AI, e/acc, and decentralization e/acc bros are generally optimistic about tech... the one exception is a lot of us are nocoiners and fairly negative on crypto. why is this? Good topic. First, it's a bit more than just two camps. I think it's more like five, arranged in order of most to least statist. 1) AI risk: wants state to stop AGI 2) e/acc-c: is fine with centralized AI 3) e/acc-d: wants decentralized AI 4) Crypto: wants decentralized alternatives to web2 5) Bitcoin: wants total focus on decentralized alternative to Fed The most important difference between these camps is *not* on the tech, but on the ideological values underneath. The key question is: how much do you trust Washington, DC? 1) AI riskers de facto trust it a lot, because they want to empower it to do "airstrikes on datacenters" (even after DC just aimlessly blew up the Middle East for 20 years). 2) e/acc-c may not go that far, but they're willing to tolerate significant amounts of state failure to live in places like San Francisco. 3) e/acc-d is where some decentralization starts kicking in. They don't trust the SF city government, so they want to make radical moves to fix the city. They also don't fully trust centralized corporations, so they want to decentralize the models, as Llama 2 has done. 4) crypto is even more focused on decentralization, but in what they would call a pragmatic way. They'd argue that decentralization is a continuum, and that services that are more open than existing web2 backends are important to the way forward. 5) Bitcoin maximalism is not only focused on decentralization, they think everything besides Bitcoin is a distraction because it takes away attention from the most pressing issue of it all: the ultimate rugpull by the US government, the Fed's ongoing devaluation of the dollar. The conflict that @mimi10v3 sees is between groups 1/2 and groups 3/4/5, but groups 2/3 are really quite distinct in their thinking. (You could in theory believe in both AGI apocalypse and Bitcoin apocalypse, but the nature of such things is that camps 1 and 5 have relatively little overlap, because camp 1 ends up advocating for powering up DC and while camp 5 ends up taking it away.) My view is that the oncoming rush of AI regulations and ongoing real-cost-of-living increases will move more people into groups 3-5, the decentralization-focused groups. And it really all boils down to how much you trust DC.