The Infinite Knowledge Machine with Shady El Damaty

hi good morning everybody um I'm running a little bit late here but I'm pretty excited to share with you guys um a little bit of the work that we've been doing on on the infinite knowledge machine thinking particularly about ethereum as a distributed compute service for immutable truth on public blockchains and how this really is powered by our ability to think about uh think about science think about uh semantics and how we can build autonomous protocols that curate knowledge in the real world and I'll introduce some things to you guys like decentralized science which has been an ongoing Topic in this space over over the past year how about a topic about a year old so a little bit about me my name is Shadi co-founder of hololim it's a zero knowledge identity protocol for um taking off chain proofs and putting them on chain and so I'm running a little bit late so I'm going to give you guys the power the blitz version of this talk and uh really briefly I'll be talking a little bit about the steward mandate that calls upon us all in this web 3 space thinking about public goods I'll talk specifically about ethereum as a knowledge machine or rather that uh that ethereum really exists purely in a way to curate and accumulate knowledge and this is a really important concept to keep in mind as we engineer technology within the space I'll point to the importance of dows as a way of mediating the the interactions between autonomous agents and humans and being able to maintain alignment between ai's autonomous protocols and being able to service the needs of people as they evolve and change over time I think really key to that is a concept that we take from the scientific method uh generally thinking about Discovery is a recursive Loop right so meaning that progress usually looks like not like progress for a while before before we actually find a major breakthrough that kind of coined as term as a paradigm shift you might have heard that term before in philosophy of science and I'll give an example like about um specifically about a discovery of oxygen and how oxygen is kind of this mind-blowing thing that seemed to nobody knew about and lastly I'll talk a little bit about some DC Primitives so I'm going to speed talk through this um I think we're all here because we think that's ethereum offers an opportunity to uplift and Elevate public goods very much like this conference right however you know when we're thinking about immutability when we're thinking about in signs of alignment uh the permanence of the decisions that we make is really significant so it's really important for us to kind of keep in mind how we Shepherd resources to the infant machine in a way that best Services the interests of society and those and those values that we care about so you know just a brief history on ethereum um you know when it was first released the Frontier update it was that main major unlock for for people that were programming technology working with building Tech the next building Next Generation applications from the internet moving away from web two systems was this record of shared truth or this shared state so this ability to perform distributed computes uh and consensus around the results of of those computation and this empowered a bunch of Technologies like defy apps which which kind of blew uh kind of blew up in and and volume there after uh one of the first major killer use cases of of ethereum and Dao's really uh kind of emerging after that as a way to coordinate and organize around these shared uh shared systems and shared outcome uh shared group goal directed group Behavior so yeah so I think you know really what we're seeing is ethereum kind of moving as a way of taking things that we know to be true about the world and putting them on chain in a way so that we can all coordinate and move somewhere together I think it's really important to keep in mind too this multi-chain future that where we're all moving sometimes it's not together sometimes it's independently and and uh this multi-chain future that we're seeing over the next couple years that's beginning to emerge it's going to be really critical for that on the back end right you know I think where we're really really moving over the next a year or so uh or next couple years or so is this is this a full full automation of thinking about you know putting the a in Dallas right right most hours right now really couldn't be described as autonomous so having agents I think that are able to take off chain actions right such as like plant a tree and then update an on-chain record and be able to incentivize positive behavior in that way so I'm running super super late here basically what I wanted to Point your guys's attention to is this idea of decentralized science so just about a year ago here at East Denver we we put on the first decentralized science conference where really taking a lot of these ideas from web3 from D5 from distributed systems architectures and thinking about how can we seed how can we seed resources how can we see different Community nucleation points so folks can go out accumulate knowledge and use a shared record to assure its record of Truth to be able to communicate what it is that they're seeing in in the world and their experiments and being able to drive funding being able to drive coordination around those efforts so some really Key properties of design protocols is some of the same stuff that we kind of see actually for most apps whether they're in D5 or whether they're in community building or whether they're in some alternative use case and it's really key so you know I think what's really key here is this being able to execute any sort of deterministic code on these distributed consensus networks and so this really empowers knowledge creation as this automated process or as an engineered process thinking less of knowledge as something I think about you know in my basement of my lab and I go up to the laboratory and then I do some experiments manually but moving more towards the future of automation where we can start effectively exploring a wider parameter space and automating that humans become custodians of these agents so really key to this are going to be linked unverified identif linked identifiers for verified content and this is something that we're seeing starting to merge with technology like ipfs which uses cids for example to directly address data by its content what it's made out of um and uh yeah and I think really important to you is thinking about how ZK ZK systems are allowing us to verify proof of computation on certain things so being able to prove that you've achieved a certain series of steps to produce an outcome or produce a produce an observation or conclusion and when you have all these things coming together then you can start thinking about systems that allow us to engineer specific uh outcomes that we that we care about so for example if we have the outstanding problem discovering whether dark energy or dark matter is going to influence the direction of evolution of the universe and we need to decide what kind of telescopes we should put out there should we put up one big giant James Webb Telescope should we put out a bunch of smaller telescopes and make a synthetic aperture telescope so we can look at multiple parts of the sky at the same time and offer that resource to more people there's pros and cons to each of those and so you know with these decentralized protocols like Bitcoin for example I think quadratic funding is just the tip of the iceberg and once you do have this linking between an ontology specifically for thinking about hypothesis generation experimentation sharing results on chain using the shared record of truth then we can start putting together algorithms that allocate funding in different ways that optimize for these different behaviors and I think this is really important for avoiding the emergence of like this immutable Dogma so lastly you know I think once we are able to prove out autonomous protocols or engineer processes for Distributing Goods to maybe balance the pros and cons for the impact of a particular uh the impact of a particular say science project or hypothesis or group Behavior towards trying to tackle a key challenge this really opens up some opportunities to think about how economic engineering on the back end can be used to further drive people to work in that field or to transform the value for example of all the data that the James Webb Telescope is producing into things that benefit society and that could be used to fund science moving forward and that's just really the tip of the iceberg so I encourage you guys to definitely go check out um uh definitely go check out denver.dsi.c Community it's a it's a rough overview of all the DSi events that have happened this these past couple days I think we have four four days of content and we've had folks from all over the space that have never heard about web3 before all coming together really attracted by the promise of being able to start with a on a fresh page and thinking about how we can use some of these web3 tools in science today to transform how we transform funding to transform how scientists think about collaboration and really interestingly I think starting to curate a permanent shared record of of Protocols of ideas of processes in science so do check us out I also want to show my project as well some co-founder of holonym's zero knowledge identity protocol and you know we're really excited about science and my background as a scientists kind of led me to this point because it allows ZK allows us to do things that we couldn't do before which is we can finally allow researchers to choose to be either completely public about how they share the results or their data sometimes they can't be public right maybe perhaps they're working with Phi perhaps they're working on a project that they don't want to get scooped on although that's not always something that I would uh sometimes I think there's really no danger of being scooped you guys should just work out in the open but this is a real concern in in cases where you know multiple groups are all converging to the same idea but they can't share the results in public either because they don't want to contaminate each other's results like for example the picture of the first black hole all those teams worked out in in privacy so yeah so I think CK is really important uh if you guys want to check out Holland M I can give you guys a demo after the after this this talk we built out this demonstrator application of what's moving away from the language of daos and thinking more about societies uh because scientists don't know what Dows are and they're not going to take the time to look at that on Wikipedia but they know what professional scientific societies are and this is a great way I think to onboard researchers into the space uh you can take a look at this and you know how where where we're basically uh leveraging protocol Labs as hypersearch protocol to bring scientists in verify things about their identity such as whether they have a PhD whether they have an open science framework account and being able to import that reputation off chain on chain in a privacy preserving Manner and minting Hyper certificate nfts that allow funding based off of some impact criteria so yeah so uh definitely check this out here's some examples oh I'm not even you've been changing my slides so early uh anyway that's it for me thank you everybody have a great day um and thanks for taking a seat actually I saw a couple of you guys wandering at the last minute so thanks thanks [Music]