d/acc: one year later

Abstract

A one-year retrospective on ``d/acc’’ — decentralized, democratic, differential defensive acceleration — Buterin’s framing of a middle path between blanket techno-optimism and calls for a global AI pause. He reviews progress across defensive technologies whose values embody distributed power rather than concentrated elite control, including vaccines and biosecurity, air-quality monitoring, prediction markets, and zero-knowledge cryptography. The essay argues that a healthy response to AI risk should actively push forward defensive and democratizing technologies rather than assume that either laissez-faire acceleration or centralized restriction will produce good outcomes.