For Endy, thinking about how to achieve such lofty goals begins with democratizing biology — or rather, the inverse of it. “What is required to be functional in a democracy?” he asked Buterin and the audience. Part of Endy’s own answer rests in thinking about biologizing democracy instead, such that “biology as a way of growing things can give anyone anywhere the set of things needed to survive [and be] a fundamental optionality to undergird citizenship.
However, both Buterin and Endy acknowledged that independence conceptualized as such is a “double-edged sword.” Endy raised questions of geopolitical stability holding together only because of supply chain interdependence, musing if it would “ever be sufficient to recreate mutual interdependence” by instrumentalizing network nations and decentralized autonomous communities , in blockchain parlance, “to counterbalance deglobalization through atoms.
Continued consideration of synthetic biology and blockchain in, of, and even as society traversed questions of what kinds of biological futures would be “good” for humanity and which would be good to avoid. The immediate instinctive answers for Endy were to avoid “re-militarizing with synthetic biology” and a hope for “a biotic culture that can acknowledge biotech as instinctively scary….[but allow for] fear as a gift of the chance to be courageous.
Fielding questions from the audience ranging from alignment and biosecurity, network states, responsibility, and ideas of “the good,” the two innovator-thought leaders took solace in the idea that technology isn’t just “happening” to people, but instead that people are happening to people. “Don’t put technology between a person and another person.
“It’s possible we don’t get it right, but the best we can do is create better collective decision-making capacities and use tools that exist to keep discussions open and accessible,” the Ethereum founder concluded.