Vitalik: The ideal distant future of AI is the deep integration of humans and machines while maintaining global pluralism

Odaily Planet Daily News, Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that one direction for the future development of AI is a deeper integration of humans and machines. This includes computers working more collaboratively with humans, recognizing conscious and subconscious signals emitted by humans, brain-computer interfaces, and computer-aided telepathy that helps multiple people better understand each other and collaborate. The ultimate form of this is to eliminate the binary divide between humans and machines and open up various positions along this spectrum.

Vitalik hopes that deeply integrated humans and machines can outperform separate humans and machines, and continue this trend until reaching the technical limit. The distant future AI outcomes he envisions include: the preservation of global political and economic pluralism, with no single company or government dominating; humans can choose to accept technological upgrades to explore the universe at a level competitive with pure machines, or maintain the status quo and act in the world through robots that follow instructions; most of the Earth may become highly regulated nature reserves where people can continue their current way of life, while those wishing to do more radical things would go to space.

AI itself may become too powerful compared to other alternatives. A certain country or company may gain a decisive advantage and lock it in permanently. Powerful technological means could cause incalculable harm. The path of human-machine integration itself may also fail to retain enough humanity, ultimately becoming just another way to create powerful robots. Therefore, he hopes to pass through this narrow channel at a slower pace and supports proposals for deceleration or pause, including ideas that provide braking opportunities such as mutually assured compute destruction.

Vitalik stated that his ideal world is one where open weights prevail, and Dean Ball's judgment that open weights have a decelerationist effect by suppressing capital expenditure on frontier models is completely correct, even though this would drive more capital expenditure on peripheral devices and applications. This can achieve deceleration without resorting to stronger political means. However, he believes one should not expect the world to naturally provide convenient economic and physical laws. Humanity still has some agency over political laws, and there are many ways to change incentives without giving control to a single authority, and these should be utilized.