The Dangers of a Crypto Commons

tl:dr; A blockchain-based data commons could be a great liberator of humankind. It could also be a great enslaver. Now’s the time to face that challenge and try to affect the outcome.

One of the ideas that I put forth in the CMO Primer for the Blockchain World was how data management would chain. In a blockchain-enabled future, there is a “data commons” to which everyone has access and where time-to-insight is the competitive differentiator.

I still think that makes sense in the short and mid-term.  Patrick Kershaw, however, helped me recently understand that there’s a potential huge problem in the long-term.

In an excellent piece, Protecting Ourselves… From Ourselves. Thought Experiments on how the Crypto Commons will evolve into the First ‘Friendly AI’s’, Patrick outlines a realistic future scenario where this “data commons” is managed and owned by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (a ‘DAO’). This DAO could be programmed and optimized (based on the protocols originally laid down by its human creators and the AI systems that will eventually pay for access to it) to act in ways that, eventually, could lead to what is called “Instrumental Convergence.”

This is the situation where “seemingly well-intentioned AI ‘act in surprisingly harmful ways.’

This will happen, he believes, because the decentralized data commons that are being built right now will, by definition, have no off-switch. That’s one of the benefits. Of course, it’s one of the risks as well.

So, there will be nothing stopping the AIs that have access to these commons to begin a program that either overtly or covertly begins to take control of resources.

“How,” you might ask, “would an AI get control of resources?”

Well, let’s say that a gold, oil, or forest company decides to do a â€˜reverse ICO’. It has tokens for ownership of the resources, a method for contracting out work, and can vote for how to price its goods.

Say that someone builds an AI designed to optimize profit (or, an AI builds itself)….well, you could see a scenario where the DAO for the oil company raises prices during a hurricane and creates gouging…which can’t be regulated. If you can’t pay, you can’t get heating oil and, well, then you’re out of luck.

Then, things get worse from there.

He reminds us that “control of resource=control of power” and he tells a pretty powerful anecdote about Vladimir Putin.

Vlad was a mid level KGB bro and ended up getting control of wood in St Petersburg, ran some OG ops on everyone to get control of all wood in Russia, then all resources in Russia, and then by default… all of Russia.

So, not only can it happen, it does happen…just until now, it’s never been by a decentralized AI.

Now, however, the stakes are about to get really high and to prove his point, he quotes Ralph Merkle (he, of the Merkle Tree) in an Epicenter episode. suggesting that we approach this task with a sense of urgency.

 â€œwe get to set up the initial conditions, because right now we are running the show, so I would suggest we arrange the initial conditions in such a way that we have long happy lives. That’s my suggestion.”

DAOs are coming, whether we like it or not. That genie is out of the bottle. Wrestling with this new world of an open, data commons on a decentralized network seems like a wise move to make.

I want to be optimistic and I am, but I am also realistic.

Mark Zuckerberg created a centralized entity that he could barely control. Decentralize that and there’s near no chance.

These are big challenges indeed.