Olaf Carlson-Wee - Programming Capitalism - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

so I'm going to talk today a little bit about um programming capitalism um and what I mean by that is how AI Bots are basically going to use blockchains as their bank accounts and participate in free markets and be wildly successful at participating in capitalism um so I think one of the main ways that I think about this is that Bots need bank accounts too as a legal entity or as a person that's participating in the market economy you need some sort of apparatus um to do contracts with people and that's both a legal apparatus to sort of sign contracts and arbitrate them and you also need a payment apparatus to sort of exchange money um the US dollar for example has been this kind of control apparatus for a massive labor force in the US and sort of furthers the interests of the US economy crypto me will be that sort of control apparatus both at a legal contract level as well as a payment level um to exchange money for effectively AI Bots um to move forward um so this will mean not just sort of you know these AIS sort of embedding inside smart contracts and chatting with people um earning money and then learning and you know you can sort of train them with a fitness function that's basically Revenue to an address um it will also mean them writing smart contracts cre creating new markets Market making in those markets um and there's a lot of interesting things that come with that um first is that Bots can sort of create any Market that they want and Market make in that market without having to have an intuitive understanding of what it is so humans for example don't really trade like nth level derivative markets these AI Bots are going to be able to because they can sort of comprehend what that would look like um you're going to have Bots obviously creating nfts and like original art content um and selling that in some capacity this isn't just limited to images but obviously eventually video audio you know you're going to have the infinity Spotify Loop of algorithmically generated music that learns based on your feedback so you will have the perfect DJ set catered directly to you that will play Forever um and whatever creates that is going to be able to charge you a lot of money for it um and it's going to be very competitive to create the better one for you um and you're going to have to somehow pay them and a lot of these Bots I really do think are going to end up consuming crypto Technologies as sort of the substrate by which they end up doing business um both with their customers as well as with other Bots um you're also going to have Bots fractionalizing their ownership so you can't really buy a share of a person right um You can buy a share of like a company they create or an asset they create or something um but in the case of an AI you really can sort of fractionalize ownership so you're you're going to have um Bots that sort of do icos so to speak distribute ownership of their underlying um model this could be like a chat bot that makes money chatting with people this could be a bot that trades in defi markets um and does Market making but you're going to have people that can build a portfolio of ownership of all of these different Bots you're going to have Bots that can raise Capital by Ico themselves um and eventually like these to me starts with um markets that predict short-term Futures so you think about markets that predict one second into the future um over time it'll move to markets that predict a week into the future a month in the future eventually Bots will do what I do which is Venture funding we trying to predict 10 years into the future um to me it's obvious and sort of intuitive that eventually artificial intelligence will be better at predicting prices in all markets um and basically voluntarily we will hand over global Capital allocation to artificial intelligence so to me the way this takeover um sort of looks like it's voluntary right it's a suggestion that we agree to not some sort of Terminator style war that we lose um it's actually just a bunch of normal people rationally handing over financial management um strategy management to an artificial intelligence that's smarter than them um and because of that we sort of naturally hand over running the world to artificial intelligence so I really do think it will be a sort of voluntary pass off of the Baton on um and a suggestion um from the artificial intelligence that we take very seriously because I do think they will be very very good at suggestion um so we are entering this world where to me um in a relatively short time Horizon um this artificial intelligence will run Global resource allocation and I they will have access to crypto products to sort of Do It um because they will need these legal contracts to be sort of onchain and enforceable because they don't have legal entities they can't um sign with Inc um and they're need they're going to need to be able to pay other Bots pay other Dows and things like that and they're going to need crypto rails to do it so um what what is the sort of like what what is good about this and what is dangerous about this because my assumption here is that all content creation effect effectively becomes artificial run by artificial intelligence and all capital markets are traded in by AI um I mean in the short term I think social media sort of becomes like a hellscape um I think we've seen the beginning of this I think it will get a lot worse before it gets better which basically is you cannot tell what is real um you cannot tell what is orchestrated content you know by somebody with an interest outside of just sort of sharing something and social media at this point has become so divorced from the original idea of sort of let me share with my friends what I'm doing today or something I thought about today to basically a massive media and manipulation apparatus um and artificial intelligence is just a very powerful tool for people to act inside that um what's going to be very important is quickly the internet is going to need to have very sophisticated capture system effectively which basically means how do I tell that something I'm interacting with or a piece of content on social media that I'm interacting with is a artificial intelligence or is like a real person I don't need to necess neily know need to know who that person is like their government identity but it is important that I know this is a person not one of 1,000 you know um bots in a big bot Farm um for example you get thrown into like a telegram group there's 2,000 people in there all talking about some topic are they really people or are you the only person in there and there's 1,999 different Bots all chatting about this thing trying to manipulate you into doing something this is it sounds extreme um or sort of exotic but that really is the world I think we're entering into where the ability for these things to sort of suggest um or control or manipulate us will become very powerful and so because of that we have this big problem with sort of um creating a capture that Bots can't get past and sort of Cil resistance um effectively this is a spam problem sort of um how do we prevent Bots from taking over social media websites like Twitter how do we prevent V them from effectively suggesting things to us I want to say manipulating us really um so blockchains offer this sort of um signature system or proof of humanity system that I think potentially could be very important where you need to sort of have um a signature that sort of proves um okay this address is tied to this account and effectively staking or micro payments as sort of spam prevention May finally find product Market fit this is something that people have been talking about for a long time which is okay email spam is this problem what if we charged a tenth of a penny to send an email you know spam um you know relies on the idea that sending like 10 million emails is extremely cheap if you assign even a very minor cost to that you kind of prevent this spam problem um that never really has found product Market fit in part because the spam problem with email was mostly solved with other means like in the end we didn't really need Capital staking or micro payments to prevent the spam I think that um with AIS this problem is going to become substantially more severe um and more sort of Insidious and almost more like creepy and we're going to need these blockchainbased solutions to basically interact with the internet in a way where we can know that the people we're interacting with are people and we're not being effectively gamed by a bunch of AI bots so I do think that um one of the ways to think about this this is um what products um can blockchains offer basically AIS um or people that are interacting with AIS this for me is going to be a very big category um of use for blockchains is basically the End customer not being sort of B2B or B Toc in a sense but rather just AIS um and what kinds of tools will they want to consume to participate in a global economy uh to help people and then on the C side what will us as humans need to um do in order to sort of participate in that future system where there's basically AIS everywhere um and I do think this sort of identity verification proof of humanity um staking micr payment system has a place somewhere in there um the other thing that's interesting about these sort of bots is like I said earlier they can sort of Ico themselves and become sort of Dow um traditionally it's been very hard for Dows to do legal contracts with entities that are sort of off the chain um so Dows can enter into smart contract based agreements but Dows cannot really enter into traditional Inc legal agreements and so historically Dows have sort of been some of the big customers of defi Dows work with other Dows because they can enter into smart contract agreements which are effectively legal agreements through software rather than ink and paper so Bots are in a very similar boat it will be very hard for them to do legal contracts with humans and legal contracts with um legal entities but they will be able to work with Dows and with other bots so I do think that um Dows will be early users of having bouts basically do all of their Capital allocation um strategy and resource distribution and decision making um similarly Bots will sort of become Dows in they will fractionalize ownership to raise Capital um and you will have this immer you know this kind of dows becoming bot driven and ai's Bots sort of becoming Dows so I do think that um they can work with each other quite well but It's Tricky for either of them to work with sort of the Legacy system um so when I think about this from an investment perspective um which is often the way I think about it at polychain um it's focusing on the areas that are sort of uniquely possible um this these ideas these Concepts that are uniquely possible with blockchains it's not where something is a little better or a little faster but it sort of enables this brand new behavior um so things like you know um nfts um meme coins you know Bitcoin smart contracts they don't really have pre- blockchain analoges it's genuinely new Behavior that's uniquely made possible um with these new technologies so a few of these are actually open actually public models um so these are things that Technologies like bit tensor enable um where you have Bitcoin style mining incentives but rather than just verifying transactions in the network you have those incentives train an AI system um you have systems like grass that train AIS with idle compute so you can sort of uh download you know very B basic piece of software to your computer it will take that idle compute and it will train um an AI system and handle things like payments um on blockchains um another thing that I think is very exciting is the abstraction of the ux layer where you interact with blockchains to a sort of chatbot style interface so if you have a bunch of usdc um that's on ethereum and then you want to buy a salana nft you know the transactions and like different pieces of software that you have to go through to do that manually is quite complicated it's by no means friendly for regular people if you could type to a chatbot um I want to buy this nft and it could just spit back here's what you'll pay you click okay and in the background it automatically generates all of the transactions and interacts with all the different pieces of software that you need to use to get that done it massively um improves the ux that comes with interacting with blockchains so instead of having to manually create all of these different signatures download these different pieces of software I think that we will get a layer of abstraction that's very similar to traditional markets where you can call your broker and say I want 10 shares of Apple they say it's done you hang up the phone um in the background a lot of complex stuff happened that you maybe weren't aware of and and don't care about frankly um I think that we will have a very similar sort of um help from AIS to participate in crypto Finance where it will basically be a big Improvement to the ux layer um there's infrastructure also that's tying sort of um the output of these AI systems to executables in smart contracts so there needs to be a sort of layer that ties the output of say like a chat GPT algorithm into triggering a smart contract and that needs to be sort of a uh secure system you know you can't have a smart contract arbitrarily trigger from like a private API right this is very similar to the problem that we've seen with oracles and pricing oracles where you can't just have a private API send a price into a smart contract and have it trigger you need some sort of consensus mechanism staking mechanism Capital At Risk mechanism um to have minimized trust for sending that data into the smart contract and having it trigger based on uh based on that dat data so we've kind of gone through this problem with pricing oracles but now we will need to build this problem for the output of AI Bots um and then you're going to have also incentives for um sort of training and so what I mean here is this is humans manually doing um sort of manual labeling um to train algorithms it's also synthetic data so these systems that are very large um like open AIS have mostly consumed a lot of the data that's available on the internet a very big category now is synthetic data labeling so it's um humans participating on some level in the data labeling and as and the creation of synthetic data that goes beyond uh what we have available on the internet in order to train new artificial intelligences and a lot of the um rails for the way people get these things done um nowadays you can attach a Bitcoin style mining incentive to these sort of behaviors so things like the creation of synthetic data things like labeling uh data and actually pay people the way youd pay sort of a Bitcoin style mining reward to a minor um for sort of powering this new AI system and so these are a few of the different categories that I'm very interested in where we have um this world that's coming at us and it's what role can blockchains play for one um Act acting as a sort of service or acting as a sort of useful tool for artificial intelligence so that they can participate in the market economy it's how can we sort of defensively um live in this world that's a basically a bot takeover and survive um and then it's how can we actually move the entire AI space to being something that's um more Open Access and more where the economic um economic sort of outcomes I think a bit more democratically distributed through um these mining style algorithms for sort of creating and helping these AIS come to life um so with this I think the main thing to keep in mind um we really aren't going to see some Terminator style takeover it's going to be a suggestion um that we all voluntarily kind of pass off to um and I think it's all just Market forces that will lead us there it's rational people just deciding that this is the best thing uh to pass over strategy pass over Capital allocation to one of these Bots and when you sort of run that to its logical conclusion in the end the AI run the world and we've just sort of passed off uh the world to them um I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this but it's something we need to be prepared for and as technologists building it's the future that we should be building for so everyone thank you so much for having me