Bankless - 138 - What's Next? Vitalik Buterin | Part II

Starting point is 00:00:07 Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front-run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, exciting episode for you. This is the sequel. This is part two of what's next with Vitalik Buterin. We ask, what's next for Ethereum in today's part two episode? We talk more broadly. What's next for the world? What's next for AI in the intersection of crypto? This is the same. social and philosophical side of Ethereum. We get into the question of what have we created here? What is Ethereum holistically? Is it like a country, a network state, as Belagia, you might say, or is it a

Starting point is 00:00:49 Dow? If it's a Dow, how should Daos be governed? Should we use a corporate governance structure? Should we take the learnings from philosophy and political science and apply those things to Dow's? And then we end with the biggest question of all. I have never heard Vitalik comment on artificial intelligence and his thoughts, but he gives us those thoughts today. Is AI coming to destroy humanity? We ask him that question. Will there be a peaceful coexistence? And what is the intersection between crypto and artificial intelligence? Crypto, of course, being a decentralized technology, AI being one that centralizes. Are we in for the cage match of the decade of the next century? Maybe that's ahead. Vitalik as well thinks AI could be coming sooner than he previously thought.

Starting point is 00:01:34 I think this is after a trip to Silicon Valley and talking to some experts. So a lot of content to unpack. Of course, this is a second part of a two-part conversation with Vitalik. If you want last week's part one, go back on the RSS feed, and you can download that. You should see that. Guys, of course, we're just going to get right to the conversation with Vitalik Buterin, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. If you've been listening to Bankless, you know that we're fans of the modular blockchain thesis.

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Starting point is 00:04:54 And this is a concept most recently put forward by Bologi. He was on the podcast as well recently. And we asked Bologi, who's been a long time in crypto, of course, from very beginnings, do you think that the network state is kind of the main thing that the crypto project is focused on? And his answer was, yes, absolutely. That's what we are doing. Money is just a subset of the network state. I'm curious your perspective on this Vatelic, and I know you have thought.

Starting point is 00:05:24 thoughts, but let's talk about Ethereum first. Do you think Ethereum is an example of a Belagian network state or a network state of, you know, some other conceptual framework? I would say no. And I mean, I would, like, I think Ethereum has a very important role to play in network states, but I would say Ethereum is like a bit of a higher layer thing. And the reason why I would say that is that at this point, the Ethereum community has grown very big, very diverse, very pluralist in a lot of ways. And one of the things that that means that it sacrifices is definitely an assumption of alignment on a lot of issues that people really care about, especially on non-crypto-related topics, right? Like, I think if you look at, you know, even Bitcoin 10 years ago

Starting point is 00:06:20 or like even a theory of eight years ago, and you asked like a question of, like, what do you think the right federal minimum wage is? Or like, what's your view on how health care should be provided? Or, you know, what's your perspective on immigration or, you know, who's right in some geopolitical situation? You know, like, 10 years ago, you would have gotten a lot more alignment. And I think these days you're going to get less alignment on those. kinds of issues. And I think that's an inevitable part of the ecosystem growing. And it's also a healthy thing, right? Like Glenn loves to use the phrase facilitating cooperation across difference. And to me, facilitating cooperation across difference is definitely part of what both, you know, blockchains and a lot of the equipment on blockchains is going to be about. One, probably just a very concrete example just to kind of dive very briefly into the weeds before we dive back out of

Starting point is 00:07:23 what I'm talking about is the whole ENS Brantley situation, right? Like that was something where people within the Ethereum ecosystem who are passionate Ethereums and who have DotEath names, you know, they did have very different perspectives on that situation that they care deeply about. And I think it's a testament to the Ethereum ecosystem and even to ENS itself that we were able to navigate that and even navigate like pretty close to a 50-50 split I think in the yeah ens Dow's decision of like whether or not brantley should be fired right without that really turning into like a big schism that breaks ethereum altogether and to refresh people with the brantley situation brantley had some controversial comments what was it at the time that you know a subset

Starting point is 00:08:11 of the theorem community disagreed vehemently with and yeah any other light on that for folks that weren't familiar with the current event as it happened in Ethereum world? Yeah, I mean, like, he basically has kind of traditional religious views on topics like, you know, homosexuality and, like, those kinds of topics that are, like, definitely extremely out of step with, you know, especially people who have a more left-leaning ethos. And what was the outcome? So the outcome was that there were a lot of calls to basically fire Brantley or, you know, cancel him for various meanings of that term. And I think he did end up getting pushed out of true names, LTD, the company, but there was a vote to try to push him out of the ENSDAO, and I think that vote ended up failing. So, you know, Brantley is part of

Starting point is 00:09:01 Ethereum land, and there are people in some kind of sub-islands of Ethereum who do not really interact with him or wants to interact with him. And then there are some people who do, right? You're right in that he did not get kicked out of the Dow or he did not lose a lot of his like delegation but he did kind of be removed socially he had much less presence on Twitter people listened to him a lot less and so while the formal Dow did not remove his power he did like kind of socially get like knocked down a few rungs if you will so there was some sort of like hybrid outcome to this absolutely yeah and i mean the crypto space i think has uh you know obviously yeah continues to intersect with geopolitics more and more.

Starting point is 00:09:45 The other big example of that was obviously the whole Ukraine situation this year. And there, I think, like, I personally am not aware of, like, Ethereum community. I actually, no, maybe within the Aragon team, which is Russian. There's definitely more people who have, like, takes that vehemently disagree with my position and I mean I guess your position on that issue and there has been some even Twitter drama on that but more and more of these do crop up and more and more of these will crop up but I guess my view there is that you know I have views on each one of these issues and we have views on each one of these issues and I don't think that like our role as participants in the

Starting point is 00:10:35 Ethereum ecosystem should cause us to shy away from expressing our views on some of those topics because, you know, those topics are very important. I was going to say, I think some of what you're saying, Vitalik, is that Ethereum is almost like too credibly neutral to become a Blagian network state. Like, it doesn't have strong enough opinions. It's kind of like asking the Internet to become a network state. Well, what is the Internet? It's a whole bunch of tribes coming together to interact.

Starting point is 00:11:01 So, but maybe so if Ethereum itself is not a network state and can't become one, it doesn't have a social fabric that has enough, you know, coherence. I suppose, around a particular set of values, other than being decentralized and being incredibly neutral itself, then is Ethereum a substrate for spawning other network states on top of? I think absolutely. And I think Ethereum, like, it absolutely is still both a substrate and a home for a lot of different subcommutities that do have these much more detailed and opinionated visions of the kind of world that they want to see. And, like, I do think that Ethereum, to some extent, does sort of structurally have some opinions in the sense of, like, if you're a person that really does believe in the world economic forum vision of a cashless society, then, like, there's just much less for you that Ethereum can offer, right?

Starting point is 00:11:56 So I do think that, you know, there is some extent to which Ethereum, as a thing, has values baked into it, and there are values that are much more shared by the, yeah, Ethereum community than by the, yeah, world as a whole, right? but I think the right level to try to make some of these more opinionated visions come to life is by sub-communities that are close to Ethereum and that are even proud of their alignment with Ethereum, but they do sort of recognize their distinction from Ethereum itself. And so that do sort of both give permission for people to still be Ethereum's, but at the same time not liking their vision. and also by doing so, kind of give themselves the freedom to, like, really have these, like, stronger moral commitments without, you know, fear of kind of offending people by speaking for Ethereum as a whole, right? So, like, I would love to see multiple Ethereum network states. I would, I think within the network state concept, like, there is a lot of room for, like, some kind of concept of,

Starting point is 00:13:04 kind of coordinating layers between network states in general, right? Like, I do think that once there are multiple network states, they are going to have some common interests that just have to do with the fact that they're all network states. I think there might even be Valguyen co-locating some of them beside each other, for example, so that, you know, they can interact with each other, but without literally being part of the exact same at surf and, you know, sort of the high levels of alignment that come out of something like that. And I think Ethereum can be part of the alignment layer, but there's probably also room for other kinds of alignment layers between different network states as well. So it'll be interesting. I think, you know, we'll see how that whole vision is going to evolve.

Starting point is 00:13:49 I mean, I think just basically saying that network states are something that should be free to be more opinionated is something that's probably even going to just create a better world because we'll get more interesting visions that will try to use the concepts to be able to do more. When we talk about the World Economic Forum and Ethereum, we're comparing the value systems of these two like polls, right? But I think it's fair to say that the World Economic Forum is very like opinionated and it's very like political and Ethereum is designed to be this credibly neutral platform. And I think perhaps it's a fair take to say that the reason why we can't really find much room on Ethereum for the World Economic Forum is due to that difference, right?

Starting point is 00:14:35 Like, we can't really find a way to include the WEF's values on our credibly neutral social settlement layer. There's just like not room for them to appear. And so when we talk about other network states or other political systems that do find good ways to inhabit space on Ethereum, and maybe there's more than one, maybe there's a number of them, that's true. They are able to do that because they are more aligned with the values found in Ethereum or they fit inside of it a little bit better. And so Ethereum as a system of supporting many, many network states does come to actually like proliferate its values upon the world by supporting many, many other network states that fit on top of Ethereum, that fit well inside of Ethereum's structure.

Starting point is 00:15:20 And so Ethereum kind of becomes like the meta structure that allows for many, many network states to proliferate. And I think what you were saying with like co-locating network states maybe both in physical territory, but also two network states that are just like very similar, are also going to be able to cooperate with each other, work well together, and grow stronger because of that cooperation. And so I'm wondering if you see this kind of like trajectory for things and network states being built on Ethereum where if we're going to get a proliferation of many, many network states, some of them are going to be able to fit better than others. and the ones that fit better than others are able to adapt with each other better than others.

Starting point is 00:15:59 And then this is kind of this snowball that carries us into this Belagian network state future that I think he is very, very hopeful for. Is that a fair take for the future? I'd say so. Yeah. I mean, I think it's definitely true that some ideology is fit better into both Ethereum and the network state world than others. I mean, the world economic forum is an interesting case, right? because, like, there's the World Economic Forum as an actual thing, and then there's the World Economic Forum as, like, the thing that Twitter trolls mythologize it into.

Starting point is 00:16:31 And I, yeah, I mean, I always get the feeling that, like, I haven't been to the forum myself, but, you know, like, yeah, talks to, like, people who have participated in it, and, like, you know, Ayas kind of talks to people in and participated in it a little bit. And, you know, there are very diverse people, and there's definitely people. that just wants to create infrastructure for schools and developing countries. So, you know, it is a forum and ultimately a forum like internet forums are like places where discussion happens. But at the same time, forums like the our Bitcoin forum, you know, they do tends to like

Starting point is 00:17:09 skew toward particular ideologies as well. So we always, you know, there's always a balance between those two tendencies. And I mean, I think there's definitely the some aspect, like the. The concept of globalism, right? Like, that's an interesting one. Like, I don't know if you saw there was that Twitter poll I made where I basically asked people how they identify me. And one of the questions was, am I a globalist and do you like globalism? And there were people who said they like globalism and I'm a globalist.

Starting point is 00:17:41 And there's people who say they don't like globalism and I'm not a globalist. And this is because there's like actually two different meanings of the term globalism. Like, one is this sort of, you know, cosmopolitan vibe of like someone has the same moral value of whether they're from the United States or Canada or Uganda. And, you know, I'm going to be open to treating any of those people as my brother. And then there is globalism as in one world government. And like, I'm obviously a fan of the first and not a fan of the second. And I think a lot of people are fans of the first and not fans of the yes second. But they just disagree on the semantic question of which one of those two of the word globalist belongs to.

Starting point is 00:18:19 And, you know, even within the world of the World Economic Forum, I think there's definitely people who are very ideologically inclined toward the second. But then there's, I think, also people who are much more inclined toward the first and don't care about the second. And I think as a kind of global, you could call it sort of alternative liberal, and with you using the word liberal in the lowercase sense movement, there's an opportunity to try to like really. split those two and to like basically show people that like some notion of global brotherhood, you know, it doesn't actually require global political centralization. I think these are all fascinating things and like obviously why even the social science side of this cryptic movement is maybe in some ways more interesting than the technology side. But you know, you're talking about the semantics of words like globalism and how that's changed. I also think the semantics behind words in crypto have changed. So take the word Dow. That used to mean something different than what it means today. And I would even say a year ago,

Starting point is 00:19:25 it meant something different than it does today. You wrote a post, which I read yesterday, I was quite fascinated with, and the title of that post was, DOWs are not corporations. And I think you were responding to a new kind of concept or, I guess, thing that's been in Vogue recently, which is the idea that all DAOs that we have on Ethereum and other crypto networks should get their shit together a bit more, should get a bit more organized, should nail down a structure, and should start to resemble more corporate governance. I think you push back on that claim, and you think that some DAOs maybe are fit for corporate governance, but others should be more public, should be more inspired by the political scientists. And then,

Starting point is 00:20:14 the political science that we have. And maybe that's the lens of Ethereum. We'll start there, back to what is this thing called Ethereum? Is Ethereum a Tao? And like, what actually are Dow? Should they be managed corporately? Or are there new governance systems that we're unlocking here? It's a good question.

Starting point is 00:20:33 I mean, I think we haven't really even fully defines the term Dow as some of the examples in that post go into, right? Like there's this sort of vague notion among a lot of people that a Dow still should be this kind of logically centralized singleton where money goes into one place and there's a global vote on every funding decision. And that's clearly just a bad model. And it's a model that probably doesn't even give people what they want out of Dow's. And then there's this alternative architecture that's kind of inspired by what Ukraine Dow is doing where you have the core that makes these decisions. but then you have pods and pods have a much higher level of autonomy. And that seems like something that actually gives people more of what they want out of decentralization. So, and like obviously Ukraine Dow was not the only one.

Starting point is 00:21:27 Like there's also Vita Dow, which was doing life extension research. There's all of the various Taos that are trying to like run long-term pieces of infrastructure. So, you know, reflexer for Rye, Maker for Maker Dow, Claros, then Optimism, Ritra funding, and all of these things. So I hope that we're going to learn a lot from these examples. I hope that a couple of years from now we're going to have, like, some much better models of what a good Dow looks like. And, you know, once we, you know, learn from them, then, you know, would the Ethereum Foundation be able to become a Dow based on that kind of bottle? we'll see. I guess that that was one of those things that's also been a dream from close to the beginning. And then, you know, optimism, obviously very Dow controlled, like what other

Starting point is 00:22:18 DAO-controlled, like what other DAO-GELD we're going to see within the Ethereum ecosystem. We'll see it. It'll be interesting. The Brave Wallet is your secure, multi-chain on-ramp into Web3, and is built directly into the Brave privacy browser. Gone are the days of managing multiple wallet extensions that put you at risk of fishing, spoofs, and tracking. But the Brave Wallet is, you. you can securely manage your crypto assets across more than 100 different chains, including Ethereum, layer 2s, Solana, and more, all without downloading risky extensions.

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Starting point is 00:24:49 So discover which Ledger device is best suited for your journey by going and visiting shop. com. Why don't Dow's just all operate with the corporate governance structure? I mean, there is the argument, Vitalik, that we have baked. out corporate governance over the last 200 years. We've made it pretty efficient. There's a CEO, there's an executive team, there's a board of advisors. There are these governors that keep them in check. These are called shareholders. And it works pretty well. Like all of the products that we experience in our modern world were brought to you by corporation, right? Somebody on the S&P 500 went and created

Starting point is 00:25:27 this. And so these joint stock ownership companies with the corporate structure works pretty well. isn't a Dow just trying to mirror that, or is there something different here? That's a good question. I think there's two arguments that I have against that line of thinking, right? Well, I mean, actually three arguments, right, in the post. Like, one of them is that some things require censorship resistance, and corporations are not good at censorship resistance. Another one is that corporations are good at building products,

Starting point is 00:25:56 but they're less good at providing infrastructure. So, like, for example, social media companies, have completely failed at satisfying people's desire for some notion that, like, the content decisions that they're making are fair, right? And that's the sort of thing that DAOs might actually be better at than traditional forms of corporate governance. And then a third one is the fact that, like, well, actually corporations are designed around the idea that they're second order organizations and they can appeal to first order courts when something goes wrong, right? Like, you can 51% attack a company, right? And, like, potentially, 51% of the shareholders could try

Starting point is 00:26:41 to vote to kick out the other 49%. But that is explicitly illegal. And the mechanism that enforces that is itself, you know, ultimately the government that enforces shareholder laws, right? And so if we're going to build a Dow, then the Dow has to include all of that functionality that's normally provided by nation states by itself. And, you know, corporate governance is not good at doing that, but political science, so like that's exactly the sort of stuff that it studies. Yeah, it's definitely fascinating to see how that evolves. Maybe let's switch back to you Ethereum for a minute and kind of the end game. I guess if, you know, using as simple words as possible, Vitalik, how would you describe Ethereum's end state? Like, at the end of this long roadmap, the theme of this

Starting point is 00:27:32 episode, I think, has been what's next? At the end of all of these things that we've talked about so far, of what's next, what does Ethereum look like and what does it deliver for the world? I think, well, Ethereum's ethos from the beginning, right, I think has been to insist on a few particular values, but otherwise not have its own picture of what specific things it brings to the world, but we have that up to the ecosystem and lots of different groups to create their own vision. And I think just having a well-functioning global cryptocurrency is a huge amount of value by itself. Like it's especially valuable to people outside of the first world. And in places like Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and other places that have a harder time with the existing financial system.

Starting point is 00:28:28 Ethereum being the substrate for DAOs and mechanisms that do other things. So identity is one of the biggest examples. Like can we create some kind of more decentralized model of identity and really start, you know, start. with some of the tools that the Ethereum ecosystem has already, whether it's accounts and hopefully soon social recovery wallets and ENS and things like popes and like try to really optimize that and do what we can to build it into something that's like really good at providing what people want out of an identity system. Being a base layer for Dow's in general, like I mean network states are,

Starting point is 00:29:10 we just talked about those for 10 or 15 minutes, but like what would it actually mean for Ethereum to be a base layer for things like that? Things like proof of humanity have always been one of my favorite applications. Other kinds of censorship resistant applications, other kinds of like credibly neutral and decentralized applications like, you know, could we actually do the whole blockchain-based social media thing and try to create social media platforms that are like more credibly neutral and fair in some way. So, like I don't think there is one very very.

Starting point is 00:29:42 vision for what Ethereum could do. I think there's many different visions. And I think once Ethereum manages to solve its scaling problems, it's going to be in a much better place to help be the substrate that allows all of those visions to happen. I love that part of the answer to the question of what's next for Ethereum is like question mark. We don't actually know what's on the other side. It's like a choose your own adventure. Vitalik, before we close this out, finally, Danny Ryan came on the podcast earlier this week. And he told us that you had some thoughts on AI, artificial intelligence, that is. Vatow, do you have any hot takes on AI?

Starting point is 00:30:19 Like, are you worried about... Since we're on the topic of what's next. Are you worried about AI in society? It's like, are AI's an existential threat to humanity? Do you see any intersection with crypto? Give us any hot takes. What I really want to know, actually, out of this is, like, AIs are not going to have bank accounts, but AIs can totally manage private keys.

Starting point is 00:30:39 And so, like, what intersection does this look like? Did we just create a substrate for AI to gain control of the human race? Yeah. It's over now. Yeah. So when I was visiting the Bay Area, like as part of my trip to SBC, I also visited and talks to a bunch of various AI people, like people from Anthropic and OpenAI and some of the big AI firms and just general AI boosters in the space. And I was surprised by the fast timelines that a lot of them have. Right. Like going in, I think my timelines were more that, you know, we're going to get something like the singularity by, you know, sometime around 2075. And when I gave this a number to people, they're like, oh, wow, you're crazy. How can you possibly think AI is going to be that slow? Wow. And like, a lot of them are literally expecting human level AI before the end of this decade. And, I mean, it was singularity, yeah, within a decade after that.

Starting point is 00:31:39 Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, these are obviously. inside views and my default instinct is to be skeptical, but you know, I think it's important that's the question of like, well, what if they're right? And, you know, what if over the next decade or two, AI basically ends up eating the world?

Starting point is 00:31:57 And then the question that we have to think about is like, what is the role that crypto has to play in an AI-dominated world, right? Like, you know, are structures that, kind of insist on the idea that like humans are the only kind of significant actor in the space. Like are those going to survive an AI transition? Like what would an AI even look like?

Starting point is 00:32:26 Could crypto be a part of like somehow democratically governing the AIs that come out? Would crypto be something that could help coordinate like some alternative AI project so that the whole AI transition doesn't lead to just massive centralization in one or two companies. I mean, I don't know, but I think it's important for anyone to be thinking about the future of crypto as a space to also have the question in mind of how does AI play into this and like what would a merger of, well, not a merger, but what would the interplay between crypto and AI look like? I don't yet perfectly know the answer to this question, but I just think it's a really important question that we need to be very serious from thinking about. Do you have any thoughts on like AI ethics and making sure that we embed, you know, human-oriented ethics into AIs very early so that we don't get an advanced general intelligence that kind of

Starting point is 00:33:29 runs away from us? I mean, Nick Bolstrom has talked about this and his books, Elon Musk, and others, wondering if you've looked at that angle of things. It's a very good question. So actually, the people in the Bay Area that have a, fast timelines, they're also more optimistic about AI safety and AI alignment than they have been before. The reason why is because a lot of the very doom and gloomy AI alignment theory, like, it

Starting point is 00:33:53 basically implicitly assumed that AIs would be grown by essentially playing real-time strategy games against each other, right? Like, if you think of how something like Alpha Zero was grown, right? It's just, you know, it's able to learn to play a game by playing against itself billions of times, and then it just becomes really good at go. And you just like take that model and you translate it to optimizing it, manipulating the natural world as a whole. And with that kind of a growth path, like, it's easy to see why that AI would be totally just unaware of and not able to be aligned with human values, right? Because the AI grew and developed its patterns of thinking

Starting point is 00:34:35 without any interaction with humans, the AI's path to becoming intelligent would not even be the same path that humans took, where, you know, there's this complicated interplay of cooperation and competition. And there's even a big argument to be made that human intelligence basically evolved as a result of humans having to play political games against each other, right? And AIs would just be in a completely different concept. And so, or they would be born and raised in a completely different way, right? And so, maybe the whole, like, would the AI just turn the universe into paperclips to be able to calculate a little faster thing here? It's like a really excellent question to ask. But the AIs that we're seeing today, there are AIs that are grown by basically learning patterns of human behavior. and it's basically repeatedly attempting to pattern match the situation that they're in to the human behavior that's been repeated the greatest number of times in a context that's similar to that pattern. And so the AIs that emerge out of that kind of learning process just are going to be AIs that are sort of more naturally human by default. It also means that we're going to have slower takeoff because like there is a natural divide

Starting point is 00:35:52 between being able to get to human-level intelligence and surpassing it. Because human-level intelligence, you can get to human-level intelligence if you're just a really good pattern-matching engine that learns from all the humans. But moving beyond human-level intelligence requires you to actually come up with things yourself. So it's still a step higher, basically, right? So we have more time. The AIs are more likely to be human-like. We're more likely to see multiple AIs instead of one-stasy.

Starting point is 00:36:22 single AI dominating everything. So all of those things paint a more optimistic picture. And also the work that's been happening in AI alignment now, like, it's less theoretical and it's more practical. Like, it's trying to say, how do we take the AIs that we're building today? And how do we try to make them be as aligned as possible? And that's a path that seems to be like slowly starting to make more headway. So I mean, obviously, we still have very big problems.

Starting point is 00:36:50 I think very big problems from the risk of, you know, the AIs that take over being unaligned. And I would say also a political centralization risk from like bad versions of AI alignment theory being used to justify an idea that AI risk means that AIs have to be, you know, in a lab where only a couple of large corporations run by sort of self-appointed ethical high priests should be the only ones that have access. to the capabilities. And, you know, if people who build the most powerful AIs end up having that kind of mindset, then like, what would that mean for the political structure of the world? That's kind of like a secondary AI risk that I think is also worth thinking about, especially in the near term, right? Because like the ayes that we have today, those are more, like, more than a decade away

Starting point is 00:37:47 from like paper clipping risk. But, you know, if we have. enter a world where like the U.S. and Chinese governments can make deepfakes, but no one else can, then, like, in some ways, that's worse than a world where everyone can make deepfakes, because it just sort of unbalances the balance of power toward two particular organizations. So, I know, I think, like, that stuff is also stuff that's probably worth thinking about, and it's definitely been more on my minds than it has been six months ago, but, you know, we'll see. That's interesting. And I'm wondering if you vibe at all with Peter Thiel's take,

Starting point is 00:38:20 where AI is kind of a centralizing technology, whereas crypto is a technology of decentralization and almost like a defense, a bulwark against the centralizing functions of AI, does anything in that idea resonate with you? I mean, that's an idea that I've repeated myself multiple times, right? I think the question is like, how do we take that from sort of the world of theory and the world of like abstractly thinking about AI and crypto as sort of ideologies for the world and into the question of like, well, what concretely can crypto do to try to mitigate the chance that AI leads to centralizing everything? Which is faster or further along in its roadmap?

Starting point is 00:39:01 Ethereum or generalized AI? That's a good question. It depends on how far you want to go. I do still expect that we are going to get Ethereum fully finishing its vision before we'll get to a human level AI. But like even close to human level AI, like that's going to start to make our world. look very different. This is a fantastic bear market content for us on the AI side of things. I think actually we want to explore this a bit further, Vitalik. Ryan is taking notes. I'm curious from your perspective, is there anyone in the AI field that we should be talking to on bank lists as we're looking

Starting point is 00:39:35 at this? I will think about this. And if I find names, I'll send in too. Fantastic. Vitalik, it has been a pleasure talking to you about what is next for Ethereum. We didn't say it at the outset, but congratulations to you, to us, to the entire Ethereum community for this major milestone and getting to this point. Congratulations to you too. It's all been a great journey. Bankless Nation, we've got some action items for you, lots in the show notes today. Number one is proof of stake, which is the book that Vitalik has come out with. This is, I think, Vitalik, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of your blog posts only in book form, which makes it more accessible for people. Is that correct? Yes. Also, some links to the post that we talked about today, the paths to single-slot

Starting point is 00:40:22 finality, Dow's are not corporations on Vitalik's website. And what does Vitalik think about network states? We'll also include a link to the MEV boost website where you could see all of the builders and relays in production. As always, got to end with risks and disclaimers. Crypto is risky. Luna is risky. Luna is extremely risky, but to be honest, Ethereum is risky, too. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. Technically, it's the London hard fork, but it's still the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Starting point is 00:40:58 Thanks a lot.

Bankless - 138 - What's Next? Vitalik Buterin | Part II

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