I realized what bothers me about @vitalik.eth d/acc essay. Even though it is optimistic, it shares with the pessimist side a presumption that technology, as an evolutionary process, *can* be governed according to some notion of human intent.

“Tech can/cannot be governed” is a bigger divide than optimism/pessimism

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

The rare technologies we’ve been able to weakly “govern”, like nuclear have a) highly upstream proliferation choke points (fissile materials) without which knowledge is useless b) no real upside to small-scale/retail use/democratization. I want AI; I don’t really want a backyard or small-biz nuclear plant.

LLMs/AGI is gonna need huge amounts of specialized compute hardware - isnt that a pretty big upstream choke point?