Juan Benet I Accelerating Humanity | Filecoin I Pragma India 2023

[Music] this is an interesting uh moment for us because we introduced pragma as an event this year and you were with us with the very first pragma in in April and uh this is the last pragma of 2023 and uh we get to reflect not on just the future but also the last eight months and uh and I'm excited to kind of have this conversation last time we covered how we can make web 3 better from the point of view of interesting protocols that need to be invented interesting problems that need to be solved but I think it's it's a good idea for us to actually zoom out and talk about how we actually think Humanity can be made better with a lot of the new things that we we're inventing um so we're going to kind of shape around a lot of these things and I'll kind of in a way be in a lot of tangents and we'll kind of cover all the topics that we think are interesting and uh my kind of first one um to kind of start off with is uh a lot of you may have heard of EAC Accel acceler acceleration ISM diac all these topics around just how do we actually take more risks um so I want to kind start off by actually you having tell us about what is accelerationism yeah so um and by the way super excited to be here uh love the pregman series and all of everything they to with us to um help connect everybody and build great things in the future um so accelerationism came out as a um response to uh some deceleration ISM that was uh being talked about so in the effect in the effective altruist community so the effective altruist Community has been trying to create a structure uh where people around the world are thinking very rationally about their how they spend their time and their effort and resources and try to maximize the utility and the improvements to humanity globally um and so there's a lot of you know tons of people around the world um are thinking more carefully about what they do and what they do it and so on to try and maximize the the utility broadly um that's kind of where the um effective part is about making sure that you're doing a good job at altruism which is you know improving things for everybody now among that there's a a whole branch of the EA community that has been very worried about AI risk um and so there's some amount of um deceleration SYM that comes from that in saying hey no hold on AI might actually be uh extremely risky and we should be um careful about deployment that strand ended up giving rise to a uh and connecting with many other um communities much broader and different from EA that are broadly just afraid of technology or broadly think that technology doesn't have much to offer or they're broadly um you know big Tech or whatever um it's just making the world worse and so it there's like this broad meme about deceleration ISM uh happening um you know in various different places and so accelerationism came in as a big counter to that and saying no no no like like remember um Science and Technology greatly improve Humanity um when you look back and think about all of the great uh improvements that we've had in the last few centuries last few Millennia um you can trace often back to some important um understanding leaps you can find the scientific improvements that gave us uh those benefits you can uh think about the technologies that uh delivered those scientific improvements into some public goods or some some infrastructure or some U products that people ended up using so think of like aqueducts back in you know like the thousands of years ago or like Agriculture and irrigation systems or public sanitation or the printing press or you know carts and um the internet and now you know the internet telecommunications all the way to to the Internet so accelerationism is saying hey no hold on like there's an enormous amount of benefit that the world gets out of Science and Technology being deployed as fast as we can um and where this kind of like fight emerged between um kind of the people saying hey hold on uh let's slow things down against people saying let's accelerate things now the Nuance thing here is that most EAS are actually accelerationists that want things to go faster want the science and technology to go way faster except for things that might cause massive amounts of harm including things like making AI in an un unsafe way and this is where I think um there's a recent post uh from theic called deac which tries to thread the needle between these two very different um these two Landscapes where that breaks down both why um the acceleration is Viewpoint of trying to uh improve science trying to improve technology trying to um create better um better things as fast as we can broadly generally tends to translate into broad broad improvements globally um and why doing that in a free open permissionless environment is just so good for the entire world and has repeatedly um shown to like just greatly um improve human life however um this is where uh I think the D did a great job here uh navigating um however that there's a part where you want to be differential in which Technologies you um improve so this is an EA idea of saying let's be uh let's build technologies that are risky um carefully and and think about how they might be deployed and along the way think about other technologies that give you the Safeguard or safety relative to that technology and then think carefully about which things you prioritize think carefully about which Technologies do you build first or which Technologies you build and in what rate and who you give access to them and so on so so that's the kind of um uh so the Ty has a great post that you can go and check out that kind of threads a need needle between these two Landscapes and that that's what daac um is um and there's a lot of good ideas there about thinking about uh defensibility decentralizations decentralization um uh uh and and across a few different categories so for example um bio uh you want to be able to do use great Innovations in BIO to improve Humanity like cure diseases um solve all kinds of um fundamental problems think about longevity and so on and at the same time you want to be careful about um giving creating uh vectors for massive harm where you know people are like engineering pandemics or you know things like that so you know the things like bio there's things like um Communications infrastructure there's things like um economics and governance Technologies there's um you know stuff energy um so all of these areas you want to both um build great technology that can improve how the world works and you want to try and diffuse it to the to everybody as fast as you can because that creates an enormous amount of utility globally um that improves people's lives however you want to make sure that you're doing so um uh carefully and that you don't accidentally end up creating massive amounts of harm um and yeah that's kind of the summary of like the that landscape that's that's a better summary than Chad GPT did for me good uh we're I'm still uh still not gonna be replaced yet uh hanging on you know from a cliffhanger uh so so obviously when people kind of talked about talk about accelerationism they talk about bio longetivity like nuclear energy and kind of a lot of the infrastructure improvements around kind of standard of living for people uh where does kind of crypto fit in and and how do we think about that and what does that actually do from a technological standpoint for us yeah so um I think crypto is an extremely extremely important set of Technologies um that enable us to build uh a better infrastructure for economies and governments worldwide and this starts in both the large scale um you know kind of rewrite how a country econ Works economically all the way to the small scale of how you transact with other people how you support other people or how groups organize their um their work and organize their their systems and so I think the the and what I find extremely extremely powerful about Crypton web 3 is that we're we're working with um software eating mechanism design eating economics and we're creating Leever extremely powerful levers that can organize humans and organizations and you know even nation states um at a massive scale and so by deploying new kinds of infrastructures and new kinds of um new kinds of infrastructure new kinds of incentive structures new kinds of um like small even simple smart contracts um you can you can rewrite and rewire how massive scale systems operate and that's an enormous amount of potential and I which I find super exciting what are kind of some examples of thinking about a better government or economic structure yeah so um you know everything there's a lot of different kinds of things I start with small and then go large so in in the small scale you can think about um people doing like different you know micr lending like there's lots of different countries that do micr lending when people lend money to other people you can do that in a much better much faster way lower friction um using these kinds of systems you can then you know think about how groups organize and run their um their own economic structures whether that's like maintaining the finances of a community maintaining the finances of a company or maintaining the governance of a community or or a company or something like that think of dows as fundamentally changing the way that governance structure works in in an in an organization um you can think of you know larger and larger scales like create broad support structures for um larger and larger communities so for example um things like coming up with New Economic models uh for example Ubi where uh you can have large communities um you know potential pretty massive scales um create uh a distribution structure for for wealth that ends up giving people access to a basic income um or and you can think of that being um put put in place even by large scale Global um governments where you can have use crypto to um build Ubi systems um you can use crypto to um build other kind of economic structures so one thing that I'm particularly excited about is um changing the nature of how Capital Works um being able to uh wire in um perspectives perspective about how that capital is getting used and what it's going through think of um things like the entire um being able to use Financial structures to improve um our work in certain goals like carbon credits are a concrete um example of making a financial instrument to try and um reverse uh climate change and trying to make the world Greener you can do all kinds of um and not took an enormous amount of work to to develop and deploy like it was a huge International um uh effort from many governments and many uh corporations and so on to try and boot up that system in crypto you can just Rite a few lines of code and build a thing like that and build a structure that works in that way um and so you we've now seen over the last few years a pro proliferation of very different kinds of um instruments kind of like that so for example um renewable energy certificates or you know certificates that of people planting trees or um doing other kinds of like carbon offsetting yeah yeah doing like useful valuable public goods oriented work um and so you can use crypto to build very large scale systems that that um that can do that kind of public goods um valuable work and I think that this you we really have these magical superpowers with with scrypto and blockchain to rewire how the entire world Works um and it's just at your fingertips with you know some smart contracts remember how um powerful some of these are like the entire you know think of Bitcoin or or or or even filecoin as just a couple of incentive structures that a mass and enormous amount of resources right so in fatco there's just one incentive structure that releases some currency for adding storage to the network and that on its own brings an enormous amount of of storage and assembles it from around the world and so think of being able to do that kind of stuff but for other other sour systems like you know um carbon um sequestration or um renewable energy build outs or you know all that kind of stuff so think of um you really think of this as kind of you're a wizard with like magical superpowers and you have to like do the right incantation to then you know cause this massive amount of impact that can scale into the world um I mean it's it's a I'll add on to the the Bitcoin side of this which is the incentive is you get to mine this thing by hashing this math function and then suddenly you have these operations that are consing more power than countries just to get this magic internet money and he's never thought this would kind of make this hundreds of billions of dollars of an industry just because somebody said this is how we think it should work one incentive structure boom like that's that's scale right and so if you can create systems that are that that straightforward and that simple and that scalable um you can move mountains you can totally Change the World um it's just you know it's important to aim for good outcomes right so the Bitcoin example is also shows you that you can accidentally have um bad consequences like the Bitcoin proof of work function doesn't do anything useful just wastes and dissipates energy which like that's not not not good like you can at its best you can maybe say it's like soaking up some excess energy from a grid but in reality um it just massive operations are just wasting energy driving up the price for others and so on so I think considered it pretty harmful now you can use that same incentive structure to produce extremely valuable things right so um in F when we think about it as like creating useful storage out of it um in the refi space you can think of um imagine uh doing a block a block reward struct structure but for carbon sequestration right sequester as much Poss carbon as possible and try to kick off this Global race to to do that um now the devil's in the details here of like making sure that you're creating a good verifiable structure that you're the incentive structures are producing good outcomes um but that's kind of the level of power that you have at your fingertips with this magical engine money and this magical coordination machine that we've all built no and I think one of the more interesting things it's it's one of those ah moment especially as as a developer when you realize that you now have the same toolkit to start a country or a currency or an economic system that just you didn't even realize was possible like we can literally emulate a corporation that behaves like a 100,000 employee company with like 500 lines of cod we can fund real world things without having any real world tied to that capital or or the governance of it and Crea these amazing outcomes just because we can now represent all of that as an economy that's just in code um and that's effectively what we I feel like haven't fully realized that the full power of it and uh and it creates to some really cool and incredible outcomes I do want to talk about some of that um let's talk about how does that get leveraged to make research better in the world yeah so one of the things that I I'm super super excited about is um accelerating the R&D pipeline to produce way better technology for the world and produce way more scientific discoveries uh by using these kinds of incentive structures right so as you saw in the early video like we're very um uh inspired by the potential that we have as as humans and we uh reason that the amount of Science and the amount of technology that we make um is is kind of The Leverage point there and so what can we do to accelerate the R&D pipeline um with these magical superpowers the um so I'll give a a few examples of possible things uh first off uh you can think of funding structures for um the different stages on the R&D pipeline so one of these pieces is like um there isn't a ton of um well first off you can give funding to science so first off you can create Grant structures to fund a lot of scientific work there's many fields that are underserved there's many fields where um the traditional Grant structures are extremely hard to reach um or people scientists around the world that don't have good government governments um investing in in scientific research and it's very difficult for them to access capital from other countries and so you can with um crypto you can create a scientific funding agency um that's Global that really kind of devel uh gives you um funding wherever you are um based on the merits of the work um so you can build like an international agen scientific funding agency then second you can think of the transl sci science translation part of um hey suppose we have some good scientific discoveries how do we make some technologies out of them um usually this is what's known as the value of death where most ideas go to die um because there aren't good funding structures here um governments tend to not fund this stage and this is way too early for VC to to get in um and and invest here because it's like extremely high risk and it tends to be negative um Financial Roi so VC's just cannot invest in this area um the usual thing you hear is like VCS can't invest in science projects and this is sort of what they mean um and so this area Is tragically underfunded there's no good agencies out there that can fund this this piece we could build that crypto structure to do that uh whether it's an agency deploying funding with public goods structures or using other kind of mechanisms and incentive Fields um an example here is that you could go and restructure and reframe how IP Works which is usually the incentive field is supposed to be here or you can com abandon that that kind of incentive field and create a new one um like retro retrospective you can use retrospective funding rewards here uh to reward the work that ended up producing good viable technologies that can be put into products um then you in the capital side of um now funding product development like once you have good technologies that can be put into products um you could lean on the existing VC infrastructure U but that has all kinds of access problems and um biases and so on you could build a new kind of VC structure um with crypto with Crypton native um uh systems and that is much more transparent much more open much more aligned to to the goals and outcomes that the community wants to have so you could have like a a crypto powerered VC infrastructure to support the development of startups and products um in their scaling and you can also do this without Financial RI you can of course have uh funding structures that are public goods oriented that are about achieving those direct outcomes um there's a lot of groups and projects in the in the space thinking of these kinds of um public goods funding infrastructure for for these kinds of projects to scale gitcoin is a good example of of doing this now at pretty large large um scale uh then if you kind of go a little bit um uh deeper into the incentive structures you can even create new sorts of instruments so um you know you can think of currency as fundamentally really valuable Innovation and really valuable technology that we discovered very early on and that ended up powering lots of infrastructure um and lot lots of our Commerce and society and civilization uh you can come up with inventions of that caliber um and in the science field there's a way of doing this with a thing called um impact certificates or or hypers search so if you can kind of think about uh wrapping the credit of of having built something um into a certificate that you can sell that simple Act of bottling the credit and creating a financial instrument that allows you to trade that and transfer that to other people um which is similar to a currency a currency bottles up utility of some of some um actual physical object or some service you know currency bottles that utility and allows it to be traded um you can do that same thing with with the credit of having done something something good and sell that into a market of willing buyers and that gives you a fully um you know a retroactive and and and proactive funding system for for scientific work at massive scale which is super super exciting right like that kind of stuff can um can get built maybe just to kind of have this syn in uh fully what's like a crazy world scenario that you can think of in the in the next 5 to 10 years of these R&D structures kind of just redefining or matching the scale of some existing programs so when you think about the R&D spend in the world uh you can look at uh countries as being the biggest Spenders in in R&D so tons of the technology that you have today traces its roots back to some scientific improvements that got funded by some governments globally and when you look at the scale of the funding there it's kind of in the order of you know tens of billions per per country um at least the big countries I think the US um is spending somewhere in the order of like 60 to 80 billion dollar every year um on research um and this is like non non-defense oriented research the defense oriented that's per week yeah yeah exactly but much larger um and you know China is also very very big there there's lots of countries that that um uh deploy some amounts but when you $60 billion is not that much if you can think of crypto networks what's the market cap of Bitcoin like I don't know somewhere around you know5 to tril yeah like a trillion dollars right so um 60 billion is like six so like 06 so like 6% of that um now if you had 6% sounds like a lot but if Bitcoin becomes 10x more valuable or you know ethereum becomes 10x more valuable 100x a THX more valuable then suddenly that 06 becomes 06 006 and it becomes you know a small amount relative to the emission rate of these currencies and so what one idea that I find extremely fascinating and super compelling is that we could in with blockchains um if we allocate some amount of the token Supply to go to funding broad public goods including science including um R&D then you could have funding for Science and Technology development at the scale of nation states starting with small countries and then eventually getting to the scale of something like the us or China and potentially exceeding it so can you imagine what how the world would be different if suddenly the crypto Community was funding R&D more than the US and China like that that completely changes the world um and that's accessible to us that's only within you know two or three maybe four orders of magnitude of value increase so if and if you look back we've done more than that in the last 10 years so in the next 10 years we can totally we could we could hit this right and so um that's I find that extremely extremely compelling now is that after or before you buy the Constitution through a dow yeah uh get and losers were gonna go fun science well I do want to also talk about non kind of Science and R&D stuff so one kind of common theme Here for ipfs LEP and just fcoin is a better incentive structure for computers and the internet across the world um how do you think about the evolution of of the internet and and what is like a better internet look like yeah uh and this is what got me into crypto in the first place um because I I didn't kind of expect or predict that the the R&D side was going to be able to to be doable with crypto um when you think about the internet uh you have this amazing superpower machine um you think of the internet of this like huge nervous system that connects all of us and we access it through these like you know magical rectangles that um we get to like look into and and touch and so on and speak into and soon enough like think into um and these are like this portal that you can get to access everybody else and organizations and countries and so on and the how that how that internet works how the what the properties of the connectivity actually are like who is allowed to access the internet who is allowed to access the internet how much or where um or um or or whether or not you're like allowed to access specific other people or specific other organizations those properties end up being the difference between having amazing superpowers or not so the internet today gives humans globally this massive leverage point over everything else in their lives most of what we do day-to-day is now Ed by the internet in some way most of what we do is mediated through computers and so the rules of the road like how the system works ends up impacting people at a massive massive scale um and from my perspective this is like this is human rights level important like this is one of the most important things that that you know the UN and Humanity should be worried about like creating good protections for people globally to access this amazing resource and and thereby access each other um to be one of our top priorities can you talk about why there what's not there right now like why do you say that they need protection it's like what's not protected yeah so like imagine you know we've seen some acute cases where um suddenly some people woke up one morning and the internet was on gone uh so this happened in certain countries where there were you know political upheaval um and suddenly one morning the government just shut off the internet can you imagine waking up one day and suddenly can't reach your loved ones you don't know what how they are you you can't access a map you try like getting a car you can't do that anymore you try to access your files none of that works boom like everything is gone like can you think of your personal life right now how much of it is mediated by the internet like this is freaking tragic right like this this is this is a thing that governments probably shouldn't have the power to do anymore um and today like it the the internet is built on a series of contracts and policies that groups agree on and that can totally happen in a bunch of places and that's a very acute example it happens in a lot smaller cases lots of countries are starting to deploy you know social Credit Systems where they track what you do and what you say and so on and if you say the wrong thing about their the government if you disagree uh too loudly then your access to the to Services starts getting cut off um you know suddenly you you uh you can wonder why people don't say bad things about the government when you know if you do that you can't use the train you can't travel you can't um see your friends and see your family or or potentially you're CAU off from those from the social networks entirely right like that's the level of power that some governments are now getting through the Computing infrastructure and so it's really critical that we change how the internet works here that we bake in uh strong security and protections for human rights directly in the network layer right so one approach is to you could wait until the UN and a bunch of countries decide to um you know realize that this is important and therefore curtail everyone's Powers which is close to guaranteed never going to happen um you know never say never but like very unlikely or you can just build safer stronger systems and deploy them um the way that the the future is defined is by the builders creating the Technologies and deploying them at scale that often has way more impact than um governments deciding to shift it in One Direction or another um and so you can with web3 and with crypto um create a dramatically safer and better infrastructure for the world you can create systems that are censorship resistant you can create systems that are privacy oriented that that protect your ability to interconnect and talk to other people that protect protect your ability to reach your loved ones um and eventually that protect your ability of actually connecting right so today with filecoin we have a massive scale storage Network that is you know significantly sensorship resistant you can deploy um uh applications through it and and that way you can uh prevent some shut off but you're still having to connect to that through you know your cell network or your home um uh connection and so on we can build crypto powerered um uh inter isps right uh helium is an example of one of these like you have a crypto powered ISP already providing um local local connectivity we can build many of these and scale them you can even build a satellite Network right so starlink is pretty cool you we have a satellite uh constellation providing internet access which is an amazing achievement like that's super super awesome but it's controlled by one company and one country so if your if your community is like not in their priority list like you you could find yourself like cut off from that connectivity so we should have a decentralized Humanity first oriented satellite Network and you can build that with a crypto we could start shipping satellites and power that ISP with uh with crypto so like that's a level of power here once you build something like that um you can bring connectivity to the whole world without having to ask for for permission or or um allowing attackers to to um you know infringe on people's rights globally so from my perspective you can build a human rights preserving um internet infrastructure by building the infrastructure um with with verifiability and with decentralization in in the in the bottom I think that is like it sounds crazy but that is actually the case like people are like well are you telling me that I can go launch a satellite on my own and try to give internet to people yes you can yeah you can we've done it crypto is a is a a start yes and they also run Dogecoin onless some mistake there's a Dogecoin server on in space yeah um yeah so in fact some of the hacks that we've done through eth Global included Dr which you know has NOS in that satellite um so yeah you you can go ship a satellite into into space a it's not that expensive um B you can raise the money for it C you can build you know human rights preserving infrastructure so go do that yeah and you can do that now it's not a in the future we'll be able to do this it's all these tools are actually handy to us and and that to me is the the actual incredible part of the power you get from cryptography now being more accessible to people and all these economic incentives that make building the future a lot more exciting yep well ju thank you so much for this amazing conversation and hopefully you all get to ask him some questions later on outside at the audience uh after the next talk um yeah yeah I will take no questions while there are talks going on so don't even try all right please give Juan a big round of applause thank [Applause] you