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Vitalik Buterin on Human Agency in the AI Era
00:26:28
Sophia Dew and Binji Pande speak with Vitalik Buterin about technology, human agency, and how the internet is changing the way people think, build, and relate to the world around them. Drawing from his writings and personal reflections, Buterin discusses how his worldview has evolved over the last decade, from creating Ethereum as a teenager to thinking more deeply about the social and philosophical implications of technology today. The conversation explores the idea of “sanctuary technology,” systems that provide safety and coordination without removing individual freedom or agency. They also discuss the changing relationship between humans and AI, the risks of over-relying on automated systems, and why actively learning and thinking for yourself may become even more important as AI capabilities improve. Along the way, Buterin reflects on creativity, community, identity, and the challenge of staying intentional in a world that increasingly pushes people toward autopilot.
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- [00:01]
Vitalik Buterin
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 advantages that the dollar has. And each individual person is free to use it or free to not use it. 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.
- [00:56]
Podcast Host (a16z narrator)
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. Sophia Du and Binji Pandey speak with Vitalik Buterin about technology, freedom and the future of human agency.
- [01:51]
Sophia Du
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're, 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 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. 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, so I'll pull those up in a second. But really excited to unpack those a bit and talk them more through with you.
- [03:18]
Binji Pandey
Yeah. Hey, Vitalik, I think we're all live now.
- [03:22]
Sophia Du
Yeah, Vitalik's live here. Welcome.
- [03:25]
Binji Pandey
How is it going? How's Nomad life been, by the way? I know you're still fully nomadic, right?
- [03:32]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I have not gone mad, so I guess that part has not been living up to the name, but that's probably a good thing. Yeah.
- [03:42]
Binji Pandey
Yes. Matting is for later.
- [03:44]
Vitalik Buterin
Indeed.
- [03:45]
Binji Pandey
Awesome. So should we pull up. The whole concept here is you've written so many interesting things across AI, across civilization generally, and, like, tech, obviously, Ethereum, whatnot. So we're just 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 and tweets and just trying to find nuggets out of them for this. So, yeah, we got a couple of these.
- [04:08]
Sophia Du
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?
- [04:21]
Vitalik Buterin
I think when I wrote that, the thing that I was writing before. Right. Was sort of a rebuttal to people who argue that if we develop technologies that let us live much longer than that might actually be a bad thing, because life needs to be finite to have meaning. Right. And my reply basically as well, actually, if our lives are infinite, the, like, everything around us, the situations that we're in, the people that were around, the kind of world that we're around, like, everything changes so much over the course of 10 years that, you know, as much as it's a continuous process, it almost might as well be a death and a rebirth. Right. And. And so, like, the world is finite. And like, actually, you know, the world is much more finite than even any of the individual people in it. Right. Because any individual aspect of it is just changing so quickly. And that's something I really did not appreciate at the beginning, Right. You know, as a teenager, sort of 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 adult, fully conscious, fully. Yeah. Kind of understanding what's going on in the world to at least what I thought was a pretty high level. And I'd be able to notice just, like, the large differences between then and now. Right? So maybe I could give one example, right. For the longtime crypto people, right? So do you remember the quote that's inside the bitcoin Genesis block? Right. It's in 2009, January 3rd. The Times, on brink of second bailout for banks, right. When's the last time you thought about a bank bailout? Like, you know, it comes up sometimes, right? But it's like, definitely 10, 10 times less than it did in 2011, 2012, when it just defined how we think about crypto. Right. You know, like, the themes that we need to think about the. 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, like, you know, you probably remember 10 or 15 years ago, like, it would be normal for people who are close friends to sometimes not talk to each other for days. Like, doesn't that sound crazy? Like, you would literally not talk to each other for days, right? It's like how you, like, get withdrawal symptoms. Doesn't, like, something break, right? And, like, well, you know, before we had all of these always on communication devices. Like, that was the life that we lived in, right? I mean, 20 years ago, I remember. I remember it was possible to get lost in walking around the city, right? Like, even things is, like, as basic as that, right? And, like, 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 in the first maybe 20 years of your life, you're sort of. You're a learner, you're a consumer, you're someone who's sort of playing games that other people set up for you. And one of the big transitions that. That you 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. And 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, what kinds of things keep you up at night. 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 even if, you know, like we left a thousand years old, like we're not going to get bored of the world. Right. Like, you know, we're going to keep creating new worlds for ourselves. You know, like, I think that's a really fascinating and also definitely sometimes sad, you know, sometimes, you know, you lose things that you miss. But you know, like also like still beautiful future of the world that we inhabit.
- [09:37]
Sophia Du
Oh, that's so beautiful. You're so right.
- [09:41]
Binji Pandey
That's amazing. I think one of the things is that general piece of as you get older, these moments cumulatively grow into your whole self and sense of self and that defines you is fascinating. That's just true for everyone in the world. In your case, what keeps you up at night and what you push forward. You built Ethereum when you were 19 years old. You were fairly young. So for you it was like this almost this speedrun of responsibility in a way and like, just like this thing that birthed itself. And I think one thing that's really interesting is like how your thinking around it evolves with you and how the community evolves with you and how a lot of like what this whole thing is also grows up. And I think there's, there's definitely like interesting parallels across like everyone who's had an involvement in anything that they have brought into the world or just like a community that they're a part of.
- [10:35]
Vitalik Buterin
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 like, wait, at this moment there is no other pilot. And wait, like 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 Ethereum, even before. Right. I remember the process of myself dropping out of university and actually even that felt autopilot. Right. Basically what happened was that first I signed up for this co op program 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 work 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 U.S. immigration law, it turns out that for the category of visa I needed. The company needed to have existed for a year and Rebel had only existed for nine months. And so they tried hard to find a way around it. Eventually they gave up, right? And, or, and then I, I. So instead I had an off term. And so on 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, hey, there's 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 authors. Then a few months later, Ethereum started. And actually at the very beginning, the original form of Ethereum was a project, was a proposal to the developers of this project called mastercoin, for how they could make their protocol more general purpose. And I sent it to them and they basically said, like, hey, you know, well, it'll take a long time before we get to this. And I just realized, okay, I'm not going to wait so long. How about I'll just do the thing myself, right? 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, right? 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, like, wait, this is my new thing, I'm not going back, am I right? And, you know, I kept autopiloting for, I think, a very long time, right? And in a lot of ways, like, the autopilot really comes at every level, right. I think the level of ideology is also a big one, right? Like when I was younger, I would be kind of going off of these ideas from 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 network 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 started, like, originally wrote those words that I was passively gulping down when I was a teenager and actually. Really? Yeah. Understand from first principles, you know, like the place of crypto in the world, the future of technology, the challenges that we have, and kind of develop a philosophy from there.
- [14:55]
Sophia Du
No, a hundred percent.
- [14:56]
Binji Pandey
I think this is an open question that's been very interesting these days as well.
- [15:00]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah.
- [15:00]
Sophia Du
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. 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, around the future of Ethereum. And what I love about your writing is you coined specific terms and one of them is sanctuary technology. 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? 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?
- [16:43]
Vitalik Buterin
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, you know, like, banks getting bailout, bailouts and potentially like dollars inflating. Right. And you know, like 15 years later, it's like, well, on the one hand, the risk that the dollar is going to go crazy is, like, actually way more credible than it was. And on the other hand, there's like, much worse things happening to people and even happening to, like, people that we know than that, than just having your currency inflated. Right. And, you know, we're seeing all of these threats pop up in the cyber world, in the physical world, in terms of the. On the social media landscape, for example. Right. And the way that. That has transformed into a sort of mimetic battlefield. And it's the kind of environment where, you know, it's. It's not just about sort of, you know, roaming through the forest and making sure you're collecting all of the candy you can. Right. It's like in environments where, like, before you can collect candy, you really need to make sure that you're safe. Right. 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. Right. And 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. Right. And, you know, whether the uncle in the sky is like Palantir or some super intelligence AI company or some equivalent in the foreign country of your choice, it's like there is this vision of safety that's very disempowering. And I think the core idea of even the earlier version of all of this, which was diac, right. Is that we want to be safe and at the same time, we want to be empowered. You know, we want something that continues to keep us in control and continues to keep us at the center in a way, in a way where we have agency. And that's, I think one of the things that like the word sanctuary does a good job of capturing.
- [19:32]
Sophia Du
Yeah, couldn't agree more.
- [19:35]
Binji Pandey
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 space, places of comfort.
- [19:41]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah.
- [19:41]
Binji Pandey
And like, sanctuary to me, like, almost sounds like a place of comfort as I spend more and more of my time in this, like, world. So I love that word. I think it's. It's awesome choice.
- [19:53]
Vitalik Buterin
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. The. 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 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. 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 really want to capture.
- [20:55]
Sophia Du
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 kind of 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. 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. And get a bit of your advice into what they're actually up to. So Benji and I were collecting and polling people on Twitter about actual situations that they've been in, and we have a few. Benji, want to share maybe one of the things that people have been saying, and Vitalik would love to hear what you think.
- [21:49]
Binji Pandey
Yeah, I'm trying to get a good one. Okay. So, like, I think one thing that's interesting, since we kind of talked about, like, growing up and stuff. Okay. Someone said, I started using Claude for almost everything I write at work six months ago. My output is way up, but last week, I had to give a verbal update in a meeting, and I noticed I couldn't think on my feet the way I used to. I'm wondering if I'm getting more productive or getting worse at thinking. I guess, like, the question he's kind of asking is, like, how do you end up. How do you, like, not let your brain erode away when you kind of start relying on these different systems to kind of accentuate it?
- [22:23]
Vitalik Buterin
Um, yeah. Yeah, I Think for me, like, almost since I was a kid, I've definitely, like, forced myself to do more things by hands than I have to. Right. Like, like, I was the kid who in chemistry class would try to do the tests without a calculator. And, you know, that was crazy hard. And, you know, I had to memorize. Memorize walk tables and. But at the same time, it helps. Right? Also, same thing for navigating in cities. This is why I just fundamentally think walking is so much healthier than being in a car. It's not even just the exercise. It's like, if you're in a car, you experience a city as a collection of teleport points. If you're walking, you have to actually think about where you're going, and the whole thing actually fits together. And, like, wow, it's like a grid, and you can move from one place to another place, and it follows laws of geometry. Right. And I think in general, there is this pattern where you just have to force yourself to do things manually, at least sometimes. At least to some extent, even though you don't have to, like, even at the very least, just to make sure that your brain stays on. And, like, that's probably something that will only have to increase more as. As time goes on. Like, learning actively is just 10 times more effective than learning passively, even for the same amount of time spent. Yeah.
- [24:01]
Binji Pandey
Do you think that ultimately becomes, like, an agency thing? Like, you kind of have to start pushing yourself to have the agency to want to learn, because it's so easy to defer to not wanting to learn.
- [24:09]
Vitalik Buterin
Right.
- [24:09]
Binji Pandey
So easy for me to be like, I'll just query a chatbot, then, like, do the work to think about something.
- [24:15]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah. Yeah, you definitely do.
- [24:18]
Sophia Du
Yeah. No, it seems like a lot of the themes from today's conversation was all around human agency and how we as humans, one should have agency and not be on autopilot, actually take agency over our lives and then to how the technology that we build can continue to enable human agency. And this is not just something that we end up giving our brains off to some model to then do the work for us, but that we continue to be active in the driver's seat and active in shaping what we create. I know we are at time, which is kind of a bummer, because I feel like if we had more time, there's so much more that we could continue unpacking and talking about. But, Vitalik, really grateful for you to join us today and join us for the first time here on mts. And it was so lovely to learn a bit more about how your brain works to how you're thinking about the future, and just a little bit call to action for all of us folks who want to get involved, see the world changing so fast, and want to make sure that we're active stewards in shaping how it evolves. So Vitalik, thank you so much for joining us.
- [25:23]
Vitalik Buterin
Yes, thank you too, Benji. Thank you. Sophia.
- [25:28]
Podcast Host (a16z narrator)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating, or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.