Blockchain Ethics by Rhys Lindmark of MIT

Ezra's landmark day at Riesling mark my twitter handle and this has blockchain ethics and we're gonna from the digital currency initiative that MIT and yeah it's gonna be 20 25 minutes to chat about blockchain ethics before I do that because we have a small proof I just want to ask people where what your name is and why you can do this talk so let's start over here sure my name's arginine Eric and I long ago I studied philosophy and I am still deeply interested in morality and ethics I've been attending Yale's working group on technology and ethics for the last couple of years so a lot of discussion around emerging technologies and how that impacts our history of human experience that we use to build our ethical knowledge based out of so obviously very short timeline here you're not a lot built up so we're having a lot of new experiences and figuring out what the ethics is are out here so I love to have the conversation that sounds great thank you [Music] what sir robotics robotics the guy of her lab is very experienced in this field so they told me to go and you can you know send it to him later that sounds good and thanks for letting us do this is fun I'm Elizabeth and I'm from Detroit Diana CTO of black beans startup neither black Jean died centralized exchange and ebo which is under supplies trading app video and I'm particularly interested in us just because of how watching is the world with so many different aspects and ethical considerations are thank you and I'm also at Elizabeth like how does it happen and I did that like you studied you know psychology and and philosophy and ethics and you have just always kept up with it many moons ago I was an RN and medical ethics was something I was very involved in so it's fascinating to watch yeah how it's how it's becoming to evolve here watching yes I think as you all have noted we are something like Bakhtin ethics we're at the just the beginning of this there it's actually kind of funny because whenever you say to folks oh I'm gonna do a thing I'm watching I think so whatever most people's response is like kind of a hilarya ha ha you mean the lack of ethics things like that which i think is a sign that we need more so I I guess another note here so I at the digital currency initiative at MIT I just started teaching a class on blockchain ethics this semester and I as far as I know it's the first blockchain ethics class that has existed so I'll give it a little overview on what that looks like I can maybe is anybody here actually hacking badge right here on our case week so we'll do a little keeping a fight to packing but more macro how it looks in the movement is there a clicker jerk where people just click it on there okay Morrowind i'll be able to use this okay there we go so you see about what dr. antics some specific examples of it I could use it while you pack and then this other piece about blockchain ethics connects to abundance morality so with that said what is blockchain ethics and why is it important so block gene ethics is a field and a community of people focus answering the question how to impulsively shading the development of blockchain technology pretty much what you'd expect a group of people aligned around positively shaping technology and you can think of it I kind of think of it like you have something like the state like nation state governments and things like the SEC or the CFTC and things like that that are regulating blockchain kerbin currency technology on the other side you have companies I just like copy pasted this from the website of various folks who are trying to do a company's do which is increased shareable returns and things like that it's a little bit more confusing in the blockchain ecosystem because of token ah mix and like open-source protocols thanks but generally you have the state companies and then you kind of hope people often call like civil society or like the third space and that's where the blockchain ethics falls is with nonprofits it's with universities and things so and why we need it is because you have in any case you're gonna have if you have any technology you're gonna have the tech Attucks like you were referencing earlier in the field when nuclear technology came out we started like ooh let's have a nuclear security let's make sure we don't blow ourselves up with ai ai with biotech new biotech metics and so with blockchain we will have watching ethics as a full teacher field or just not quite there yet let me say also know he urges this is especially true for blockchain cryptocurrency technology because in addition to it being tech in it like checking in and of itself it's also money and so that makes it even more needed from a tech perspective so as I said earlier why it's important this is just an indication that we have no technics right now whenever I know blockchain ethics I talked about and so the way I really think about it is although we're at the beginning stages here if blockchain technology has even ten percent of the Internet's impact we should take great care and developing it that's that's the crucial idea it's tough to tell how impactful this technology is going to be I think a lot of us here believe that it could be surprisingly impactful and if it is let's proactively think about how it impacts society so you could see these examples that are people are starting to think of others things like Bitcoin and how it's used Dartmouth markets or what's you know pseudonymous training and things like that something like the Libre it was a big wake-up call for a lot of people around tech around blockchain ethics and Libre is the Facebook coin they're cukoo currency and when that happened then Congress is like oh we should talk about this and now they've had a bunch of people come in and you can also mention oh if Libre has it they're connected to two billion people and so there are lots of societal impacts there the other piece here is this is a funny image that I took where a big desire of you know Bitcoin and aetherium and other cryptocurrencies is to to some extent to take down centralized trusted into institutions like banks and nation-states and if that does happen what should that like evolutionary process look like so another issue here at the current blockchain ethics ecosystem and why it's important right now is because it's not very big so you can compare it to the AI ethics world and ten years ago there was essentially zero dollars in AI ethics with zero centers but as you can tell here these are a bunch of different centers around the world there's hundreds of millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding it with centers around the world that compared to something like the blockchain ethics ecosystem which doesn't have very many folks in it there's a couple specific players most of these people are just the not really ethics focused but they are essentially lobbyist groups in Congress although they have some ethical components in this thing block change across accelerator which is anything they're saying open money initiative which is thinking about how money is used in like Venezuela and take them inflationary countries but it's we're really at a it's essentially zero dollars of watching ethics ecosystem all we have 15 million of hundreds of millions of dollars in D so when we start to think about what hello when we start thinking about and goodbye when we think about actually what blockchain ethics is if we assume that's now yes we think it's important by the way G section let's check who based off of my explanation there this thing below this seems super important as being and I was really convinced seem that important where would you all fall giving me a thumb like this corner this is not that important so given that let's talk about what it actually looks like and I'm gonna reference Albert's talk yesterday at the opening ceremony which is block cheese very complicated and we are at the beginning of understanding it as a technology so depending on how you look at it you can go to a bunch of different perspectives and this is especially true for watching epic so we're gonna come to a similar multi-perspective mindset here so I like to think of it from these three big perspectives there's the tech side of the blockchain so the technics piece there's the money side of watching cryptocurrencies so the money ethics piece or the financial ethics piece and then there's an institutional side which is if you think of these blockchain and cryptocurrency networks as new kind of institutions in and of themselves a new kind of networks like something like the Facebook or like something like Google they have the power to motivate coordination Bowl we can also think about some institutional efforts as well so on the 10 epic side the way that I think is right is so as we know with blockchain technology in the you can think of it as a new a new kind of database or a new kind of ledger and if you do you have this old kind which is essentially a journey about this new consciousness distributed ledger where everybody has a copy of the blockchain and it's immutable it's usually sadhana suit has a pseudonymous so it has you know your public key out there and when you have this distributed ledger and you have that technical affordance and when people say technical importance what they mean is like the abilities of that the technology gives you when you have that new technical forints of this immutable distributed database a societal good that comes up is this tension between privacy and security so what I mean by that is pretty much from any database whether it's Facebook's database or the Equifax sting of a nation even a database you're gonna have issues around like okay if everybody's on this database how can we make sure that that thing is super secure and like you know that people can't access it in these ways and how can make sure that it's private such that the data that is on it does not have like receive revealing personal information that things like that and so that is one thing one way to the view this technology and you can imagine something like Facebook's Libre if you just connect Facebook Libre to all the like Facebook's system you imagine all of our financial transactions in Facebook's hands in addition to all our like you know it's social media transactions that could be an issue of privacy and security another way to view it is still from this tech methods perspective is as a new Internet Protocol so this is the internet protocol stack which was built in the late 1900s and you can view all these were essentially ways to give and receive information and in a kind of permissionless trustless fashion and you can have been hairlike so the companies that are built on the pivot or whatever but you can imagine Bitcoin and aetherium as a new layer of the internet stack and a new internet protocol but incentive for information it's for value and so now we can give and receive value the technical affordances we have given receive value in as mission lists trustless way through this protocol and it will have like the early internet you can think of it as being like unstoppable code and what they mean by that is just like at the early internet it's like oh you're gonna be able to you know they're the internet you know given receive like porn on the internet give her sieve you know naughty words or things like that were able to be transmitted as bites through this protocol so - can you give and receive you know censorship resistant money like Bitcoin um or on stoppable code like smart contracts if-then statements that will be happening in this new world and is a technical affordance another way to think about it is this decentralization of disintermediation peace and that affordance I like to think of it as so with the early internet it was you know what the internet was to information it you know decentralized and disintermediated is trusted centralized information things like media primarily until you get this decent relation to disintermediation where everybody now has their kind of personalized Facebook feeds or you know direct to them kind of Google search engines and that decentralization of disintermediation will happen as well in the blockchain and cryptocurrency world but instead with information it will happen that with value are you will be able to have these weird new pockets and you can start to see them exist of networks of values start to be created so with that as important this new internet protocol some of the societal goods that you are worried about here are just making sure you still have humans in the loop so as like it's nice that you can we phishing send things in this through a protocol and his permission is trust this way with unstoppable code but at the same time if you have unstoppable code that allows you know terrorist financing to give somebody you know hundreds of millions or billions of dollars it's like then maybe we want humans to be part of that to some extent and so that's one kind of classic issue that getting maps from the internet onto blockchain crypto another one is coherence so the idea here is that it's very connected to the decentralization piece where you have with the Internet has it never exists you know there's new kind of trust ecosystems where people believe in whatever their current Facebook feed is telling them or they believe yeah whatever the Twitter feed is telling them and you have a lot less coherence and a lot less clear stories for society which is good and bad but we expect a similar thing to happen in the blockchain in cryptocurrency world where you're like okay there are all these tokens it was used to be simple when there's just like a US Dollars and then also you if you went to another country you use their money but now you have a lot less coherence around what is valuable and what what is money so that's when you take blockchain Athens and thing different technics lens that's what this looks like now you can think of it also from a money ethics lens and for financial ethics wins and and by the way just to let you know we're talking about blockchain ethics and viewing it from these three lenses so we just talked about in the tech ethics lens in our from the money ethics lens so if we think of as money ethics and there's been the evolution of money over time and now we have cryptocurrency in school and so when you have this affordance of money as new kind of money the societal good and this one's a little more complicated but generally you're trying to protect investors or consumers and yeah trying to protect investors and consumers with what happens to their money and so we have a bunch of different than the United States we have a bunch of different in those government regulatory bodies that help with this like the s senior the CFTC or FinCEN in lights the SEC does securities the CFTC does commodities fencing those money and so depending on how you think of cryptocurrencies and you can think of it as any of those things you kind of have different regulatory laws here and the real like tension and societal good that we're pushing for here is like on one side we want the liberty of being able to say hey everybody anybody can have access to these new markets anybody can get access to the site to these icos that's cool we don't need to be an accredited investor to invest but if you have that then people's incentives then you have this permissionless system where if anybody can access it and you have things like scans and things of that variety that are have no consumer protection around them so that can be an issue in another classic issue too is if you have these new kind of frictionless systems built around Liberty then you might not get very much equality so this is with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency the income inequality or the Gini coefficient in all these systems with big the theorem is like worse than all nation-states for all intents and purposes so that's when you think of it as money those are some issues that come into play you think of it as incentives that's another some other issues come into play what I mean by incentives are because this stuff is money then it will devise people to do something and more to dulles that so if any like a clear societal good here is a healthy environment and I've seen the the mining system with cryptocurrency so you can imagine it as any world we're gonna put this white paper on the internet 2008 postal code 2009 and before you know it ten years later you have certain you know these massive server farms all around the world they're spending about 1 mm they're about one five hundredth rather of the world electricity just to mine Bitcoin and that is crazy and that's a result of these incentives just saying that you can't earn electricity into money and then people like oh want to do that and obviously as an externality of that then you have these environmental issues so this is saying that when you think from an incentives perspective and send advising people to do things is very very powerful and that can have negative extra allottee like an environment and there are also some other things that we don't need to go too deep into of like ways that you can be good or bad of game theory to be mean to people with these incentives so that's watching ethics it's money ethics let's finally talk about watching ethics as ethics so by institutions I mean so when people talk about institutions they're talking about things like religions but if they're in all these things or things I can go to make important eight people and this is connected to the sky coasts who has this Coase theorem of like why it's the market exists versus why does the state exist why aren't they just the same thing or not it's because their each thing there is better or worse this institution is better or worse at organizing people either motivating them for things or coordinating them for things like the market is super good at motivating any big let's go and like people are down to do things it's not very good at coordinating the markets not that good of a coordinating mechanism first is something like a state which is better at coordinating people but it's less good at motivating people so we have these institutions big things like religions or nation-states or companies or recently this is an interesting one what's up then this is a recent one of these new internet platforms so you have a new kind of institution which are these internet and evil platforms like especially Google Amazon Facebook that connect people over the Internet through this new trusted well any stuff like sharing economy uber Airbnb etc all into this buckets it's a new institution that we've seen recently now we're seeing some of these new blockchain cryptocurrency networks as institutions in and of themselves that can motivate and coordinate people and so when you have these new institutions the big issue is essentially stability like societal stability and the tension here is this tension between lucien and revolution so you can imagine most of the blockchain cryptocurrency world wants to exit the current system by creating a new revolution over here and if they do so that is exciting i'm generally bullish on that and think it will be good but if that happens it like nation's needs go down or banks go down it's like we want to make sure to do this in a way that is more evolutionary than like revolutionary in like less fragile for society and as an example this food scene is happening with like Google Amazon Facebook when they had more of a move fast and break things behind set what that meant is that we are since making as a society went down in a big way some things like Amazon and what it did to a bunch of you know small you know small medium businesses they got hit by this in a big way so there's things that you can kind of map from this internet world right like that was more kind of a revolution vibe than an evolution flag so we should watch out yeah so that's kind of the third big way to view it and danger get you have a speed here we were talking about three big ways to view blockchain ethics either as technics as money ethics or as institutional ethics sue oh yeah means for those of us who are hacking here I think that really I don't have too many pieces of advice for you I mainly have this is called the Collingridge dilemma which states when change is easy the need for it cannot be foreseen when the need for changes apparent changes become expensive difficult time-consuming and this is to say that like right now at the beginning like this weekend you should really be worrying about like the ethical implications of like the technology you're gonna bill it's not gonna be too big of a deal but as these things happen over time you should think about you know things like the trust assumptions that are baked into your system what what your system is incentivizing people to good to do where's the security of your system all these things that we've chatted out in those last big three slides start to think about them as you have today and make sure that you're not creating something that long-term if it continues to propagate that negative impacts I want to say one final piece here though which is the one thing that almost all of us I bet could do which is connecting blockchain ethics to abundance so it's kind of a more macro take I think it's pretty important so the idea here is that Austin Society have gone through these ships from scarcity to abundance and at the beginning in the agricultural revolution and you know 12,000 years ago food was the scarce thing but then we're like oh we know how to make farms this is sweet then food no longer became scarce and land became the scarce thing this land is what you need to make all food after that and the Industrial Revolution land was primarily the scarce thing but we were able to start to create these factories and and machine shops and things like that and that may be the case of like the land itself folks it has a form but rather like the machines in the capital or the superfine thing and so that's kind of what we've been based around our being scarcity constrained society recently what the shift I claim is making now and other folks claim is happening is that we are starting to be in the case where it's actually we have enough we have enough for ourselves from money perspective for society before like a distribution problem that is a production problem and then eventually will attention please attention as the main scarcely in society but actually moved to the world of abundant capital we have a lot of power to us in this room so as you can see here in this last this is a graph it's 200 years of the number of people who live in extreme poverty 200 years ago essentially 90% of people everybody to perform no one have washing machines are like TVs or computers or any of that stuff half the kids used to die before the age of five now it is ten percent so a lot a lot less people than extreme poverty which is great it's still about 750 million which is awful but we are much closer to abundance we'll work from like an individualís if a macro perspective people up from an individual perspective and this is a graph x-axis individual income and it's a log scale by the base this doubles each time and the y-axis is how happy you are essentially across these four different kind of metrics that people are measuring and if you look at it it's like oh man right around $45,000 per year you know really it's already diminishing to that point it gets even essentially flatline is there something you don't get that much happier after you make money after $45,000 a year so what this means is that I self tax myself and I'm super transparent about it so I made $7,000 a year of that about twenty thousand dollars is tacked to the government the government and then of the remaining 50 thousand dollars I self tax myself twenty percent of it are about ten thousand dollars and give to a variety of random charities and things along which can have a lot of impact and I'm also very transparent with my with the amount of money so I literally took these pictures right before we made this talk so my Bitcoin eat has gone up recently so I feel good about that and I find that wasn't even a bank account so this is just a note to all of us here to really as you move there's like what you're doing with like your technology and there's also taking a step back and realizing you're replacing the macro picture of things and saying who do I really need all that's coming into me or can I let some of that money flows through me back to others in the system so with that if you want to learn more you can walk to you ethics code there's a really big syllabus there and a forum that you can join it would be like ping me every Sun mark or anything of that variety as well and thank you so much [Applause] maybe aside from you know that that thanking you and a few names that we had do you see any groundswell to start anything there you know are you reading that NASA to some extent I am part of creating that groundswell I think that there are a lot of the weird thing within the blockchain cryptocurrency worlds that a lot of folks have his mindset baked in because it's kind of a rejection of the web 2.0 world and surveillance capitalism and you know the banking state and you know those things so I think sometimes there's everything here is the groundswell and I would say there's not really I would look at OMI the open money initiative that's very specifically about understanding how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are used in nation states that have hyperinflation so I think that's the best one the other one is coin Center although they're technically a lobbying organization for too much they are very knowledgeable about all the money ethics side of things and how that works I think you're right I think it is very baked in I know as we started our firm we created our values so all of this is kind of a softball or feel free to follow up afterwards so should a good project the valid reason to effectively launder bad money with the current presidential election going on there's some attention on biting for example accepting money from oil executives to fund his campaign and I've got a note that your with the digital currency idea how does the media lab so it's a joke Ito secured funding for you yes so potentially some of that money here at sound comes from mr. Exley right yeah so that's currently a discussion right now around your Center and I know you are aware of that so so what are your thoughts on is it okay for us to burn so much electricity to get Bitcoin in these networks off the ground for the potential value that they can provide is that equivalent to the moral cost of getting an bootstraps MIT does so many good things Media Lab does so many good things is it acceptable to use tainted money to fund good projects yeah that's a great question and so just for everybody else who just came in there and we're talking about blockchain ethics and wondering how one can use ancient wonder what are the how she think about using bad money dirty money for good things there's no good one is a like a consequentialist mindset or utilitarian my temperature to say hey if you this money's gonna go somewhere and so you can think accounter factually and say oh it could either go to this thing over here or you know if you imagine somebody with dirty money sends it super anonymously to just give to really really poor people to give directly that seems good who knows maybe you have too much behind the final fun yeah exactly exactly sorry I take that or you can think of it from a deontological of virtue ethics perspective where you say hey I actually the most important thing here is that people are being honest about themselves or being transparent and from that perspective you may even be less okay okay thank you