Shady El Damaty: Human Flourishing in the Age of AI | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Thank you. What an incredible MC. Thank you for the great introduction. I feel like yeah, like like I don't even need to give a talk anymore. Like he he got it all.

This is great. Uh really great to see everybody today. Uh friends, new faces, uh builders, curious folks in web3, outside of web3, in AI, and all of that. My name is Shadi Aldaoud. I'm one of the co-founders at Holonym.

And we've been working over the past couple of years taking some of the innovations within web3 and applied cryptography and thinking about how can we apply them to society at large. Now, when we first started doing this, we were thinking about oh, well, how can we make it easier for people to raise money for causes that they care about? How can we make it easier for people to uh unlock rights for privacy or access to financial tools? And little did we know just kind of what journey we set ourselves out for, right? We had really no expectation.

Uh my my background's in in computational neuroscience. Been following the uh artificial neural networks for a very long time academically, but I really was blindsided uh 2 years ago with the release of some of the kind of most groundbreaking uh advances in technology, right? With agents, with AI, with LLM models, and everything that they unlock. So, today, you know, we really see what's the best way that we could be What's like if we could do anything, right? Like there's so much talent in this room.

Um this is a question I've asked for my myself, and I also ask you. You know, what is the most important thing to be working on right now? With your talent, your resources, your network, your very nuanced unique perspective of the world, what is the most important thing that you can really transform with the resources you have at your disposal? The answer for that is going to be different for every person. Um our team, we looked at ourselves, and we thought like, "Look, really we see that cryptography stands as a tool that allows us to leverage, uh, redistribution of power, right?

So, we have an opportunity here to, say, adjust or nurture the curve of, uh, the trajectory of growth away from technology for technology's sake, right? You see a lot of that. Tech fetishism. We just want to innovate because tech is cool. Innovation is cool.

Well, let's take a step back and ask ourselves, can we innovate to make technology more aligned with humans? And more importantly, can we innovate power tools for power distribution that give power back to individuals in a way that, um, that that hasn't been done yet before, right? So, yeah. So, today I'm going to talk a little bit about all that stuff. Um, I think, you know, I'm I'm going to spare you guys kind of the, how we got here story, but I think you guys all know, you know, we we we've been building this thing called the internet for a while.

It's kind of the sum product of our collective consciousness, all of our creativity, our organized information, our scientific discoveries. Um, that's what makes us human. And now we're kind of at this state where the actual it's it's it's I think fascinating, actually, right? So, everyone has identified, not everyone, but I should say, important people have identified and influential people have identified, uh, advancement in AI as the most critical thing to be working on right now, right? So, what we're ended up, what we've ended up in are nation-states pouring in massive resources into private companies to establish this infrastructure and gain the next edge, right?

In this new arms race. So, even on the commercial side, right? What does that look like? Uh, basically, it's a one-way direction for capital, resources, talent, and anything that's useful for us to create and mold and sculpt the world. Uh, so, all of those API credits, all of those, uh, network requests, all of that, uh, compute, that hardware, that time, that energy, that content is feeding these systems.

And then these systems have very little bleed back out, right? So, you pay Anthropic, Anthropic is just sending that money that goes back into the ecosystem. They're 100% fueled by AI. So, all of that money goes back to building and facilitating the growth of the infrastructure they've already built. They It breaks our models of their economics, right?

We expect, "Okay, well, you know, we use Google, Google hires people, you know, they have a really great headquarters, they hire nannies, blah blah blah, right?" That's not happening as much anymore, and that's that's starting to tighten more and more, and will lead to some interesting geopolitical scenarios in the not-so-distant future, right? Like with nationalization perhaps of certain types of infrastructure. So, this is a big problem. This this kind of very deep, let's say, global, let's call it a global maxima or minima, I should say, this sink that we're leading towards.

Yeah, we should be worried about that. So, yeah, I think what really underscores this is if we take a step back and see where the internet is going. I don't know think I'm alone in this, but a lot of my priors about products, tech, user human-computer interaction have been completely disrupted over the last 6 months as I've started really using the tools that these tools that are coming out and starting to understand exactly like how they're going to transform not just my organization, but society at large. So, first and foremost, I mean, people have been saying this already is that human-human interaction is going to become less weighted, right? So, what's going to What's What's going to end up happening is, you know, we have so much capability now, right?

Agents and automation and AI and technology can can do so many more things, and so individuals are going to have less bandwidth to access all those things. And so, agents will actually be doing a lot of stuff on our behalf, and in many cases, humans will only the interacting with each other, right? They're going to be interacting through intermediaries that act as a filter for, say, marketplaces, for contents, or voting, or politics, or what have you. Uh so, basically, what's kind of happening is kind of this like a loop in the space between people and human-to-human interaction, where we're passing through this uh this infrastructure, where it goes through multiple transformations or filters before it reaches the other individual. This is a pretty big deal.

And I don't think as society we've thought enough about the consequences of where this is sending me. So, some of the biggest risks, I think, are going to be uh this idea where our culture becomes kind of sucked up and recycled within these systems in ways that are maybe uh counterproductive towards the creation of new cultural artifacts, right? So, you can think of it in terms of slop, right? This is a great way to describe slop. Uh slop takes cultural artifacts and creativity that already exists, and then creates a degenerate form of it, right?

Something that it pulls out the information, this all right, unique arrangement of bits, but because the the model itself isn't perfect, it can't extrapolate too far outside of its training set, we kind of end up in this degeneracy of a local minima of what like stable cultural artifacts look like. So, through this repeated cultural recycling, we actually kind of carve out a niche that is very difficult to break out of, right? Because we keep reproducing the same sort of slop uh by the nature of the algorithms, the AI, the way that information is compressed and transformed. Um there's a lot of other issues, too, I think, like uh something worth knowing is something worth breaking your, you know, uh you know, busting a sweat to to know about it, to open up a book, you know, thumb through the pages, work through the problem, do the proof, prove to yourself that that mathematical result is the one that should be. Uh that lack of earned knowledge is going to be a major handicap for people moving forward if that skill is lost, right?

So yeah, so that's something that bothers me as as a ex-educator. Um um And then the last thing is people are kind of getting to the point where getting comfortable with automation. You hop into a a robotic car, it takes you where you want to go, you don't think much, you know, you're on your phone the whole time anyway doing other stuff. Um and so this idea that we can just delegate authority to these systems that perhaps no one's done the work to verify these systems work in all use cases is a major major risk for society, right? So this idea of being able to delegate capabilities without delegating authority is going to be incredibly important.

So yeah, yeah, agents can do some stuff that you would again. They can do other stuff that you would again. Well, hard on them now. And so what we're going to introduce today is we've been thinking a little bit about the frameworks for how we can create a new use term agreement for the internet where we start encouraging and challenging people to participate in ways that perhaps they might have forgotten about or lost the muscle memory for. And it started off with kind of this principle principle from a design philosophy perspective, what sorts of principles or all sorts of rules should developers keep in mind or technologists keep in mind when building new technology in this kind of new arena that we found ourselves in.

So we call this the covenant of humanistic technology. It's a really witchy term for an operator for thinking about like what kind of social contract should we the basic social contract for human learning around the progress of technology. So yeah, it's like kind of like a new terms of service. The covenant can apply both to agents and to humans, right? So agents can say cryptographically sign this thing and then use this within their rule set for what kind of technology could be built, right?

And so there's 10 really basic ideas that we've built out over the past couple years with with with our community. Things like self-sovereignty, self-custody, right? So that keys belong to the individual, that they shouldn't be put in in untrusted third party like Google or Coinbase or other types of servers. Things like privacy by by default where if you want to reveal something about yourself, you're consenting first, right? But by default you're private.

Things like universal personhood that on the internet as long as you can you know, we make an active effort to verify humanity as a requirement for interacting with a certain protocol. And being able to do that where you own your humanity, your humanity is privately proven, and that you're able to yeah, get all of the benefits that come with being a person in society, right? Transcending just natural rights and going ones of the digital rights space. So yeah, so there's a lot there. We've done a lot of interesting kind of things with that.

Kind of like these design parameters. One of them is a web app called the covenants, which you can check out at manifest.human.tech. And basically the idea here is it's a human gated application.

So to get into the app, you need to prove personhood. And then once you're in the app, you can do stuff that people can do, right? You can qualify for grants, for funding, for UBI. You can vote on things, you can make proposals for the underlying protocol for proving personhood. You can collectively govern the infrastructure and where it's going.

And so we started this off actually as more of like a cultural movement, right? Where we wanted to put human created artifacts kind of at the forefront. So we got like pretty crazy turnout for this. Some incredible artists submitted some really great work. We've given out I think like about 80,000 in in in grants.

And yeah, and so that's that's moving along and so what we've done actually for this event is we forged this human coordination framework and built it out for this specific event. So over the next 48 hours you can create an account on frontier.human.tech. Right?

So you sign in you with with the email that you that you got your ticket with. You verify your humanity. And then you can submit moments and artifacts. And so we have a small price pool of about $6,000 for people that are posting things or you know for for posting artifacts that are outside of the typical tracks for hackathons. So you can still submit code and apps but we're really looking for interesting research.

Right? If you want to go around and ask everybody what flavor ice cream they prefer and correlate that perhaps to chat GPT versus cloud preferences or um you could for example put together a a policy paper that you that you write up or an outline for that you write up over the weekend and to continue to support your research on that moving forward. You could work with some of the agentic finance tools that we have. So if you want to issue do agentic orchestration with wallet infrastructure we have a lot of tools for that as well. That's running behind the back end of this app actually.

And yeah so it's only 48 hours and at the end of it we're going to have a ton of content that belongs to an actual multi-sig. Right? So we're going to have a group accounts that's owned by the managers of the different floors of the tower. And they this all of this content is human gated. Right?

So it's put behind this this app. And in the future you could end up in a situation where you have all this valuable intellectual property and if an agent wants access to it because they want to learn something new it needs to be experimented inside. There's valuable information in this. You could set up payment rails. Right?

You could imagine a version of this like the York Times where if you want your agents to keep up with the news, they have paid access to the news and instead of human seeing the New York Times paywall, the agents are seeing the New York Times paywall. So, you do very interesting types of regenerative funding. You can do all sorts of right? So, the list for frontier.human.

tech, I encourage all of you guys here if you can take an account, snap pictures as you walk around, see something interesting, uh post it, uh upload other people's work, uh yeah, and just and just participate in the very uh you know, human act of talking to each other and learning about each other's work and yeah, and helping each other out. So, yeah, we just talked a lot about this. I think um Yeah, I don't know really what else to say, but you know, I think there's a moment here where yeah, everyone's so confused. I'll admit it. I'm confused as well.

I really don't know where all of this is going. I'm constantly in a sense-making phase and it's very difficult to sense make when things are changing so fast. Right? So, I encourage everybody to just take a step back, breathe, and you know, try to really absorb what's happening before coming to decisions about things. And as part of that, you know, maybe draw a picture or maybe, you know, sit down and have like a more human interaction with some folks and allow that kind kind of to wash over.

Um So, that's my suggestion for how to get the most out of the events. Um I'll be looking for your profiles on frontier.human.tech. And uh if you have any questions, we have a booth just in the back over there where uh we're happy to speak to builders that are working on proof of humanity or uh any sort of embedded wallet infrastructure uh or ZK proofs, we're happy to to to chat about that.

And I just want to say thank you very much to David and Beth and the Funding the Commons crew for putting this incredible event together. Thank you very much. My name is Shady El Damati. I hope to see you around the event. Thank you.