to some extent in certain specific contexts: for example, European food is healthier than American food, which is a case in point; the success of nuclear non-proliferation so far is another. However, these strategies cannot work indefinitely.

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

• Upholding principles in an increasingly tribalized world, rather than blindly constructing various things—on the contrary, we hope to build specific things that make the world safer and better.
• Recognizing that exponential technological advancements mean the world will become extremely peculiar, and humanity's overall "footprint" in the universe will inevitably continue to grow. Our ability to protect vulnerable animals, plants, and populations from harm must continually improve, and the only way forward is to forge ahead.
• Build technology that can effectively protect us, rather than relying on the assumption that "good people control everything." We achieve this goal by creating tools that are naturally more effective for building and protecting than for destroying.

Another perspective on d/acc is to return to a framework of empowerment from the European Pirate Party movement in the late 2000s.

Our goal is to build a world that preserves human agency, achieving negative freedom, which means avoiding active interference from others in our ability to shape our own destiny, while also achieving positive freedom, which ensures that we have the knowledge and resources to exercise this ability. This resonates with a classical liberal tradition that has persisted for centuries, encompassing a focus on "access to tools" and emphasizing education and freedom as key elements of human progress. Given the technological landscape of the 21st century, we can view d/acc as a means to achieve these same goals.

Third Dimension: Coordinated Development of Survival and Prosperity

In my article last year, d/acc particularly focused on defensive technologies: physical defense, biological defense, cyber defense, and information defense. However, mere decentralized defense is not enough to build a great world: we also need a proactive vision that clearly defines humanity's role in acquiring new decentralization.