Vitalik Buterin is best known for creating the world’s second-most-valuable blockchain, Ethereum, when he was just 19 years old. In the past few years, though, Buterin’s influence has expanded well beyond the world of crypto and into the broader realm of ideas where the young polymath—who taught himself Mandarin while traveling the world—offers important treatises on technology and the future.
The latest example is a 10,000-word essay Buterin published this week titled “My techno-optimism.” It’s a response to the much-discussed “manifesto” with a similar title by the influential venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Buterin’s piece endorses many elements of the manifesto, including an affirmation that technology has delivered marvelous benefits to humanity, and that fear and overzealous regulation have limited progress in fields like biotech. But while he endorses a foot-on-the-gas approach, especially to solve the climate change crisis, Buterin also calls for a more cautious approach when it comes to AI.
While the Ethereum creator has long been a leading thinker in computer science, he has also become one in the governance of technology and society. Here is Buterin on the crack-up at OpenAI and the problem of putting guardrails on technology by means of small councils of elite decision-makers:
“[It was] a well-intentioned effort to balance the need to make a profit to satisfy investors who provide the initial capital with the desire to have a check-and-balance to push against moves that risk OpenAI blowing up the world. In practice, however, their recent attempt to fire Sam Altman makes the structure seem like an abject failure: It centralized power in an undemocratic and unaccountable board of five people, who made key decisions based on secret information and refused to give any details on their reasoning until employees threatened to quit en masse.”
Drawing on his experience in trying to build decentralized communities in the Ethereum realm, Buterin provides new and important insights into how to think about AI—including how to avoid the very real possibility that humans end up as pets to machine overlords. He is, of course, hardly the only one with big ideas about the future of technology. But what makes Buterin stand apart is his deep capacity for empathy and lack of ego.
Unlike Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan—another tech genius whose ideas carry a lot of weight in the debate over technology—Buterin doesn’t have contempt for those who disagree with him, and he doesn’t frame the debate in the shrill us-versus-them tone of the venture capital elite.
“I believe that these [technologies] are deeply good, and that expanding humanity’s reach even further to the planets and stars is deeply good, because I believe humanity is deeply good,” he writes. In a troubled moment where too many people are consumed with fear and negativity, it is welcome to read a tech genius who relies on empathetic persuasion. If you want a shorter and more approachable window into Buterin’s worldview, you can also check out this new Fortune Q&A, which includes the moral case for supporting Ukraine and the fascinating sci-fi realm of the popular book and film The Three Body Problem. Have a great weekend.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
