d/acc: A Review and Outlook One Year Later

About a year ago, I wrote an article about technological optimism, outlining my overall enthusiasm for technology and the tremendous benefits it may bring, while also expressing a cautious attitude towards certain specific issues, particularly around the concerns of superintelligent artificial intelligence. If this technology is not built properly, it could pose catastrophic risks or lead to humanity losing power irreversibly.

A core idea I proposed in that article is decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration. This means accelerating technological development while selectively focusing on technologies that enhance our defensive capabilities rather than destructive ones, and striving to decentralize power rather than concentrating it in the hands of a few elites who decide right and wrong on behalf of everyone. The defensive model should resemble the democratic Switzerland and the historically quasi-anarchic Zomia region, rather than the lord and castle model of medieval feudalism.

In the year since then, these ideas and concepts have seen significant development and maturation. I shared these ideas on the "80,000 Hours" platform and received a lot of feedback, mostly positive, but of course there were some criticisms as well.

This work has continued to advance and has achieved tangible results: we have seen progress in the verifiable open-source vaccine field; awareness of the value of healthy indoor air is continually increasing; "community notes" continue to play a positive role; prediction markets have seen a breakthrough year as information tools; zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (ZK-SNARKs) have been applied in government identity verification and social media (ensuring the security of Ethereum wallets through account abstraction); open-source imaging tools have been applied in the fields of medicine and brain-computer interfaces (BCI), and so on.

Last autumn, we held our first major d/acc event: "d/acc Exploration Day" (d/aDDy), which took place at Devcon. The event brought together speakers from various pillar fields of d/acc (biotechnology, physics, networking, information defense, and neurotechnology) and lasted an entire day. People who have long been dedicated to these technologies began to learn more about each other's work, while outsiders became increasingly aware of a grander vision: the shared values driving the development of Ethereum and cryptocurrency can extend to a broader world.

The Connotation and Denotation of d/acc

Imagine a scenario in 2042. You see a report in the media stating that a new epidemic may break out in your city. Such news has become commonplace: people often overreact to every mutation of animal diseases, and in the vast majority of cases, these mutations do not lead to an actual crisis. The previous two potential epidemics were detected early and successfully contained through wastewater monitoring and open-source analysis of social media. However, this time is different; prediction markets show a 60% chance of at least 10,000 cases, which makes you feel concerned.

Just yesterday, the genetic sequence of the virus was identified. The air quality testing software in your pocket has been updated to enable detection of the new virus (whether through a breath test or after 15 minutes of indoor exposure). At the same time, open-source instructions and code for generating a vaccine using equipment available in any modern medical facility worldwide are expected to be released in a few weeks. Most people have not yet taken any action, primarily relying 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 handles routine tasks such as navigation, restaurant and activity recommendations, but also takes into account real-time air testing data and carbon dioxide data to only recommend the safest places to you. This data is provided by thousands of participants and devices, and with the help of ZK-SNARKs and differential privacy technologies, it minimizes the risk of data leakage or misuse for other purposes.

Two months later, the epidemic miraculously dissipated: it seemed that 60% of people followed basic epidemic prevention protocols, such as wearing masks when the air tester alarmed and showed the presence of the virus, and self-isolating if their personal test results were 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 potentially five times more severe than the COVID-19 pandemic of twenty years ago has not caused serious impacts.

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

Holding an event with "diversity" is not difficult, but it is quite challenging to truly foster close connections among people from different backgrounds and interests. I still vividly remember my experiences in middle and high school of being forced to watch lengthy operas, which I personally found tedious and boring. I was well aware that I "should" appreciate them, as failing to do so would label me as an uncultured computer science slacker, yet I could not 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 loved to learn about various jobs in different fields.

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

The core idea of d/acc is simple and clear: 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 transferring 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 easy to implement, while it faces severe challenges when defense encounters numerous difficulties—under such circumstances, the likely outcome is a chaotic period of mutual confrontation among all, ultimately reaching a state of balance ruled by the strongest.

One way to understand the important significance of trying to achieve decentralization, defensiveness, and acceleration simultaneously is to compare it with the ideas generated by abandoning any one of these three aspects.

Decentralization accelerates, but overlooks the "differentiated defense" part

Essentially, this is similar to being an effective accelerationist (e/acc) while simultaneously pursuing decentralization. There are many people who take 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, they exhibit a noticeable lack of attention to the "defensive" aspects.

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

Differentiated defense acceleration, but neglecting "decentralization and democracy"

Accepting centralized control to achieve security goals has always held a certain appeal for some people. Readers are undoubtedly familiar with numerous such cases and the drawbacks they bring. Recently, some have expressed concerns that extreme centralized control may be the only way to respond to future extreme technologies: for example, envision a hypothetical scenario where "everyone wears a 'freedom tag'—a successor product to today’s more limited wearable monitoring devices, similar to ankle tags used in some countries as alternatives to imprisonment... encrypted video and audio are continuously uploaded and interpreted in real-time by machines." However, centralized control presents a degree of problems. A relatively mild form of centralized control, often overlooked but still harmful, is reflected in the resistance to public oversight in the field of biotechnology (e.g., food, vaccines) and the closed-source norms that allow such resistance to go unchallenged.

The risks of this approach are evident, as the center itself often becomes a 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 outbreak. Centralized epistemology led the World Health Organization to refuse for years to acknowledge that the coronavirus spreads through the air, while mandatory social distancing and vaccine mandates triggered political backlash that could last for decades. Similar situations are likely to arise again in any risk scenario associated with artificial intelligence or other risky technologies. In contrast, a decentralized approach will more effectively address risks emanating from the center itself.

Decentralized defense, but excluding acceleration

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

This strategy faces dual challenges. First, overall, technological and economic growth is extremely beneficial to humanity, and any delay in it will incur immeasurable 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. Slowism strategies can work to some extent in certain specific contexts: for example, European food is healthier than American food, which is one illustration; the success achieved so far in nuclear non-proliferation is another. However, these strategies cannot work indefinitely.

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

• In today's world, amidst the increasing trend of tribalism, we must adhere to principles rather than blindly constructing various things—instead, we aspire to build specific things to make the world a safer and better place.
• 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 continuously improve, and the only way forward is to move boldly ahead.
• Build technology that genuinely protects us, rather than relying on the assumption of "good people (or good AI) controlling everything." We achieve this by creating tools that are inherently more effective for building and protecting than for destroying.

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

Our goal is to build a world that preserves human agency, achieving negative freedom, which means avoiding active interference by others (whether ordinary citizens, governments, or superintelligent robots) in our ability to shape our own destinies, while also achieving positive freedom, which ensures that we have the knowledge and resources to exercise this ability. This resonates with