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

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

I think overall I fall on e/acc side because I don’t think meaningful governance is possible without large-scale authoritarianism. 

Culture is highly governable. Trump, Taylor Swift, MCU etc show how it can be done. 

Economics is weakly governable to ungovernable.

Tech is near-pure anarchy.

Even apparent counterexamples are weaker than they look:

Nuclear: Proliferation reaches North Korea

Aviation: Drones!!

Pharmaceuticals: Gray markets; India bucking western IP regimes

If you were historically first mover, you can slow things a bit, that’s it

Even apparent counterexamples are weaker than they look:

Nuclear: Proliferation reaches North Korea

Aviation: Drones!!

Pharmaceuticals: Gray markets; India bucking western IP regimes

If you were historically first mover, you can slow things a bit, that’s it 

https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x6084cdcf

I’d say main e/acc axioms are:

1. Knowledge *will* leak to all who can master it, faster than you think

2. They will want to do very different things with it

3. They will not have an interest in use-consensus and 1-few defectors can blow up consensus

4. Innovation will break chokepoints

5. This is all net good

Now with AI, the obvious chokepoint is silicon. If you follow the industry (Semianalyis, China Talk newsletters), it is obvious control has *already* slipped away. EUV machines from ASML aren’t the iron grip chokehold you think they are. China will get past 3nm.

Everything above fab level is bs illusions of control.

I think this is an absolute good thing. Much as I dislike China’s authoritarian surveillance state a) the West isn’t much better b) I’d like a duopoly at least to break out of Western-centric AI monopoly dangerously open to regulatory capture by crackpot doomers

That said, I like the d-for-decentralized d/acc more than e/acc. 

The d-for-defensive d/acc I think is a dangerous impulse at political level. As a normal tech refinement vector (like nuclear safety), “defense” is important and happens as a matter of course. As a pre-emptive political concern it is a boogeyman.

What do I mean by that? 

Normal tech “defense”: FAFO, add safety protocols by trial and error, accept the risk of some loss (including loss of life) along the way.

Political “defense”: Make up boogeymen like “X-risk” that justify pre-emptive installation of massive capture surfaces for evil priesthoods

There is only one “governance” move: pump more $ into an area where you want to accelerate idea rate. Govern that area to have porous, globally accessible boundaries so people can self-select in/out from anywhere in world. Don’t try too hard to prevent discoveries leaking. 

That’s it. That’s “governance”

All efforts to *stop* technology/ideas being discovered and tried, or even crossing into your borders are necessarily local in time/space. They’ll last as long as you control the guns. Or the idea smugglers invent better ways to get around guns.

This is a good thing.

I’ll close with a discussion question: If you *could* govern technology absolutely with a magic remote control that can control global rate (including negative rates to rewind) of evolution of any technology “channel”, *should* you and *would* you? Or would you destroy that magic remote control (paradox alert!)

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.

I suspect this is in fact approximately the world we actually live in and renewables are in fact at least a decade behind because fossil fuel industry convinced enough people climate change was not a threat/not real. BP and Shell sat on it for decades.

I agree that's an important divide! I'm curious how it would translate into practice.

For example, in a hypothetical earth where corporate lobbies successfully convinced everyone that climate change is actually good, do you agree that solar power tech would be decades behind where it is on our earth? Why or why not?

I’m surprised by this view.

Counterargument: the regulatory state has chokepointed all physical technology for decades. Eroom’s law (see below) is just now finally flattening out as FDA loses prestige.

Bans on tech held back everyone from the Ottomans to Zheng He. Policy shapes what is feasible in technology.

Such control is always local in time and space. See argument down thread. Lack of capital and downstream lack of capability absorption capacity determine rate more than regulatory attempts.

I'm in the tech can't be governed, mostly.

Counter examples
- Nuclear
- Aviation
- Pharmaceuticals

They all share a very high fixed cost to build the infrastructure to get started.

If we treat governance as a form of tech, what does that mean in this context?

To me, it's asking the question of "governed how exactly?" Through regulatory enforcement? Through economic incentives? Through artificial hard constraints (physics? smart contracts?)? New forms we haven't discovered yet?

But insofar as ‘technology’ (term that needs to be deprecated) is configurations of labour and people it is always inherently governed. Granted, physical laws aren’t governed, but people and labour always are. The only variable is form.

Absolutely brilliant. Thanks for putting this into words. Chewing on it

I actually think the even higher-level divide is whether markets are the right mechanism to govern technology. By saying that tech is ungovernable, we are actually ceding it to the invisible force that governs the direction of progress in a capitalistic world, which is markets. 1/

From (probably a bit different standpoint) GDPR is a good example of how tech is being governed