ChainCatcher news, Vitalik Buterin elaborated on his views regarding the recent debates surrounding techno-optimism, AI risks, and avoiding extreme centralization methods in the 21st century, as well as blockchain and cryptography, in his latest blog post "My techno-optimism."In it, Vitalik stated that artificial intelligence is fundamentally different from other technologies and deserves special caution. In Ethereum, they intentionally try to ensure that many parts of the stack are decentralized: ensuring that no single codebase controls more than half of the proof-of-stake network, attempting to resist the dominance of large staking pools, improving geographical distribution, etc. Essentially, Ethereum is trying to realize an ancient liberal dream of a market-based society. To some extent, this is effective: the dominance of the Prysm client has dropped from over 70% to below 45%. But this is not an automatic market process: it is the result of human will and coordinated action.Blockchain enables the creation of economic and social structures with a "shared hard drive" without relying on centralized actors. Cryptocurrencies allow individuals to store funds and conduct financial transactions, much like using cash before the internet, without relying on trusted third parties that may arbitrarily change the rules. They can also serve as a backup anti-counterfeiting mechanism, making attacks and spam costly for users who do not have or do not wish to reveal their true identities.Account abstraction, especially social recovery wallets, can protect our crypto assets and potentially protect other types of assets in the future, without overly relying on centralized intermediaries. Zero-knowledge proofs can be used for privacy protection, allowing users to prove things about themselves without revealing private information. For example, encapsulating a digital passport signature in a ZK-SNARK to prove that you are a unique citizen of a certain country without disclosing which specific citizen you are. Technologies like this can allow us to maintain the benefits of privacy and anonymity while still obtaining security assurances and combating spam and bad actors.

ChainCatcher news, according to The New York Times, 350 executives, researchers, and engineers in the AI industry recently signed an open letter expressing concerns that AI technology poses an existential threat to humanity. The letter was issued by the nonprofit organization Center for AI Safety, which contains only one sentence: "Reducing the extinction risk posed by artificial intelligence should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, along with 2018 Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, have signed the letter. (source link)