TLDR Tech / Crypto
Vitalik on AI 2040 and the Pause Debate
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin engaged with the AI 2040 policy paper, framing the debate as two incompatible worldviews: proponents assume superintelligence arrives by 2040 and warn of irreversible power concentration, while detractors assume the ASI transition goes smoothly by default without accounting for humanity's hard power dropping to zero. Buterin declined to join either camp but rejected the framing from major AI labs that positions one actor's "controlling global dominance" as the good outcome, calling it a trigger for every political alarm bell in any world resembling normal technology governance. He advocated for his d/acc platform, which emphasizes formal verification, cryptography, open hardware, and non-power-concentrating physical security, and noted that AI 2040 has improved by becoming more open-source friendly and incorporating "mutually assured compute destruction," giving multiple actors the ability to trigger a global compute winter rather than selectively disenfranchising others. As a legitimacy-building bridge, he proposed pre-agreed triggers (super-pandemics, unemployment exceeding 25%, and slaughterbots deployment) that, if enough fire within a set timeframe, would shift the community toward compute slowdowns, giving both accelerationists and pause advocates a reason to accept the framework.
Read the full story