Vitalik Buterin on Human Agency in the AI Era

0:00Binji Pande:One of the challenges of the world right now is that we're definitely in a less peaceful and less safe world than 10 or 15 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 free to not use it.

0:38Binji Pande:I think in general, there is this pattern where you just have to force yourself to do things manually, at least sometimes, even though you don't have to, just to make sure that your brain stays on. Learning actively is just 10 times more effective than learning passively, even for the same amount of time spent.

0:56Vitalik Buterin: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 can 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 powerful systems, but making sure humans remain active participants rather than passive users.

1:41Vitalik Buterin:Sophia Du and Binji Pandey speak with Vitalik Buterin about technology, freedom, and the future of human agency.

1:50Sophia Dew: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 going to talk about, I just wanted to plug the Discord and X chat that we have.

2:27Sophia Dew:So we have an actual chat. And one of the things that we really want to do, Benji and I wanted to experiment in a whole new way and actually get more user interaction. And we didn't want to do just a regular interview with Vitalik. We wanted to actually unpack his advice, get to know his wisdom. And then at the end, we'll have an opportunity to hear directly from the audience about situations you're facing and see how Vitalik reacts to them and get his actual advice on them, which I'm so excited for. So we pulled up a few questions, a few blog posts, a few tweets live from some of Vitalik's past writings, and we actually have them here today.

3:10Sophia Dew:so I'll pull this up in a second but I'm really excited to unpack those a bit and talk them more

3:16Vitalik Buterin:through with you yeah hey Vitalik I think we're all live yeah Vitalik's already live here welcome how's it going um how's nomad life been by the way like I know you're you're still you're still

3:30Binji Pande:fully nomadic right yeah I mean unfortunately I have not gone mad so I guess you know that part has not been living up to the name, but that's probably a good thing.

3:41Vitalik Buterin:Yeah, yes and adding is for later. Indeed. Awesome. So should we pull up? I mean, the whole concept here is you've written so many interesting things across AI, across civilization generally, and tech, obviously Ethereum and whatnot. So we're just pulling up some of the stuff that you've written in your blogs. So Bia and I have had the pleasure, honestly, over the past three days, we've been rereading your blogs and tweets and just trying to find nuggets out of them for this. So, yeah, we got a couple of these.

4:08Sophia Dew:Yeah, 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?

4:20Binji Pande:I think when I wrote that, the thing that I was writing before, right, was sort of a rebuttal to people who argue that, you know, if we develop technologies that let us live much longer, then that might actually be a bad thing because life needs to be finite to have meaning, right? And my reply basically is, well, actually, if our lives are infinite, everything around us, the situations that we're in, the people that we're around, the kind of world that we're around, everything changes so much over the course of 10 years that as much as it's a continuous process, it almost might as well be a death and a rebirth.

5:07And so the world is finite.

5:12Binji Pande:And actually, the world is much more finite than even any of the individual people in it, because any individual aspect of it is just changing so quickly. And that's something I really did not appreciate at the beginning. As a teenager growing up into the world, so many things felt permanent. And as I got to age 25, and then eventually as I got to age 30, I would look back to myself five or 10 years ago, or the world five or 10 years ago, And I would actually have that reference point, right, of myself being sort of fully, you know, adult, fully conscious, fully understanding what's going on in the world to at least what I thought was a pretty high level.

6:08Binji Pande:And I'd be able to notice just like the large differences between then and now, right? So maybe I could give one example for the longtime crypto people. So do you remember the quote that's inside the Bitcoin Genesis blog? It's 2009, January 3rd, the Times on Brink of Second bailout for banks. When's the last time you thought about a bank bailout? it comes up sometimes but it's definitely 10 times less than it did in 2011, 2012 when it just defines how we think about crypto the themes that we think about in terms of what's happening in the world in terms of technology even in terms of the way that we relate to other people So you probably remember 10 or 15 years ago, it would be normal for people who are close friends to sometimes not talk to each other for days.

7:21Binji Pande:Doesn't that sound crazy? You would literally not talk to each other for days. It's like, how? You get withdrawal symptoms, doesn't something break? And before we had all of these always-on communication devices, that was the life that we lived in. I mean, 20 years ago, I remember it was possible to get lost in walking around the city. Even things as basic as that. And so much about the world has changed. And I think the other thing that happens as you grow, right, is like you come to take on a role in the world, right? And, you know, in the first, maybe 20 years of your life, you're sort of mostly, you know, you're a learner, you're a consumer, you're someone who's sort of playing games that other people set up for you.

8:15Binji Pande:And one of the big transitions that, you know, get to as you grow up more is you get into more and more of a role of actually being the one that has to create and define and contribute to the games yourself. These are just fundamental changes in attitude. They're fundamental changes in how you think. Fundamental changes in what you think the important problems are, what kinds of things keep you up at night.

8:55Binji Pande:And if you just look back at it, it really does look like you've almost moved to a different universe, right? And so I think this is one of the reasons why, right? Even if we left 1 ,000 years old, we're not going to get bored of the world, right? Like, you know, we're going to keep creating new worlds for ourselves. And, you know, like, I think that's a really fascinating and, you know, like, also definitely sometimes sad, you know, sometimes, you know, you lose things that you miss. But, you know, like, also, like, you're still a beautiful future of the world that we inhabit.

9:36Sophia Dew:Oh, that's so beautiful. No, you're so right.

9:40Vitalik Buterin:That's amazing. I think one of the things is like that general piece of like as you get older, these moments like cumulatively grow into your whole self and sense of self and that like defines you is fascinating. That's just true for everyone in the world. In your case, right? Like it's like what keeps you up at night and what you push for. Like you built Ethereum when you were 19 years old, right? Like you were fairly young. So for you, it was like this almost a speed run of responsibility in a way. And like just like this thing that birthed itself. and I think one of the things that's really interesting is how your thinking around it evolves with you and how the community evolves with you and how a lot of what this whole thing is also grows up and I think there's definitely interesting parallels across everyone who's had an involvement in anything that they have brought into the world or just a community that they're a part of.

10:34Binji Pande:Yeah, and I think the biggest transition for me over the last 10 years was basically going from where I was at the beginning, where I really felt like I was living most of my life on autopilot, to sometimes actually having this scary realization that, wait, at this moment, there is no other pilot. And wait, there are individual situations that actually require me to be a pilot and to go and actually make big consequential decisions. And going back to even when I created this area and even before, I remember the process of myself dropping out of university. And actually, even that felt autopilot.

11:24Basically, what happened was that first, I signed up for this co-op program

11:31Binji Pande:where basically you're in university, but you get to alternate between university terms and going to work for a startup. And I decided that the startup I worked for would be a crypto startup because I was already into Bitcoin. And so I signed up to take an officer working at Ripple. And then, thanks to the wonders of US immigration law, it turns out that for the category of visa I needed, the company needed to have existed for a year and Ripple had only existed for nine months. And so they tried hard to find a way around it. Eventually they gave up, right? And then I, yeah, so instead I had an off-term.

12:11Binji Pande:And so my off-term, well, I was also a Bitcoin magazine writer. And so I figured I would go around the world and just visit a couple of Bitcoin communities. Then I got into programming and I realized that like, hey, there's like actually a lot of communities I need to see, things I need to do. So I'm going to go and extend my off-term to three off-terms. And then a few months later, Ethereum started. And actually, at the very beginning, the original form of Ethereum was a proposal to the developers of this project called MasterCoin for how they could meet their protocol more general purpose. And I sent it to them, and they basically said, hey, it'll take a long time before we get to this.

12:59Binji Pande:And I just realized, okay, I'm not going to wait so long. How about I'll just do the thing myself? And then I started doing it, and even then, I still thought, okay, I'm only going to do this for a few months, then it'll be done, and then I'll go back to university. And then only in January, when I saw just how big the crowds were, just how much of a huge amount of interest Ethereum had gotten, did I realize, wait, this is my new thing. I'm not going back, am I? And I kept autopiloting for, I think, a very long time. And in a lot of ways, the autopilot really comes at every level. I think the level of ideology is also a big one.

13:42Binji Pande:When I was younger, I would be going off of these ideas that other people wrote 20 years ago, ideas like how cryptography could protect freedom on the internet, for example. That's a very big one. Also, the importance of decentralized networks, things like BitTorrent, the importance of open source software. Ideas that seemed appealing to me, but ideas that I was sort of gulping down from other people. And there was a moment in kind of the early to mid-2020s when I realized that so many of the scripts that we were running on were just so outdated. And I needed to actually step up and sort of be in the position that the 1990s cypherpunks were in when they originally wrote those words that I was passively gulping down when I was a teenager.

14:40Binji Pande:and actually really understand from first principles, you know, the place of crypto in the world, the future of technology, the challenges that we have and kind of develop a philosophy from there.

14:54Sophia Dew:No, 100%.

14:55Vitalik Buterin:I think this is an open question that's been very interesting these days as well.

14:59Sophia Dew:Yeah, and you even mentioned like the change from being on autopilot when you were maybe younger to now just being a lot more active. And I feel like it's almost the more challenging the world gets, the more our own want to just operate on autopilot. And I think that's one of the craziest things of this transition from childhood to adult is you start to realize, wait, there's not this magic person who's going to come save you. It's up to us to not be operating on autopilot and actually take agency and actually act. And so I know this is like really prevalent now. I'm here in San Francisco. That's like one of the reasons that I get to do a little bit of the recording in person and these conversations around like autopilot around, hey, technology is moving really fast around.

15:46Sophia Dew:Do I just let it shape me and kind of like let it go or where it's going or how do I actually get involved? And you give really practical advice around the future of technology, especially around the future of AI and around the future of Ethereum. And what I love about your writing is you coin specific terms and one of them is sanctuary technology. I I have this quote here that you have around Ethereum should conceptualize ourself as being part of an ecosystem building sanctuary technologies. I love this word sanctuary. And I would love to just unpack a bit more deeper. Why sanctuary? Why not open source?

16:26Sophia Dew:Why not decentralized? Sanctuary is, you know, stands for this place that protects you, protects you from danger. What ultimately was the reason that you picked this word to describe the technology that we're building?

16:42Binji Pande:I think one of the challenges of the world right now is that we're definitely in a less peaceful and less safe world than we were in 10 or 15 years ago. And 10 or 15 years ago, you were worried about banks getting bailouts and potentially dollars inflating. And 15 years later, it's like, well, on the one hand, the risk that the dollar is going to go crazy is actually way more credible than it was. And on the other hand, there's much worse things happening to people and even happening to people that we know. than just having your currency inflated, right? And we're seeing all of these threats pop up in the cyber world, in the physical world, in terms of on the social media landscape, for example, and the way that that has transformed into a sort of mimetic battlefield.

17:50Binji Pande:And it's the kind of environment where it's not just about roaming through the forest and making sure you're collecting all of the candy you can. It's like an environment where before you can collect candy, you really need to make sure that you're safe. And the second part of all of this that I think is important is that there is a vision of safety that we're competing with. And the vision of safety that we're competing with is basically, oh, 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.

18:37Binji Pande:And whether the uncle in the sky is like Palantir or some super-intelligent AI company or some equivalent in the foreign country of your choice, there is this vision of safety that's very disempowering. And I think the core idea of the earlier version of all of this, which was DIAC, is that we want to be safe and at the same time we want to be empowered. And we want something that continues to keep us in control and continues to keep us at the center in a way where we have agency. and that's I think one of the things that the word sanctuary does a good job of capturing yeah

19:33Sophia Dew:couldn't agree more

19:34Vitalik Buterin:one thing that I think that's interesting is like as more and more of our life goes online the more and more we crave spaces of comfort and sanctuary to me almost sounds like a place of comfort as I spend more and more of my time in this world so I love that word I think it's an awesome choice is.

19:53Binji Pande:Actually, there's one more aspect of it that I forgot to mention, right, which is that a sanctuary is not totalizing, right? A sanctuary is not the universe, right? A sanctuary is not a vision of safety that says that we're going to make you safe by transforming the entire world into something safer. And I think that itself is something that's sort of both more realistic and and even more respectful of people's freedom than some of the other alternatives, right? And that's, I think, an approach that's just also fundamentally more native to the kind of work that crypto does, right? Where, you know, crypto does not have, like crypto does not have the ability to fix the dollar.

20:35Binji Pande:Crypto has the ability to create its own thing that does not have some of the disadvantages that the dollar has. And, you know, each individual person is free to use it or free to not use it. And so I think like that's also one of the other nuances that, you know, you really want to capture.

20:54Sophia Dew:I love that. That's so beautiful. And I know we're kind of running out of time here, which is kind of a shame because we had so many beautiful quotes that we wanted to get through. Like, I know I kindly peaked, but you had one that was just was like, we the humans are the brightest star, which I thought was just such a such a pretty quote as well. and I just like love the way that you shaped that. But before we close out, one of the big goals that we wanted to do is you clearly have so many nuggets of wisdom that was so evident in your writing, but we wanted to give the audience an opportunity to also share about situations that they're facing and get a bit of your advice into what they're actually up to.