2. Network Goods- Purpose, Brief History, Looking Ahead - Lisbon 2022

it's been a huge lift and it's fantastic to be here um I have I think about 40 slides that I'm going to get through in about 15 minutes so this is going to be uh a little bit update of like who we are what we do and then a lot of just like random interesting things that I think should be uh like generally compelling interesting takes on what it is that I would like to see more of at Fund in the Commons and why I'm targeting those specific things um one quick logistical note before I get started uh Ben there is a timer for a minute 40 here Ben uh there's a minute timer for a minute 40 here if I could update to make sure I don't run too long um going to keep this to 15 minutes um so protocol ABS you if you're here you probably know what protocol ABS is we're driving breakthroughs and Computing to move Humanity forward and you probably no us for one of these many projects the network Goods team is not a team that works directly on any of these things we are focused as Ben said on engineering tools and opportunities for revolutionary coordination systems and within that team there are three large sub teams one of which is focused primarily on revolutionary revolutionizing research systems the systems that generate knowledge for us um I guess I should mention the motivation behind the name Network Goods comes from the fact that uh we find that public goods and Commons with their very precise economic definitions don't often capture the kinds of things that we in the world need from groups of humans coming together forming communities or networks and the term for any good that arises in the context of a network is a network good and so we have the team that focuses on network Goods our logo is meant to be uh evocative of both a depth chart and an RJ45 connector um which I derive great joy from and most people probably just ignore um Network research revolutionizing research systems Network Funding focused on making sure that systems that have or want to Foster these uh Network Goods can do so effectively can fund these systems and we also have a team research acceleration and I'm realizing some of this is getting cut off a bit uh that drives various uh requests for proposals programs grants bounties advisor sponsor for the protocol ABS Network at large is building expertise in running and deploying these programs in order to provide that expert back into the kinds of program development the other teams do um that is pretty much all I'm saying about the the teams themselves I want to emphasize a bit more and dig into coordination systems what do we mean when we say revolutionary coordination systems I would say that uh I'm using this in a very generalized abstract way and I would as as I was I I would inspire you to think about a bunch of these different systems that Humanity has as examples of things that were at one point kind of an invention like maybe it wasn't like one day it didn't exist and the next day it did but over time you could see that we went through qualitative shifts where like at some point there were not democracies and at one point like some later point there were um you have coordination tools to help people decide on goals um and ex like State and effectively communicate what those goals are whether that is the emergence of the corporate form or anything down to things like uh labor unions of the Sittin we have coordination tools to collectively build things like uh metric system I I shouldn't just read this slide um we have many of these types of things and the only reason that we don't have more of the or one of the one of the reasons that I think is most interesting as to why I would claim we don't have more of these is that we don't think about going out and explicitly building new ones um usually when you end up with something like this you're trying to solve a specific problem that isn't build a like a Humanity skill coordination system and it's always really interesting to live in a world where something like the internet or Bitcoin shows up as one of these new things that you can do and I would put uh automated market makers on roughly the same scale because it does seem to have similar potential impact on humanity and I will uh not claim that this is at all exhaustive but I would encourage you to go about your days and try to identify more of these systems because it's really interesting to see where they they show up um coordination systems are really important and growing in importance recently because I think that we should all expect unfathomable roughly unfathomable technological Pro progress in the next decade or two um there are some fairly obvious trends that you might be able to extrapolate from but uh there are other things that you can predict based on technological Trends combined with Fiction it's uh worth noting that Jules Vern predicted a lot of the future but uh so did George Orwell um I don't think that I think it's really flashy to look at things like a metaverse and not miss over the fact that to uh millions of people they use faceb Facebook and WhatsApp and don't realize or don't attest to using the internet and you could imagine that something like that could happen for something like an immersive 3D virtual world and this should be vaguely terrifying um similarly you can apparently reconstruct images from uh people see like human sees image fmri measures neural activity sends it through a um deep Learning System and you can reconstruct the image from that head apparently this is something that has been possible not great but I expect this technology will only get better with uh maybe some fundamental limits that we probably aren't that close to uh and like we also have like very clear technological progress toward AI systems that are consistently outc competing human creativity in things where we have scoped metrics for what success looks like and all of these Trends should combine to make it very clear that things might not go as well as we might hope uh that said it's very interesting to note that all of these downside possible outcomes arise from people not coordinating well enough to explain what they want and build the future that they want to have I liken this to sleep walking toward dystopia where uh I I love this quote that U misunderstands and lethargy produce more produ perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and Malice do at least the latter two are certainly rarer um this is a refor this later got reformulated to never ascribe to it uh malice that which can be explained with stupidity um but I think that this is a more charitable take that I like more people often follow things that seem like the best choice or the only choice or the obvious choice and what we don't realize is that the space of possible choices is I think uncountably infinite or at least I would argue uncountably infinite and as a result people are often in these immersive Community Systems as much a victim to the situation as they are as complicit in the general case I'm not arguing that for an individual any given individual but I feel like um there is some amount of like everyone opting into systems to some extent when like people used to have like violent overthrows of the government and we don't really have that anymore and it's not clear if that would be useful in some instances that's probably not a good direction to go in um I really do like this uh this kind of uh framing of no single rain drop feels responsible for the flood no snowflake feels responsible for the Avalanche you're not stuck in traffic you are traffic um we can though coordinate better we can have better outcomes and I think part of the claim for funding the commons is that we can achieve those better outcomes with better coordination systems and we can achieve better coordination systems with better tools and practices these practices are just things that you should get in the habit of doing things that we should try to build tools to make very easy and delightful to use um I feel like I remember uh being a fairly early adopter of venmo and loving how convenient it made handling money when you didn't have cash on you and I feel like there are so many types of things that should be that trivial but because someone hasn't thought oh this would be a valuable thing to make we should have better tools for coordination we don't end up seeing things like that and so if you if you saw the world and said I want to make things radically better you might ask how you might think about this this is probably uh this blog post is probably the link that I have shared more than any other Link in my life um it this is a particular table from this blog post complex systems researcher jelle Meadows wrote uh this blog post which became the penultimate chapter in the book thinking in systems and it lists in increasing order of Effectiveness how you might think about changing a system um to change its General Behavior or outcome and part of what funding the commons aims to do is get people to look at the systems around them think about how all of the participants in the systems or at least most of the participants in those systems would want it to behave and then find the kind of change like modifying the structure of information flows or um change evolve or self-organize the structure of that system and I guess part of the goal of funding the commons is to it create a mindset or Paradigm for the system of humanity of like we should have focus on changing systems building new systems we should have we should push into the Zeitgeist this sense of uh like I think when I I feel like when I was in college there was the thought of if you want to change the world create a startup build a product sell the product and you can use that to fix any major problem and I think that is an interesting and highly empowering framing largely because it kind of gives you a recipe or a path to follow and I think that this is also a similarly effective path build tools to help people do like like accomplish sh shed goals together better and if you do that in a scalable way you can lead people to pursuing that um in the next five minutes I would like to push through a slide change and um five very interesting directions these are not representative of what I think the future of funding the commons should be these are five directions where I would like to additionally add content or provocative thoughts um to get you to think about this it's going to be roughly 1 minute each so strap in um start off starting off with macro cryptoeconomics I feel like people when they think about cryptoeconomics think about it in terms of uh microeconomics and I would love to see more experimental uh I guess more experiments generally in cryptoeconomic systems you can see this in massive multiplayer online games but um and I will note that I don't know enough about Kian economics to steal man it so I'm not going to stand up here and straw man it but I would love to see people start explaining what experiments they could run or should run in some of these crypto systems to see the efficacy of various theories various decisions and if you have a talk or know someone who would be interested in giving a talk about this kind of thing uh out of funding the commons please let me know uh one of the basic takes of modern monetary theory is that the national debt is or could be framed as a claim on future mented tokens um I think that from a crypto perspective this seems far more intuitive than if you think about it from a nation state perspective um so I would consider I would urge you to look at some of this with an open mind um I do think that there are things like the ultrasound money meme from ethereum where if you look at this from like a classical economic perspective you'll see like you would you'd see that like decreasing supply of money is not necessarily a good thing if you treat tokens as stock and not as currency then you might end up thinking that this seems like a really good idea but I would love to entertain a discussion or debate about um whether or not it's really a good thing that you can profit from just doing nothing and sitting on your eth um I'm very interested into hearing more about like I I would entertain talks that would push back against this and talks that would go into more depth in favor of the idea that ultrasound money and a deflationary currency obviously an inflation a highly inflationary currency is not great but deflection one is not great either um I'm also very interested in the idea of everyday governance tools I mentioned this previously um oh those emojis did not render in PowerPoint that's interesting um social Choice Theory maybe Alice prefers some things over other things Bob prefers different things and there is a design decision that has to be made when you try to aggregate preferences um that question is how you aggregate them you could do it based on um equal waiting you could do it based based on the amount of money or tokens they have or the number of CPUs they have but you basically have to pick some function and then something to optimize that metric and uh I will note that if you want to if you're worried about existential risk from AI getting an AI to figure out what a good way to maximize that metric is or identify what a combination function could be becomes a very interesting AI alignment problem and if you or someone you know has interesting directions to work on for this please apply for Grant at grants. protocol. a rfx I'd be very interested to read those um there are tools for trying to maximize those metrics liquid democracy is very compelling would definitely recommend reading about that and rank Choice voting if you haven't heard it um I also haven't seen toolings for either of those or um Macy this uh what I think is a cryptographic solution to a lot of online voting problems and I'd love to see tools like this built if you build them come to come present them fun in the comments um we also have a uh right now have a YouTube show with dearth about governance tooling why it matters context that you might want or need for funding the common so if you want to recruit your friends and they come watch one of these talks and they say oh I don't know what social Choice theory is or like what is um what is the principal agent problem then this should be a resource to get people up to speed um continuing at behind time um I think that it would be interesting to move code in the courtroom uh smart contracts are great but they are everything that's difficult about law and everything that's difficult about computer science at the moment I incubated this project for a bit um it's a very interesting talk about how you could take contracts legal contracts and reference code from them reference smart contracts of the states of decentralized databases and use that to inform the legal contract in a way that you could take it to court if the contract or if the contract got hacked and I think that this is like a very interesting compelling thing to connect corporate forms that the government understands to uh blockchain forms that can be highly computable and uh Dynamic I think it would also be interesting to move courts into the blockchain where um I claim that information is code manipulates information in the same way that law is the best system we've developed for describing and manipulating and controlling the flow of human actions and uh if men were angels we wouldn't need government uh Federalist Papers uh the difficulty with government is that it has to control the people and you have to also have control itself and we don't really have anything like checks and balances in blockchains and I think that it would be really interesting to start designing some of those systems and present on them at funding the commons sound like a broken record now but it seems worth reting we see these systems that uh represent People based on the number of tokens they have the number of CPUs they have and I think it would be interesting to have systems where the governance is more explicit I could have equally put up a picture of the um the blog post tyranny of the unru tyranny of structurelessness here here for this um I think that there might be a missing piece that is uh trusted humans adjudicating outcomes um last up better intellectual property we recently ran this Workshop um protocol ABS did U I would point out these two talks in particular where you have uh novel ways that you could change existing intellectual property structures to allow radically better collaboration between people um I think it's worth highlighting all of these ideas I think are kind of at least heterodox INF Fringe um I feel comfortable talking about them at this venue because I think that if you're here we all want a better out we all want better coordination systems for Humanity we all are generally aligned on what a good outcome is um if you haven't come across the idea of adversarial collaboration it's setting up a like identifying two people who disagree identifying a third person who can run an experiment that will that both parties agree will inform the other on whether or not their theory is correct um or be willing to admit that their theory has at least holes if not flaws and I would love to run adversarial collaborations around some of these ideas so if you agree or disagree um come talk to me about either of these and generally let's collaborate potentially directly potentially adversarially and here's some of the links to projects that we have other than that um I will happily yield the minus minute 2 minute 2 and a half minutes I have to Matt freck the head of network funding oh