Towards a Humanist Blockchain Future by Lane Rettig

so yeah I'd like to mix things up a little bit and just take a few minutes to talk to you guys about a topic that is really important to me and I it's been on my mind a lot lately and I hope it's something that many of you are already thinking about and maybe this is the beginning of a conversation so this is sort of a very large topic we only have a few minutes I certainly don't want to stand in between everyone and dinner or the next venue or anything but I'm just gonna sort of give you some scenarios to consider and some questions to think about so I'm I'm Lane and you guys have seen a lot of me today I'm an independent aetherium court developer but I care a great deal about people just all kinds of people and so I think a lot about who we're building things for what we're building things for so towards a humanist blockchain future see if this decides to work awesome this is marina she is 32 years old she's a single mother and she lives in Atlanta Georgia with two small children when her first child was born 10 years ago she dropped out of college to take care of her first child since then she's worked a series of odd jobs to support the family a couple of years ago she enrolled in some nursing courses offered by Amazon University you guys haven't heard about Amazon University this these are sort of slightly futuristic scenarios so it's not really a thing but just kind of imagine near future Amazon University is a subsidiary of the e-commerce giant that we all know and love and Marina graduated just recently with a degree in nursing issued on the Amazon healthcare cloud which means that her degree is valid at all the institutions that participate in the Amazon healthcare healthcare cloud she is really happy that her career and education are back on track and she's very grateful to Amazon for making that experience seamless this is Rodrigo Rodrigo is a 45 year old taxi driver in Mexico City Rodrigo has spent his entire life driving taxis and he has no clue he would do if he couldn't continue to drive taxis a couple of years ago the city's taxi cartels collapsed because of increased competition from from uber and initially Rodrigo lost his job and was very frustrated and he joined some protests against uber for some time but after a few months out of work he couldn't support himself any longer and eventually he caved in and he signed up to be a driver with a new Oberer service called uber direct which has the benefit of allowing the drivers to keep the majority of their fees so 95% compared to the usual 65 to 70% that uber drivers keep if you kind of push him hard he will admit that he's frustrated that he works for an American company and he misses the days when he and his friends used to divide the cash at the end of the day that they collected driving taxis for the taxi cartel but he barely notices the software and things haven't changed that much and he says he's pretty happy with the new situation this is wen Jing wen Jing is a 21 year old University student in Shenzhen China she has a knack for math and she scored high enough on the college entrance exam a few years ago to secure a position at one of the most prestigious universities in her City she hopes that when she finishes studying Science and Technology that she'll be able to get a job with an energy multinational and moved to a city like Singapore for work she's applying for jobs right now and she really likes the fact that her career history the reviews from her boss from her part-time job her academic transcripts going all the way back to kindergarten are all available through a government-run portal and an app which is based on blockchain technology but she doesn't know that and she's really excited about what the future holds so these stories are fictional right these are personas but the idea here is they're not that fictional right it's sort of not hard to zoom out a little bit and imagine we're kind of five or ten years in the future and these sort of ordinary people exist in various parts of the world and what they have in common is that blockchain technology has touched all of their lives in various ways right the first case marina has a degree issued through a blockchain based technology that Amazon is using and in the second case Rodrigo is using a service called uber direct which cuts out the middleman and allows Eber to reduce their fees and in the third case when Jing has her academic credentials and her work history stored on a government-controlled blockchain okay so they're all using blockchain technology it's kind of invisible to them which is a lot like how we use the Internet and technologies like tcp/ip today right they just work and we don't think about them but they're all a bit resent relized controlled by big companies are controlled by the government the other thing they have in common is that these lives are not spectacularly wonderful lives they're not terrible lives right they're just kind of normal human lives and so the question I have for you and for all of us as builders and those designers who are building things on aetherium and thinking about the future how do you feel about this type of a future can the things we're building be better than this or do they have risks that could make the situation worse than this we're at a very very interesting time in human history right now we are transitioning we're sort of in the middle of this transition from late industrial stage industrial era into the information era at the beginning of this new informational era and the problems that we face today as a species as a global community are orders of magnitude more complex than the problems we've faced historically my favorite example of this is climate change there's no one person there's no one institution there's not even one country that can begin to address these problems together these are things that are massive coordination challenges and they're things that only the majority of humans on this planet can come together to solve or not right and face the consequences the other way however so that's sort of the scary side right we have all this sort of political instability economic instability but we also have this really powerful new set of tools and technologies and you know I'm thinking obviously aetherium is a big part of it but but there's many other technologies as well that I think can be used to address these problems and unlock human capability in a way that's never happened before so I think that that's that's why now is the time to be having this conversation and thinking along these lines I think that we are at a fork in the road I think this is absolutely true of aetherium and I think it's true of all technologies whether that's AI whether it's machine learning or self-driving cars one path forward is kind of the lazy path and that is entrenching existing power systems power dynamics okay this is kind of the rich get richer the wealthy privileged populations in the world stay wealthy and privileged for the foreseeable future and if you extrapolate based on present trends I think that that's the path we're gonna end up on so just again I think we have great potential but like none of this is automatic we don't get this stuff for free the other path is a much harder path right and I don't know what's on that path that's kind of the unexplored path but we have the potential to create better fairer more representational more participatory systems and and the tools like aetherium that we have in front of us are a big part of that and the last point I want to make here is it's not a question of ability it's not a question of resources we have enough resources in the world today to feed every human on the planet to house and clothe every human it's a question of allocation and more than anything it's a question of intent right do we are we brave enough are we strong enough to use these technologies for good what is humanists mean to you what does it mean to do good this is not an easy question and you'll probably hear this a lot like this weekend I don't have any answers as I said this is intended to be you know an inspiration for you to think for yourselves what this stuff means this is not a religion there's no tenkan mints I just I guess I urge you as we go forth and Biddle amazing things that a teeth Berlin right just think about your values and think about what humanism means to you and does it matter to you and to these people and these stories matter to you and there are communities and particularly about this problem that I found very helpful one in particular is called the effective altruism movement I urge you to look it up they have they've done a good job of turning altruism and humanism into something beginning to approach a science something that we can begin to kind of quantify and I guess the most relevant question for you know on all of our minds today is is why etherium right why why this community what what do we have what do we have to offer as a community I think we have three things to offer I think the first is the technologies themselves the apps and infrastructure and layer two things that everyone in this room is building and working on and thinking about number two is what I call our superpower and that's things like censorship resistance and permissionless innovation which I think are what will allow these technologies to change the world and the third is the community itself I don't know about you guys but the people I know who are here who are in this room and by the way all of you guys are heroes for like staying to the very end today so thank you for that the people I know in this community are here for the right reasons right they're not here to make a name for themselves they're not here to make money those things are nice side effect but they're here because they have this particular set of values that we as a community share and that I think will allow us to build a better humanist future someone else actually suggested that I use this image today for this slide and I like it because this is kind of a theorem right we're like kids we're like we're little and we're running around and we're immature but we're wearing this superhero costume and we're like we're gonna save the world so hopefully we grow up into real superheroes hopefully that's that's on us and so there are organizations in this community that have thought a great deal and spoken about and shared in a very vocal way their values and their mission statements so you know many of those organizations are in the room today and have been here on the stage today so yeah huge shout out to giveth and status and Aragon and Dow stacking and get coin for doing that for setting a really great example and flying that flag of of those values and again I just urge everyone in the room as you know we're building cool things building as great engineering is amazing but like it has to start with values I think if you really want to make a difference in the world and really look these up they're all really amazing documents and great starting points and so you may be asking yourself at this point you know what can I do I'm just one person I'm just you know a small project I'll give you three concrete thoughts to take with you and things that you can put into action today to begin making a difference the first is reflecting about your own values and and thinking about some of the questions again these are questions I'd like you guys to take with you over the next few days and weeks and months what does human isn't mean to me what are my values what do I care about right how important is this stuff to me number two when we're designing things and when we're building things as builders and designers and engineers were it's super easy to just build stuff because it's cool it's an interesting problem to work on holy crap wouldn't it be amazing if we had something that did this but we often in that process tend to forget the human element and so what I urge you guys to do again including at the hackathon this weekend is to think about the people think about the marina's and the windings of the world and the Rodrigo's who are you building for and how is the stuff you're building going to impact their lives or not and number three is join the conversation so I posted a tweet a few days ago saying that I'm gonna do this talk and asking people what they wanted to hear about under the heading of humanist blockchain future and I was genuinely blown away by the feedback I did my best to collect as many as I could of the responses so I guess what I learned from this is that this is a topic that resonates for people and it people care greatly about it and that's really reassuring to hear I obviously can't go through all of them but I'll just highlight a few of the ones that really stood out to me Manuel asked what are the social risks of blockchain tech going mainstream and how can we mitigate them we make a lot of noise and we bang the drums about making the world a better place but there are risks involved in these technologies and so what are they again not enough time to like answer these questions but starting a become starting a conversation a day ola asks how can we make blockchain more accessible to the most vulnerable humans I think it would be good if we all reflect on the fact that we're in a wealthy City in a wealthy country in a very privileged part of the world and as cool as a lot of the apps and you know adapts and infrastructure that we're building maybe it can probably have a as big if not a larger impact on the lives of some of the most vulnerable people on the planet so again thinking who are those people and and how can we build things for all humans another person said blockchains unfortunately haven't had such an impact on poor societies if it goes mainstream there's a risk that the gap between the rich and the poor is actually going to increase how do we avoid this so again you know we were all optimistic we're all excited about these technologies and about the potential for building a more inclusive fair or more just system but I think if you again extrapolate based on present trends and you look at things like the current wealth distribution and aetherium we're not necessarily on that trajectory yet we have a lot of work to do and finally Santiago says block chains tend to give priority to resources to those with the most money to spend for example you can pay more fees to get your transactions mined earlier over first-come-first-serve how does this impact society if resources like an appointment start being offered under this new paradigm you know a lot of us are economists or crypto economists we think a lot about crypto economics and we strive and I'm guilty of this as well right we strive for economic efficiency we all want markets and to marketize things and radical markets are really a great and exciting but I think it is a genuinely interesting question to ask if everything you know is offered through a market and and you gain access to that you know by putting in money or putting in value or something what happens to certain types of goods that may not be allocated in the most efficient way in such a system so again this is I hope the beginning of a conversation there are some let's call them memes where I'd love to kind of continue the conversation with you guys yeah p0 I think you've heard mentioned once or twice today on the stage is an initiative that several of us launched earlier this year to talk about the we call it the philosophical side of the theorem governance so that's the economic side it's the moral ethical side sort of the non technical side of aetherium specific governance eath common this is a meme that was created by a gentleman named Reece landmark just professing a similar set of values and and and talking about this transition from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset and how we kind of help transition and co-evolve humanity in that direction and how etherium has a role to play social scalability is a related topic that I think has great lessons for us as we look at how tools like aetherium and blockchain can be used to grow our social systems and our social structures in a trustless fashion and I invented this humanist blockchain hashtag but like tweet at me on Twitter with this and we can we can chat and in closing I just want to give a massive shout out and a thank you to Rhys the guy I mentioned a moment ago recent landmark this humanist blockchain future meme is something that he came up with and he kindly offered to let me borrow and co-evolved in this talk if you're interested in this topic check out this podcast if you're not already familiar with his work it's called creating a humanist blockchain future he has 48 talks the most recent ones interviews with Joe Lubin with Richard Burton whom you saw earlier today with Ethan who's here somewhere amazing amazing amazing content highly recommended and if all that's not enough he's also writing an entire book on this topic and I've read kind of the beginning of this book and it's really really powerful stuff cool that's it for me thank you guys for all your attention today thanks for paying attention to this talk I'm looking forward to seeing what you build