Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. After President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon launching a working group to develop a new federal framework for crypto assets, DFD called Matthew Pines, director of intelligence at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne and national security fellow for the Bitcoin Policy Institute, to put the questionnaire to him at a pivotal moment for the crypto industry. Pines praised what he called a “reversal of the regulatory hostility that the Biden administration has shown to the industry,” and discussed why he thinks blockchain is overrated compared to bitcoin specifically, how an obscure philosophy text influenced his thinking about the future of technology, and why government needs to make sure new technologies safeguard individual rights. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? The capacities of human potential, and specifically the nature of human consciousness. There are philosophical reasons, but also very practical purposes for thinking about these questions that are going to become increasingly more salient, about what's the difference between a human mind and a computer mind. These are age-old philosophical questions, and we’re going to confront operational versions of them when we have highly capable intelligence systems. We're going to have to both ask the existential and the policy question about the difference between the intelligence at work in these complex, somewhat opaque, inscrutable corporate intelligences, and the intelligences at work inside our own heads. A real, scientifically and philosophically mature understanding of the nature of human consciousness is probably the most important idea that needs to be taken very seriously very soon. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? To be honest, I think crypto, as a technology, is overhyped. The idea of distributed ledger technologies, the blockchain lingo is overhyped. You might call me a bitcoin maximalist. I think there is one important exception, which is stablecoins as a particular subset of distributed ledger technology issued on open blockchains. But in general, I have not seen real-world use cases come out of the broader crypto industry that match the hype. Again, this is coming from someone who's an extreme and vocal advocate for bitcoin. I just think there's a certain technical design, and an operational and philosophical grounding to the specific program underlying bitcoin that is unique. And these blockchain hype projects seem to me to be mostly hype. I’m not saying there's nothing there, but the level of hype is overdone. What book most shaped your conception of the future? “A Place for Consciousness” by a cognitive scientist and philosopher named Gregg Rosenberg. It’s this brilliant tour de force of a book that almost nobody reads, and it helped me stitch together how I was thinking about the nature of physics, the nature of consciousness, but also artificial intelligence and the structure of causation around what the world is that we're in. That’s critical to how I think about the future because whatever the structure of reality is, the rules of physics and causation that we're embedded in determine the possibility space for our future technologies, and the degrees of freedom available to us to exploit, and what our civilization will be able to do in the future. If you want to try to assess the far future of human civilization, you need to understand what those boundary constraints are that reality imposes on any intelligence, and to understand what those boundary constraints are, you need to understand the fundamental structure of reality. That book was the best take I’d read that tried to answer those questions in a serious way. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? One is that the current trajectory of technology seems to be one of increasing centralization, control, surveillance, prediction, to a certain extreme dehumanization and almost totalitarian dystopia. As these technologies become more and more powerful, they're embedded into systems of corporate incentives that might increasingly constrain human freedom. It is one of the core moral and political imperatives of a democratic state to ensure that its subjects are able to achieve their ends as independent actors free from a totalizing matrix of control, and so I think the government should foster and support technologies and technological paradigms that tip the balance back in favor of the individual. That would include decentralized technologies that limit single points of control, monopoly surveillance, corporate capitalism and surveillance capitalism. Reinforcing privacy-preserving capabilities that the average person can use. And carving out a sphere of freedom, in an increasingly digital age where most people's movements and conversations and beliefs and attitudes are shaped as part of a technological matrix that is mostly mediated by large tech conglomerates. That is an important trend to push back against which governments have a duty in a democratic society to do, and it is what fundamentally distinguishes our open societies from our authoritarian rivals who have no qualms about leveraging these digital technologies to reinforce essentially totalitarian control and shrink the the sphere of individual freedom down to a pinprick before smothering it entirely. Also, I think the government has a duty to keep pushing the envelope beyond what individual corporate incentives would be, and to have the risk tolerance to invest in breakthrough technology areas that may be on the fringe of known science that take government research dollars to foster. These are the kind of breakthrough initiatives that might not pay off for 10, 15, 20 years, but we’ve seen the government invest in those in the past to great strategic effect. There are lots of other areas that could be pursued that haven't been; maybe they've been pursued in secret, and there have been breakthroughs made that haven't been shared with the rest of society. It's about time that knowledge is brought out responsibly to the rest of society. What has surprised you the most this year? The power of individual agency and historical contingency among a number of individuals that just decided to make bitcoin a thing for the U.S. presidential campaign. There was no historical inevitability associated with that. Then, the contingency of all the crazy things we saw in 2024, with Trump almost being killed on stage. There’s a bizarre sense that these events are world-historical, and when you see them in real time, to witness that, and to see our society process the power of that contingency in real time, that dramatically surprised me. You don't get those moments very often, and they force you to reassess things.
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