Vitalik Buterin on Human Agency in the AI Era
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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One of the challenges of the world right now is that we're definitely in a less peaceful and less safe world than ten or fifteen years ago. The vision of safety that we're competing with is basically, oh, you know, let's trust the uncle in the sky, and the uncle in the sky is going to figure everything out for us in exchange for taking away all of our privacy and all of our agency. Crypto does not have the ability to fix the dollar. Crypto has the ability to create its own thing that does not have some of the disadvantages that the dollar has, and each individual person is free to use it or fr
For years, the Internet promised more openness, more freedom, and more agency. But as systems become more centralized and AI becomes more capable, those questions start to look different. Vitalik Buterin has spent much of the last decade thinking about how technology could protect individual agency instead of replacing it. Not by trying to control the entire world, but by creating spaces, what he calls sanctuary technologies, where people can coordinate, create, and think freely. At the same time, AI is changing how people learn, work, and even reason. The challenge is not just building more p
Today, we're actually joined by Vitalik, who is the founder of Ethereum and also a super prominent thinker. And one of the big reasons is we just love some of the things that Vitalik actually talks about and shares about and through a lot of the digital artifacts that he writes. And so this is actually an opportunity for us to unpack these digital artifacts even further, unpack his blog posts, unpack his tweets, and get to just know who he is, who you are, Vitalik. Thank you for joining us at a deeper level. But before we jump into some of the things that we're gonna talk about, I just wanted
Yeah. Hey, Vitalik. I think we're all live now.
Yeah. Vitalik's already live here. Welcome.
How's it going? How's nomad life been, by the way? Like, I know you're you're still you're still fully nomadic. Right?
Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I have, not gone mad. So I guess, know, that part has not been living up to the name, but that's probably a good thing.
Yeah. YESNAT ing is for later. Indeed. Awesome. So should we pull up, like I mean, the whole concept here is, like, you've written so many interesting things across, like, AI, across, like, civilization generally, and, like, tech, obviously, Ethereum whatnot. So we're just kinda, like, pulling up some of the stuff that you've written in your blogs, which Sofia and I have had the pleasure. Like, honestly, over the past three days, we've been rereading your blogs, like, and tweets and just trying to find nuggets out of them for this. So, yeah, we got a couple of these.
Yep. A decade ago, you were at the very early stages of actually creating Ethereum, and now it's a decade later. And I'm so curious, how has your identity changed since then?
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