Ben Goertzel & Charles Hoskinson On Decentralizing Social Media

[Music] all right pleasure uh pleasure to be chatting uh once more charles and i i thought it would be it'll be amazing to have a sort of uh on-air discussion on the topic that's been in so many people's minds uh recently which which is uh you know the perhaps critical importance of decentralization for uh no social media and and social networks because this is something we've both been thinking about deeply for quite a long time and have been both moving toward action on for quite a long time in our our own ways maybe the ai spin and and and you with with cardo and blockchain but now now things seem to be coming to a head and the the world seems to suddenly be concerned that a few large corporations are programming everyone's brains and bizarre and nefarious ways so yeah maybe be cool to start out just by hearing your your overview of the topic yeah it's it's an interesting situation so i'm kind of conflicted you know so i'm a big libertarian and you know the libertarian guys say hey let the market decide so you know when someone gets the platform we say hey you know it's a private company they can do whatever they want but the issue is collusion uh and so the the watershed moment for me wasn't the platforming of trump i said yeah okay the guy violated the end user license agreement probably nine million times at some point you gotta throw the guy out the issue was the deep platforming of parlor because that was a very different animal so the whole argument was well if you don't like twitter go compete with it build your own social network that's exactly what parlor did they had different moderation standards but then what occurred was that all of silicon valley got together and they colluded and they basically jointly decided to completely to platform parlor so amazon took them down apple took them down google took them down and if you're put in a market position where 100 of the mobile market and most web market is basically blacklisting you and you have no way to be on a cell phone for an average consumer no way to to have a website for an average consumer without going to extraordinary lengths and it's almost like the pirate bay you have to host servers and in afghanistan or something to to escape it uh that's that's very problematic it feels like uh standard oil controlling the shipping prices of oil back in the 19th century and the appeals to ethics seems so disingenuous right it's like you can you can search q and on garbage on google just fine so then why is it so unethical for there to be queuing on garbage on on on parlor as some of the content right right it's the idea that these big tech companies are acting out of sort of a moral necessity to save everyone's lives i mean it it rings very hollow right and i mean no doubt some people in those companies really really are are thinking that way but the right the alignment of this these marginal ethical arguments with like obvious corporate like profit interest as being advanced by apparent like explicit or explicit collusion among these big players i mean yeah it makes it hard to take the ethical aspect 100 seriously it's almost become like an ethical tautology in a certain respect there they say don't be evil except for the times you have to be you know it's it's uh it's a crazy crazy statement where these companies uh say well we're trying to be moral and i said okay but no one elected you and why are you guys in charge of the totality and curation flow of all of information and i very firmly believe what needs to happen is we need to split the protocols that carry the information from the interfaces that curate that information and that feels to be a much more natural thing the the problem we have right now is the the stack is vertically completely controlled by a company so google doesn't just curate what you see in the search engine they also control the underlying engine and so as a consequence they can make a decision on pretty much anything and and exclude people unilaterally and it's the same for the app as it's staying for the social networks and the level of collusion is very problematic i mean you can't tell me that they didn't talk to each other if they all deplatform someone the same day in the same hour it'd be one thing if it was a gradual process where maybe google and two weeks later amazon and something like that but if it's all exactly at the same time then it means they picked up the phone and they call each other and say well we just decided that this is no good for you um the problem is that the centralization doesn't solve the underlying problem that they're complaining about which is radicalization you know the the issue is that the way information is being presented is it's it's been it's manipulating our cognitive biases you know we're creatures of cognitive biases no matter how smart we are we have availability bias and selection bias and confirmation biases and there's hundreds of them and social scientists and psychologists and neuroscientists they think about these things and quantify them and if you digitize those biases and you build algorithms to exploit them then what ends up happening is you create echo chambers so you create these silos each in every one of those silos they are incapable of of of getting out of it there's no idea flow between them so all you do when you decentralize that if you don't solve that underlying problem is you make the silos more resilient you're not gonna you know i mean there's there's a problem when you're applying ai's to learn to win in games or video games which is both a problem and a benefit is that you know the ai will learn to do what you asked it to do so like if you're asking it to get maximum points in this game and there's a way to do it by like hacking around the rules of the game in some in some weird way no human would ever think of like the the ai will explore various options and if it's working well we'll find some route to achieve the objective function you wanted without taking into account whatever implicit constraints you had about like what's the artful artful way to do it um i think something similar exists with uh social media companies i mean they have they have a certain they have certain metrics and objectives they're working toward often very very systematically internally right i mean they want people to be looking at their site as as as as long as possible for example or they want them to be spending as much as possible clicking on ads and they'll put a lot of human and algorithmic effort into optimizing toward that goal and then we can't be very surprised that you know these groups of brilliant people making cool software build systems that that are optimizing toward that goal like via whatever hacks they can find and those hacks include exploiting human cognitive biases as you noted and and exploiting you know dynamics of of addiction in in the human brain and all sorts of human emotional patterns exporting human angst and then desperation and existential confusion and i mean the the algorithms and the corporate systems will exploit whatever they can to achieve the the goals they're given and as you say it's organized so that these sort of corporate organisms which are now sort of hybrid human and digital computing process organisms like these corporate organisms are almost like a parasite on on modern society and they're they're achieving their own goal pretty pretty effectively but that's if you took a bird's-eye view of human society and where we want to be and where we want to go during the next few years it may be leading towards the singularity and creation of agi and all that like right a situation where these corporate human slash computer networks oriented toward maximizing shareholder value by getting you to buy stuff online and start their website as long as possible i mean these sorts of organizations having that much power is not the optimal dynamic for shaping like the collective mind heart and soul of humanity right i mean i mean it's it's it's pretty far off from where we want to be and you'd imagine that like extremism and soloing and tribalism which we're seeing online and in real life you know i think that's probably only scratching the surface of the screwed up patterns that are being fostered like that that's a surface layer where it's easy to see how screwed up it is and then and there's so many other screwed up like individual and collective dynamics that that are happening you know i wouldn't say all caused by this organization of social media on the tech industry but certainly co-evolving with it and co-dependent right well you know it's an interesting thing so i i tend to agree with max tegmark in this respect where you invent the car first and then you invent the safety build with new technology or new processes there's a lack of wisdom in the uh safety components of it until after you've suffered the consequences so we looked at the oil and gas industry in the 19th century they started drilling all these wells and only after they started doing that did we start thinking about environmentalism and we said well maybe that it's not such a good idea just to have unrestricted oil well drilling maybe we need to think carefully about what this is actually doing to the environment well the oil of the 21st century is really the attention economy and the data economy and we have all this surveillance capitalism and we have all these early pioneering firms and they're effectively mining that and they're creating a kind of a social environmental damage by this process to use an analogy where these these algorithms are built and these platforms are built away to exacerbate human nature so to your point that they didn't cause it but i'd certainly say that they're they're exacerbating it and they're part of the process of its growth absolutely and i mean i think i always think of everything in human society from sort of the the end game of legacy humanity like we're working on creating agi if we can create a benevolent agi i mean this is is gonna make our current problems seem sort of archaic and silly of course things won't be perfect there will be new problems we can't imagine now but this is certainly a you know the biggest threshold event in in the history of humanity perhaps of life on earth right we could be a few decades from that even less i mean as very occurs while others have argued but if there's even a decent odds that this singularitarian view is is true i mean then how the collective mind of humanity is shaped is insanely important right because the the first agi probably isn't going to be just like a superhuman supermind in a box totally separate from human society the way things are going it's it's more likely you know to come out of the interaction of multiple different ai components made by made by multiple parties serving you know useful economic functions in in in the world at large so if the first agi which sort of triggers this singularity is is coming out of the whole mess of the tech ecosystem and people using technology to do useful things i mean then then how how messy that mess is is an extremely important thing and that right right now the direction does not look like the internet ai tech ecosystem is evolving in a great configuration for spawning a benevolent super agi like 5 10 or 20 years from now right maybe some redirection if if you know some of the sub networks in there like the ones we're involved with could affect it some redirection would be highly beneficial well the problem with agi is that's kind of like the deus ex machina situation where you you're saying well we could solve this problem if we have this insanely powerful tool and it's like well yeah but maybe we don't actually need a tool that powerful to make meaningful progress towards this uh this problem i i think decentralized social networks you you don't you don't need agi absolutely not you can do a lot with blockchain networks interoperating with their so i think an ai solution does provide a lot of value but i look at it more like a cognitive crutch so if if you injure your leg you know you get on crutches or you walk with a cane or something like that i recently had a gout attack and for two weeks i was on a cane so you know it's kind of funny we physically think about this but for the mental stuff we don't really think we need it we say oh our brains are perfectly well for functions like no we're dopamine addicts we're constantly manipulated by digital devices and uh we're we're in in a situation where we're not acting rationally or objectively most of the time we're we lack root access to our our hardware and software exactly exactly fix the bugs in a direct way and so the question is you know what would be the simplest possible agent intelligent agent that could be constructed that can act as a cognitive crutch to alert us if we are being manipulated or our behavior is exhibiting patterns that have looked like they've been propagandized that that feels like it would be a massive step forward and right now now we're getting at some of this stuff that i'm i'm hoping we will be able to build together with the singularity that on on the cardona network over the next few years i mean if you look if you look at intelligent virtual assistants now like an alexa or or google assistant i mean a these things are very stupid in in many senses right i mean i mean like i have a google home max i used to play music in my house and it you know it it it still hasn't realized like i never listened to music music with vocals during the day i mean it doesn't have that metadata there it hasn't recognized that that very simple pattern so repeatedly it throws stuff me i won't listen to and it's not even able to understand extremely simple repeated patterns in human behavior which would help them make more money even by showing me more stuff i want to listen to right so these these systems are optimized very narrowly to serve certain functions and their their functions certainly are are not to help us navigate you know the the universe of the internet in media in a way that's optimal for our own growth and self-understanding achieving our own goals and you know optimizing the collective intelligence of humanity very very far from it so what one could envision a sort of personal assistant that had a bit more general intelligence so it understood at least a little bit of what we actually want and are doing but also was not controlled by a mega corporation with the primary goal of making them money but was was controlled by us who are being assisted by the by the personal assistant right i mean i don't want a human personal assistant working for me helping me do things whose main goal is to make some other corporation money right you i want a human personal assistant working for me whose goal is to help me because i because i hired them to help me right and we should we should have we should have digital assistants like that and they're going to be building machine learning models of everything we're doing like a human assistant builds their own biological model of what their employer is doing and we should be able to even better than with a human assistant we should be able to explicitly inspect like what is that model and edit and and correct it if we didn't like it and delete that model if we want to right so i mean we need we need among other things we need intelligent virtual agents to help guide our navigation of the whole internet information sphere which are secure and decentralized and explainable to us and the thing is we we can do that without agi we can do that with technology we have right now and this technology can help along the path toward agi where do we get the training data from that that was the one thing i was thinking about is like how do how do i train an agent like that to actually i mean it's going into these devices that we use all day right so the training the training day that google and amazon and so forth are using where does it come from like it it comes from all of us it's and in principle like you can you can download most of a lot of what google is basing its training data about a view on but but very few of us are doing it we're not using it right so i mean clearly you need the you need all the data that you're using to interact with devices and with with people all day i mean you need you need that data to be in a secure data wallet that's owned and and controlled by you where your confidence being managed and secure and trustable deeper i i mean it's not just interaction used you'd have to clearly show an example of confirmation bias to an extent that an ml model would be able to understand that and so how do you do that in an unsupervised way and unless we show it all the time right and then and i mean if if the ai has a view of a lot of a lot of people i mean even even those of us who are uh especially clever in in some ways and are basically like human social emotional interactions there there's a lot that we do which is the same as a lot a lot of other people are doing right like in how you interact with an employee versus you know a romantic partner or a friend or someone who's arguing with you i mean i think i think the sort of dialogue meta games and the inner dialogue meta games that people are playing they're within the scope of current advanced narrow ai tech to recognize it's just that's not what's being focused on what's being focused on is recognizing subtle patterns and who's going to click on what's ad instead right i mean you don't need to tell that to predict who's going to click on what's ad in the most concise and effective way of yeah i mean you don't you don't care right so that's a it's just a it's a problem that the tag industry is not currently trying very hard to to solve but yeah you're right you you focus on the ai part and i focus on the blockchain part right but i mean but in reality i mean i mean you need them because i guess we each think the other guy's part is is harder because we understand how to solve our part but i mean but i mean you need you need both of them right i mean you need the secure scalable data ecosystem respecting data sovereignty and and you need that to fuel you know intelligent virtual assistants that really serve the person that they're assisting as the prime directive plus this massive scale data analytics that really understands what's going on with each of us in a way that lets it genuinely help us right because what is giving a person what that what they want mean does it mean gratifying their most intense short-term impulse at each moment or or does it mean giving them what they want in a certain balance along multiple time scales which is what which is a multiple levels of our being which is what we try to do with our our family and our human friends and ais just aren't i mean they're laughably far from from making an effort to give us what we want in a more profound sense at the moment right well the reason why i was focusing on the ai part is uh the the biggest part the blockchain part the incentives engineering relies very heavily uh upon the users and the agents inside the system and so we say okay how do we incentivize people to supervise and curate data and agents in a way that we get more dialogue and we get a great moderation so if you take the ideal form would be is you take cl cliques that are are disjoint and you put them in the system then idea flow starts occurring between them and over time they'll converge into kind of a great moderated middle so you can take a very extremist person and either the system acts like it has an immune system and it kind of kicks them out or that node over time moderates the incentives in the system has to be designed that way it's the reason we have so many problems in my view with facebook and twitter is that it actually has the opposite incentive you get more clicks and more interaction with the more polarized people become so the system is built in a way to polarize people as much as possible and thus divide them as much as possible because it's actually boosting revenue because i think i think that's an easier problem to solve right like that that's that's the easiest way to keep i mean righteous indignation and and and the the glorious feeling being approved by others in your in group and jointly indignant at the guys in the next group like this is this is a really easy emotion to manipulate with with with people it's sort of a low-hanging fruit and they're they're to an extent these networks implicitly got stuck in manipulating this this this low-hanging fruit because it was the easiest way to keep people keep people staring staring at their app right i mean just as just as settled on porn with love it's bandwidth because it's just a that's a really low algorithmic complexity way to keep keep people staring at something is show them naked bodies right so if if something would give greater benefit and even get people to stare at their site longer in in the long run but isn't quite as simple of a problem it sort of gets it certainly gets bypassed right in the loop of trying to incrementally incrementally achieve these metrics uh more and more each month and yeah what's what's interesting is that the thought that uh rearranging sort of the configuration of the tech stack as as you suggested in the beginning of the conversation so like rearranging the the tech stack so that the the protocols are separate from the applications and then the the ai models and tools used to create the ai models and inspect the models are they're also separate from the applications i mean reorganizing things in in in this way then it sort of opens up the dynamics of the whole ecosystem in in a way that i i believe has decent odds of leading to the evolution of you know social media tools that that uh you know they give people what they want in a more profound sense and in doing so they're creating communication networks among people that are are not focused entirely on sort of immediate gratification of the of the of the ego and and stoking of inter tribal rivalries and so forth because all these good and beautiful things we're losing to exist on the internet right now like they exist right now there's love there's compassion there's there's true connection between people with rival political views or from different uh historical tribes and so forth it's not that it's not that we're not capable of that or that it isn't there people are capable of amazing you know deep eye vowel connections with other people and of incredible self-awareness and uplifting of their own consciousness it's just you need networks that that foster this rather than try to squash it and and channel you into tribalism and immediate ego gratification and of course neither you or i nor our teams are going to build all the systems that solve this problem so you're going to create the create the ecosystem and tool set in which in which the solutions are going to are going to emerge right well that's the point of incentives engineering is that it's it's the initial push and because you don't have friction to slow you down you you tend to accelerate and eventually you get to a great place i mean bitcoin obviously got their incentives engineering right and they went from a single minor to warehouses of miners all around the world and now this colossal system so you know we can argue about the power consumption but that that model was quite competitive to a point that it created a trillion dollar ecosystem so i often think well what incentives do we need and we we kind of have like three sets of distinct things we need to accomplish at the same time if the network is going to be sustainable and useful to society so one thing is that you would like information to be curated where it can clearly separate objective reality from the subjective analysis of it and give people a diverse set of viewpoints and understand that stuff is nuanced so if they get that then you kind of get rid of the fake news you also get some consensus in the network of baseline facts because right now we live in a reality where people can't even agree to basic things some people yeah virus is a hoax some people think vaccines are poisoned etc cetera so there's just disjoint realities that people around you it used to be we would have one set of facts we'd agree on that but then our interpretation of what those meanings i mean a lot of people really believed like donald trump had the most people at his inauguration ever and the new york doctored those images right and of course of course sometimes the mainstream media may have distorted something about trump but the thing is that's like an image right and people believe people didn't believe the photograph they believed the photograph was fake and when you're at that point where people don't believe the photographs then then it's very hard then you have to like be on the ground there observing it in a sort of very clear state of mind to to believe anything right so i'm i mean i'm i'm not even uh a realist or materialist fundamentally i don't know if there is an objective reality but what what people aren't doing is they're not thinking in a clear and coordinated way about like this belief they have or this thing they've been told like what what evidence is that grounded in like what's the process of grounding the the abstraction or or the claim in the in the evidence that process is broken and it's probably it's partly because of ai and advanced informatics tools right because you can make a deep fake i mean it's actually hard to tell if the video if this video is gerzon hoskinson or is this video like a deep fake of gertsellen hoskinson put up by someone to troll all of us right i mean it's it's not immediate seeing is believing to tell that you have to actually yeah like the collider george lucas deep fakes are extraordinary and that's that's like last generation technology you know where they're going in a few years is going to be socially very damaging because you'll have these perfect simulacrums of uh of major figures and they'll be saying and doing terrible things so that's the first part you know the curation you need the social network to tell [ __ ] from reality so if the social network is broken then then you can't tell because you can't tell by looking you can only tell by what you read and what what others are saying right right and i think that's why they're proactively um to platforming people and controlling flow of information because there's a political terror about the consequences of of deep fakes and what they're going to do to dialogue yeah put a pin in that because there's two more points so the as i mentioned the first is just the curation of the information itself and the incentives have to be put in a way that it promotes instead of siloing idea flow idea quality saturation of objective reality from subjective reality and then when you're looking at the subjective to give you a spectrum of viewpoints almost like a next generation nolan chart to show you different viewpoints okay so then second there's clearly a data economy that exists and surveillance capitalism is not just a you know a nice term it's a multi-billion perhaps trillion dollar economy and it's very valuable to society in certain respects allows you to micro target people allows you to have more friction free commerce you get the right products the right people so there's a huge advertising model and that shouldn't go away but it should respect the privacy of the individual so there's been a lot of attempts to to explore better ad models like with brave and bats for example i think whatever you know social network you create you have to move in that particular direction where people are able to monetize their data and preserve their privacy and actually get a share of the profit from the interactions that they have and then the third design goal has to be the infrastructure itself is horrendously expensive to maintain i mean you're talking about petabytes of data you know all these systems have you know n squared plus uh interactions and so as your social network gets to a billion people that quadratic complexity becomes very difficult to carry and manage so the computational cost of that infrastructure there's a reason why google's so big and amazon is so big and facebook is so big so you somehow have to figure out how do you subsidize a decentralized distributed system to curate all that information store all that information and you actually have to make data and users an economic uh actor where they get pruned out if they uh if they don't contribute enough to the system and we haven't quite figured out how to do that in a much simpler sense with just smart contracts and these these big systems i mean you see things like ipfs and gollum and other attempts to distribute network and data and storage but those protocols are imperfect and when you talk about a social network you talk about people posting videos every day 4k videos you talk about people posting pictures every day sometimes hundreds of them millions of meaningful interactions even a small clique like if you take an extended family that's going to be over a month time probably a million plus interactions of various things from likes and thumbs up and then you're adding these intelligent agents that also have to do an enormous amount of processing on a regular basis and those agents are are only going to get more sophisticated and uh and be interacted with uh a lot so you have to have a lot of that be handled by the edges the end user yeah yeah yeah absolutely and that's hard i mean we've been working on that with a project called new net which is spun off of singularity net and i think we understand a lot about the architecture that has to be there and about how this sort of split up machine learning algorithms for this sort of this sort of a hardware infrastructure but there's there's a lot of work to be done there there's a lot of avenue for inner operation of new net singularity and cardano there but i mean it's hard it's it's hard computer science and software engineering and on the other hand obviously google and amazon and microsoft have solved a lot of really hard large-scale software engineering problems different ones but i mean i think with a fraction of the effort that they put in i think we can we can solve that problem yeah but they're cheating because they always have a trusted third party and so that that massively simplifies your protocol their problem is easier this is a this is a harder problem but on the other hand computer science and hardware have both advanced a lot since they started doing doing doing what they're doing right but yeah the incentive engineering aspect incentive design aspect is quite critical and and quite fascinating and exists for end users it also exists within the developer community because i mean what you see now is the significant majority of aipgs and we're going to work for these these these big tech companies right or or start a startup which then gets acquired by one of these big tech companies so the incentive structures of end users and of developers have sort of been channeled they've been channeled around these these these large tech companies which is you know which is an amazing achievement i i would be proud if i if i'd created one of the on the other hand it's it's not it's not optimal what it's doing in the course of society and i mean this this is one thing that interests me in our own collaboration over the next few years like i've been working with my team in singularitynet to architect like a a five-year tentative uh plan for for how to roll out and grow singularitynet on on a platform i mean part of this involves you know the agi token the new agi on a that token that we're working to launch as a new version of of singular agi token because we we need the agi token to be the right sort of incentive mechanism largely on the back end like for ai algorithm developers and and for ai application developers who are building these applications back ending on the ai and you need you need the incentivization there to work right in order to create the systems that will be we'll be creating the right incentive structures for for for end users and i think things like the the catalyst program within cardano are a very interesting step there like we're community members democratically vote with some liquid democracy mechanisms that they vote on which cardano projects should uh should get some some tokens and i've been watching and participating now and then all the other all the catalyst discussions and i want to do something that's a lot like that with some added dimensions for singularity net on on cardano for for fostering the you know the community and expanding the community to to build ai applications on on our shared decentralized network because you need the right incentive structures on on all these different levels and they need to to coordinate together which is is hard but i mean there i think tokenomics sort of gives you an advantage over what big tech has because it's it's more scriptable and it's more it's more flexible than the money and stock options and the incentive mechanisms right well yeah you know what's so cool about catalyst is there's at the end of this year going to be at least probably 100 million dollars worth of value that's available to the community and you know the partnership with ideal scale is just the beginning we keep adding more and more firms to assist us with figuring out how do you build a productive voting community because it's not just the raw participation you know so we say hey i think about two three percent of ada holders are right now in idea scale because it's still kind of in a beta form our goal is to get that to 50 percent before the end of the year but then we we're trying to identify what does meaningful participation mean because i would argue the american election system is not meaningful at all you just show up and vote but whether you spend hours thinking carefully about it or you just voted randomly it doesn't really matter and the system doesn't differentiate that so you end up with very poor outcomes and rational ignorance and a race to the bottom effectively so uh so meaningful participation is something we're definitely very interested in and our hypothesis is that's going to lead to significantly better funding outcomes so our return on intention is quite good for the system but what's cool about these treasuries in general is a it's kind of a it gives you this m m thing you know it feels so empty without me eminem maintenance and moon shots so maintenance means that you can maintain the system as it is and iterate and refine and evolve and moonshots means that you have enough money to go pursue high-risk high-return research and most great societies do this through some vehicle it can be the horizons program the european union or it can be darpa and the united states where they say all right we're going to throw a bunch of money at some crazy stuff and you know the odds are it's probably not all going to work out in fact we seldom get exactly what we want but then every now and then we get fiber optic cables and satellites and and the internet and we get uh self-driving cars and we get uh you know k-lo and these other cool things so you know what the value to any dap that comes over to cardano is that you get to reuse the catalyst stack at some point and then you can start entertaining well what does a treasury system look like within our ecosystem so you know let's look three five years out into the future and let's say singularitynet's gotten a lot of adoption there's tons of transaction volume you could put a slight tax on each transaction that can go into a treasury system for all the agi holders and then suddenly you now have a mini catalyst just for agi and you can follow your own m m strategy so one park can say hey we just want to add more agents and more capabilities and the other perk and say let's go tackle a super hard problem in the ai space and it's really risky to go chase that problem it may be the holy grail agi or it could be a subset of that or a compositional subset where you know you can decompose that problem to a collection of sub-problems and you're solving one of them and if you fail it's okay and if you succeed that solution lives in the open domain and it's not controlled by a company it's controlled by a protocol so it's ubiquitously accessible it's kind of like powerful sense i mean with what so with what we're planning out now with a certain amount of agi ada tokens i i think we can do something catalyst based that can help get ai developers on on the singularity net on on cardano platform and can help build toward both you know applied narrow ai in domains from social media to medicine to defy as well as some of the components toward agi but there's there's also much bigger things like if you think about it we're competing with these trillion dollar companies right so eventually we need custom hardware for decentralized agi and if there's enough usage of these platforms by customers for doing all sorts of practical stuff if there is enough usage then as you say a modest fee on on usage can can drive catalyst-based funding of research and you i mean you could you could fund the design and prototyping of decentralized agi chips right i mean ultimately we need to be seeding these exponential economic growth processes to to the point where you know there's more wealth in the decentralized ai ecosystem than there is in the centralized ai ecosystem which sounds very fanciful now but i mean i'm i'm a lot older than you i'm old enough to remember like uh you know the computer companies were like honeywell and wang right i mean you had these main no one no one believed that pc companies were going to supply them let alone let alone internet companies like in online ad agencies right so i mean but but this is this is how things go and i mean in in in the same way you know the the potential for network effects and exponential growth based on the right incentive mechanisms on multiple layers the potential is there for a decentralized ai ecosystem to grow much bigger than the current trillion dollar companies i mean we you just need to see the right growth processes in in place and i think i think between our communities and code bases we're able to see what what those are right now but of of course getting getting that seating to work involves an endless number of difficult sub problems both technological and human right well that's why you you know that's the value of trade you know uh bob makes the spear and alice makes the uh the rope yeah and so one of the things we're trying to focus on in cardano is is abstracting the tool sets and capabilities of the protocol so that each dap that comes can reuse that they don't have to be a domain expert that's what got me to fall in love with cardano in the first place it's like this is actually a reasonable software architecture right i mean you're using functional programming you're breaking things down into pieces so like if i if i want to take some ai algorithm and you know make it do homomorphic encryption or multi-party computing so it's you know runs in a secure and scalable way like i don't need to write all that code myself there's actually tools within the blockchain infrastructure that that are useful as code with it within what we need to do on the ai level i mean ethereum is is super cool i mean launching smart contracts into the world with a landmark thing but i mean the the ethereum code base is is not like that like there's there's nothing there's nothing in there you're going to reference or use within your secure ai layer it's just well the the computation model is just wrong it's got a global state and so you you can't grow beyond a certain amount and you become it's supposed to be a world computer but you cannot build a functional world computer that way and no yeah you have to go from global to local and then you just have so many problems in that model in fact we just had a lecture this morning with memo chuck of already talking about the differences with the extended utxo model to the ethereum style accounts model and we'll uh we'll publish that video probably next week but it just becomes so obviously self-evident that while it's a great proof of concept the system first it can't scale and second the use of other utilities comes at the same resources for everything so the so whether you're using a voting system or you're using a stable coin or a dex it all comes from one pool of finite resources so if one of those resources gets over consumed by a cryptokitties it makes all the other resources in the system more expensive and that's a bizarre and asinine model you know if a catalyst for example runs as a side chain of cardano so let's say we have tons of dapps bombarding that using that for the voting systems for their their dap that'll have no impact at all on the main chain performance as well 100 us dollars in gas for you to swap transactions i know i mean how can you how can you obsolete uh wall street that way i mean that's that's it's going to be tough right but but on the other hand i think the foundational algorithms together on those problems are there in in cardano and then in singularitynet we have foundational algorithms for distributing and decentralizing your secure ai so i mean i think ingredients are there for for what needs to be done on the downside none of us has the war chests that google and amazon and apple and microsoft do so we we have to work around that by being being clever in them and designing the right incentive mechanisms so that you get sort of positive feedback effects and and network network effects and things can really grow and i think that this year is going to be pivotal actually but we're going to i mean you've got native assets coming out and we'll be putting agi token as a native asset and then a few other singularity net spin-offs as native assets but where i mean we're going to get to flourishing database that ecosystem on cardano and then singularity dao which is a defy system we're building on singularity you know i mean we can use to help help coordinate getting liquidity into all these native assets i mean i think there's there's and then just pluto as a whole i'm super psyched about that that coming out that coming out publicly because what not many people are thinking about what you can do when you have like a real programming language as a smart contract framework which is sort of security by design built built in so i mean i think we're we're really providing stuff that that is is prepared to ex explode in an incredible way in in 2021 yeah so first about the treasury management um you know tesla 2008 was a day away from bankruptcy and now it's worth more than toyota honda nissan and ford and gm combined i mean it's just it's crazy how fast that they grew so treasuries can grow exponentially if you get to a certain it's almost like a standing ovation model where a few people stand up and clap and then eventually hit this point and then everybody just gets up and collapse and it's the same thing i think with uh with capital and companies there's a few pivotal moments that you have where you're just just kind of right at this explosive growth and then boom the hockey stick happens and then suddenly you have a lot there uh and i think that's happening in the crypto industry i watched it i remember when we hit a billion dollars with bitcoin i was like wow this is incredible you know we couldn't fathom a trillion dollars it was it was a crazy concept and then it happened within eight years of that uh of that point it took nearly five years for it to to get to a billion so it's extraordinary how quickly things can grow um then in terms of the collaboration getting to that uh you know plutus is coming very soon and we have this test net coming out and what we're doing is we're going to beat the hell out of it so we'd love for your guys to beat the hell out of it with the singularity now read the hell out of it that's right yeah yeah with anger you know yeah okay because yeah the problem with these systems is we're a little easier because we have the hard four combinator but your mistakes tend to sit around forever like we made a lot of protocol design mistakes with byron and we still have to support them and so we found a really nice way of doing that but when we released version one of plutus and the extended utxl model in native asset standard that's probably not going to be perfect because nothing is as an engineer you know the version one's there but yeah we asked you have to be backwards compatible so when you go to version two you know you you still have to support version one so to me it's super important that we get as many people as quickly as possible beat the hell out of the native asset standard beat the hell out of uh especially plutus before we do the next hard fork to bring that in because that's uh it's i i would rather not be backwards compatible with obviously wrong things as we are with uh with byron so it's great to have you guys around i know that that the code you're going to write is very novel and it's also going to push the system to its limits and you're going to create a very strong demand for performance and scale i think you know and i i can already see several areas where we would like to use ai um for example uh transaction fees you know we have this fee parameter and that's right now set with the update system so the minimum transaction fee to ddos parameter it would be so cool once we have oracles and dexes within the system and we have some notion of the value of ada relative to the us dollar to create an automated transaction monetary policy that can take those data points and and compare them to other networks real time and then try to make sure that we always have a compatible because this is actually a subtle point that we've been discussing with some between singularity net platforms cardona platform team right because i mean the transaction fee framework for cardano now and as planned for non-native assets it's fine for what we're doing with singularitynet at this moment but if we want to go like to a swarm ai or microservices model where you have a whole bunch of little ais that within a second one ai is consulting others to create others i mean if you really want to get ai by this dynamic microservices architecture i want to have this using the blockchain rather than all off off on the side i mean then then you need a way for some sub networks to have substantially lower transaction fees but then you need some a system that's intelligent in some sense to to regulate and moderate that because you know you still need to protect against ddos attacks and then all sorts of other things right so there's yeah there's a lot of areas like that where some machine learning sort of participating in the infrastructure can help a lot and one of the things it can help with is to help make the system better able to manifest the emergence of higher levels of intelligence and learning right so you get a lot of positive cycles there yeah and you wanted to be deterministic yet dynamic and you'd also like it to be globally aware of competition so you'd like the agents to be able to parse all the competing blockchains and look at their monetary policies look at their transaction policies your transaction rates and their relative values to each other and then be able to pull that into cardano and and form a transaction policy based on that data is there right i mean the data is there in the online you can you can you can download it into your ai and that i think that that's that's that's quite feasible so yeah go going back to decentralized social networks where we started i mean there's been as you know and you've looked at this in more depth than me even i mean there's been loads and loads of attempts to make decentralized social networks like there's dozens of cool projects started by smart you know well-intentioned people with the right vision obviously none of them has yet become the next facebook or twitter i mean some like uh mines.com from bill ottman i think is is is really cool but i i log on there not yet as often even as i log into facebook which is not that often right i mean mine is great just doesn't have such a critical mass of people yet although it's done a way way better job than than oh than the vast majority of decentralized social networks right so how do we get mines and you know evaripedia and dozens of other decentralized social network platforms and the new ones that haven't been heard of yet like how do we how do we get these to really take off and i think i think we shared the the conclusion that a lot of what's needed there is to make the underlying stack you know more amenable to lower cost larger scale operations of the needed kinds both in data storage and and processing distribution and and then the the distributed ai also now it's interesting you know jack dorsey from uh from twitter has sort of seen this also and they're looking at making a decentralized protocol and sort of reorganizing the twitter stack the question there is can you really make that work with the sort of incentive structures that are implicit in in twitter as as the sort of company that it is i mean that's why i separate the base protocol from the interface kind of like what steam did they had the steam protocol and then steam at the interface and their problem was that they they didn't have a full end-to-end monetary policy so they had value leakage there was no incentive to buy the token but they used the token to curate information had they solved that problem it would be still around and much larger but i think that twitter can survive with a decentralized social network protocol because it would just be a very popular uh curated interface to it and they'd still have their network effect it's just the customers and the data would be ephemeral they could flow from one interface to another interface and get that same experience the problem right now is you have to rebuild the network effect every time you launch a new one of these things and that was just like saying every time we want to do an internet application we have to completely rebuild the internet underneath it it's a it's a preposterous thing right yeah it makes it makes sense and i think it's it's visionary of uh jack dorsey to to even entertain entertain the notion right i mean not not not many corporations of that scale are willing to to well it's a proactive solution to a big problem he has because if he plays sensor in chief and he has to de-platform people from the protocol then he can never win because it's just whoever that job either because i mean you got you got people who are you got people are like clearly colluding to kill someone fine you ban them but you have people who are saying stuff that's nasty but not yet criminal and then i don't want to be in the job of telling like what's too nasty and what's and what's what's okay i mean that's court systems aren't perfect to that but i mean they've been honed for that over a significant period of time and you don't want to have to do that at large speed at fast speed and and large scale as part of operating your your tech company and i mean none of these tech companies actually want that job right that's not what that's not why they got it into the business like how can i center people censor people's political speech so i mean if of course of course if things can be reorganized so that that job is done by the community for the community rather than having to be done by the the ceo and then and their right head and then i mean that's that's far far better and the the community won't do it perfectly but actually will it will do a better job than than these than these centralized authorities and i mean it's completely possible to do that it's it's just i mean we've we did a lot of simulations of singularitynet's uh machine learning moderated reputation system over over the last couple years so i mean you can you can make you know decentralized ai guided rating and reputation systems and you can you can tune them and you can see if i tune it one way you get information silos if you do it another way you just get trolls and spammers and so forth if you if you tune in a different way you get a system that's sort of self-policing and fosters a healthy healthy level of of interaction and you can do this to get networks that self-regulate without without anyone giving giving top level control right and i mean if this is operating you know within the current global political system which i have my issues with too as i'm sure you do but it's there i mean then right you still have top level control over things that are clear crimes according to the nation states people's bodies are sitting in but you don't need top level control for for for anything else right and i think that that's not just with avoid garbage like you know mines or parlor being being de-platformed i mean it would it would also create something that's a breeding ground for positive and and creative and beneficial content and you know in which people's minds are being nudged toward positive growth right rather than then like channeled into sarat this side and and click on this ad so i mean i think potential is there to do that what's a little scary is that the handful of us in the decentralized ai space like the two of us probably understand more about how to achieve this than anyone else on the on the planet right and that's uh i mean it's actually a very big and significant problem both in terms of setting the stage for a positive singularity and just making life less shitty for humanity on on the planet at this moment like it's a well it's a stupid thing yeah the one thing i've always learned from being a cryptocurrency guys incentives are king and it's always been an incentives problem i mean how many people were in 1990 being paid to think about social networks you'd probably be in like in the sociology department at harvard or something like that or like toying around on like an mit you know yeah ai group or something but it's not it wasn't a real job and nobody would understand like how many people who are experts and how to build effective social networks are floating around now there's thousands of them they're fabulously wealthy so if you show that in a free market system you can achieve great wealth uh or at least the prospect of great wealth by building a system of a certain design uh then you'll end up getting a lot of it the cryptocurrency space was exactly the same you know how many people were experts in bitcoin-like systems in 2010 very few now in 2021 i mean the now the existing chairman of the securities exchange commission gensler he was lecturing at mit on on crypto currencies i mean that's that's how far we've gone in just such a short period of time because the incentives were right so when i look at this problem i say well how do we get the incentives in the right way to encourage a large clique of people to to come in and actually start applying serious hardcore brain power to these types of problems so it's a first mover situation now to to the minds and these other guys to the to that earlier point you brought up um i look at them almost like mechanical horses you know you know when you when we're still first thinking like how do we build a better horse people oh let's build a robot horse or a steam-powered horse or something like that well no there's this automobile idea that we've been toying around with maybe that's just a fundamentally more competitive and better model or similarly when people are thinking about vacuum tubes you could certainly optimize them and i'm sure you could build a much better vacuum tube today than they were building back in the 1940s but obviously that was superseded by the transistor and so similarly when you look at the social networks we have to say okay what is our automobile movement moment to replace the horse and mines is is not it i i i think that if those things existed they'd actually just be worse than facebook or twitter they'd get far more siloed you those three problems i outlined the great moderation the incentives models being aligned so that you know people can actually make money and produce money and and do useful things with the system and the infrastructure funding problem you have to solve all three of those with one protocol design and one incentive design and if you do that then it's going to be like this massive beacon that will attract tons of people to come in and start working on and augment it and evolve it and it doesn't matter if if it starts very small it'll go very viral and eventually get to that tesla style hockey stick you know when tesla figured out the entire model plenty of battery-powered cars before but their particular model was the one that everything came together and then it had explanations in terms of tokenomics systems it's quite interesting right because having a unified sort of scheme and dynamic for for you know promoting the right incentives doesn't mean just one token right so you're sculpting multiple tokens in a multi-token ecosystem where they they inter-operate so say we have we have we have the agi token on data and for say a decentralized social network running on ada leveraging singularity ai potentially could involve uh a different token for for a certain purpose within that network and the these you know you have to think through the inter interoperation of these these different networks and i think that this is one of the things i'm most excited about in collaboration between the two of us and between singularity net and the cardano is i think i think you guys have done very well in thinking through incentive structures and how they boil down into to token tokenomic structures and i i sort of i look forward to some uh some cognitive synergy among us on that you know we learned how much we don't know i mean we started this program at oxford with elias and he's like an algorithmic game theorist he won the girdle prize and all these things a really good guy and he's got some you know oxford he's got some really good graduate students too so we said okay between him and his graduate students we're done we're gonna put a fork in it we could easily be able to tackle all these consensus incentives problems in order for us it took two years to refine the entire incentive model just for a consensus algorithm and now we're talking about like incentives for the curation of information so it's going to be fun to collaborate i agree there such a hard problem curation of information that's being created by just decentralized ai algorithms not just of existing information right see information in a way that will guide the production of new information jointly by by humans and ais demand for a token and you need to be able to use that token because it's demanded and it's valuable to incentivize a certain collection of human behavior you also need to be able to use that to incentivize people to interact with agents in a way that they could become trained to become good cognitive crutches to reinforce the network and then that token also has to incentivize the hosting of decentralized infrastructure that eventually can scale to petabyte scale storage and huge network capacity and massive computational capacity it's a tall order it's a it's a lot of incentives engineering and that's why i don't think these networks exist yet they do as you say once it's gotten right to a certain level the you know the potential to gain both personal wealth and to you know help promote broad benefit to a huge degree those are both there in a very clear way which i think can can cause a a rush of talent into the space of you know decentralized ai and and decentralized ai guided social networks right so i mean there's a there's we're at a pivotal moment now i think in terms of both the readiness and even eagerness of the world for these technologies and the existence of the needed tools or at least a significant fraction of the needed tools to to to create them so it's a yeah this conversation is occurring at a quite interesting time yeah i mean but the good news is that there's a lot of almost right attempts like the creation of bitcoin we had hash cash and you know bit gold and digit cash and they were wrong but they were wrong in the right direction and so you just had to pull them along enough and then eventually it falls through and so you have things like bats and i i mentioned that before and suddenly now you create a demand for a token had enormous growth uh but the problem was there was no demand for the token but there was good payment for content creation and curation so they got a lot of users but they had too much value leakage and so they couldn't sustain network value and then the system fell apart so i almost felt like if you could combine bats and steam together then you created a feedback loop where the system will sustain and it'll continue to grow at a very rapid rate however they had to use the token to subsidize the actual running of the infrastructure they didn't they didn't have a sustainable model there so even though it was the protocol steam esteem and steemit was just the company the steemit company had all the power and control because there were people that could afford to run that we've got hive now right i mean that that's the beauty of open source code and decentralized communities yeah but they have that same problem it's a pareto problem where like a small group run the vast majority of everything and there's no uh economic diversity there like with cardano we spent five years on our boris because we wanted a system that would get more naturally more decentralized over time so as the price of beta increases the k factor increases and then suddenly you go from a thousand to ten thousand stakeholders and then a hundred thousand and then all the infrastructure is federated that the with those stake pools and so suddenly you have 10 000 hybrid channels and suddenly you have 10 000 oracle entry points and you know and et cetera et cetera so the system when we get the bitcoin scale could have a hundred thousand you know stakeful operators that uh that run that and that that scales quite nicely that sort of thinking into the growth of singularity net during the next phase i mean i think that the platform as we've built it now does something good it lets you it lets you create multiple ai agents all over the place that collaborate and cooperate to to solve hard hard problems but yeah we we need to architect the next stages of development in a way that will incentivize massive increase of utilization of the of the platform using aji ada but also that will ensure that you know increasing decentralized control of the network happens along with this massive increasing increasing utilization and the i mean i think i think we can do it and i think a lot of the thinking you guys have put into growing cardona was actually helpful there in ways that uh we probably don't have time to explore in this podcast right well you get the democracy stack for free you know with catalyst and you also get the the centralized infrastructure for free i mean one thing we'd love to do is see if we can get outsourceable computation i've been following that for god knows how many years uh pinocchio and capeto over at msr and you know can we can you do the computation on an untrusted computer but then provide a proof that the computation was done correctly and then you know that the whatever the result was given is right regardless of who did it yeah i mean it's there on the computer science level but it's not it's not yet there on the like scalable usable software level right yeah yeah yeah it says like we have some proofs that perhaps these algorithms work but they're a lot of them are exponential times yeah i mean i'm one of the things i've been doing with my non-existent spare time is sort of going through all the all the core cognitive algorithms of opencog which is was the ddi architecture i'm working on expressing all the core algorithms of opencog in terms of uh galwa connections over over metagraphs and the chronomorphisms and stuff so you get you get the right elegant formalization of your core cognitive algorithms and then once you've done that then then you can deploy the kind of math you're saying so that this core agi computation could be done by by outsourced computing right so i mean that the math and cs is there for a lot of these different things but i mean that there's there's a number of stages yet to go through before that that kind of thing is rolled out scalably that's an interesting mathematical expression do you deal with like a dependent type system or how are you so are you using idris it's a dependent para consistent probabilistic type system so yeah that's a mouthful but can you prove anything interesting like you could show certain things that are isomorphic to each other or what are you looking for with those well we're we are working on that right now actually yeah yeah but this uh this would probably lead us too deep down some usually interesting uh rabbit holes for a broad audience podcast okay fair enough all right well ben this has been so much fun i have another meeting i got to jump into but i really enjoyed our time yeah yeah this was this is uh fantastic it's both uh both broad and deep and i i think uh you know decentralized social networks it's both really important on the on its own and i think we can work together to solve it but it it also sort of it highlights a bunch of other more general points both about bringing singularity and cardano together and about just you know what we need blockchain and ai together to do so yeah very very very cool look forward to the next one yeah you know the i guess a closing point is platforms tend to get defined by the killer apps that are on the the platforms and i'm very glad that one of the most meaningful and significant applications on our platform is singularitynet i i would hate to see us be defined by cryptokitties or something like that so it's great to have you guys around i think this collaboration is going to result in uh an enormous amount of of evolution of our own platform and an acid testing of things in a way that's very productive for everybody and my hope is you guys become one of the most successful pieces of infrastructure on top of uh cardano and it leads to a lot of user growth and we're not just collaborating you know technologically i think we're going to share some office space at some point in ethiopia i don't know this the space has been found actually yeah yeah so our our other team and your other team will uh we'll we'll collocate uh currently to the sound of like a machine gun fire on the periphery of the city but to hopefully hopefully the basics there clears up and yeah well john was very excited about it so i imagine the office is quite nice yes i mean it's it's it's in vole which which is a great neighborhood and yeah i think uh it was a um very uh pleasant and surprising coincidence that we actually both had had flourishing teams in in other sababa contributing to the the development of our of our various uh platforms right so i mean that's a very very very very cool maybe uh yeah maybe the next time we meet face to face we'll be over some uh some injira in the obvious right that would be a lot of fun that'd be a lot of you just have to get rid of the civil war in the uh and the covet but those are just minor technical details implementation details all right thank you so much ben gregory thanks a lot [Music]

Channel: SingularityNET

Views: 50,451

Rating: 4.9542603 out of 5

Keywords: singularitynet, cardano, agi token, ada token, ben goertzel, charles hoskinson, blockchain artificial intelligence, ai cryptocurrency, decentralized social media, ai driven media

Id: TNWJGGc7ESI

Length: 70min 36sec (4236 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/theTalkingMartlet]

I was already confident in my choice to make an investment in ADA. This interview only multiplies that confidence. Worth a watch. Two brilliant gents that have clearly found a partnership they think will flourish. Carry on!

[u/CekoNereza]

Smash the likes on here and YouTube! This is gonna be great!

[u/F0xxenz]

Its a fine line working so hard to decentralize social media.

I think Charles needs to be careful about that.

Decentralizing social media can EASILY backfire on you.

​

The basics is that one should be able to post what they want WITHOUT ANY censorship.

This also would include laws that protect peoples privacy...i mean, its decentralized, right?

[u/Important-World-6053]

I really think decentralized social media platforms are a must. Especially, seeing what’s even happening in the Reddit WSB form... if the system feels threatened, the system will try to shut you down!!!

[u/mymymine]

I don't have time.to watch the whole video but wouldn't the majority be able to censor minority groups on social media since you're putting the power with the users . Or am I looking at it completely wrong.

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