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This year I had the honor of presenting at the BIL conference in Vancouver, BC, a decentralized and open source alternative to TED. My topic, of course, was the blockchain revolution. Everything went very well, but there was one question from the audience that made me think:
“Don’t you think replacing humans is a bad idea,” she said, referring to my explanation of decentralized autonomous organizations. “Wouldn’t it be safer to have a person watching over it? What if there’s a glitch?”
“God, no,” I replied, with a short explanation. “People suck.”
I didn’t have enough time on stage to go into detail, but I really wish I had. From New Age spiritual types to paranoid conservatives, there are many people who fear the rise of technology. These fears are not only unfounded, but ironically counterproductive to human progress. Allow me to explain why.
People Are Slow
As a society, we need to come to terms with something: all of us are terribly inefficient. Whether we’re navigating rush hour traffic or unboarding a plane, we tend to do things slowly and in the wrong order, especially when we’re in groups.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are the answer. Using smart contract technology, they can simulate corporations on the blockchain–for example, we could tell it to automatically grant Bitcoin loans to those with a sufficient credit rating, just like your neighborhood bank. Smart contracts can interact with each other, so the entire economy could be constructed this way.
This will eliminate the horrors of bureaucracy. A human hand can only sign or stamp a document so quickly, whereas a computer can cryptographically sign anything almost instantly. Nodes in a network communicate via the Internet far faster than humans via phone or email, and take seconds to make decisions that would otherwise require hours of meetings.
Since it’s frequently unclear who’s supposed to do what, a request sometimes bounces around every corner of an organization before arriving at the right desk. This results in an exponential loss in efficiency for every worker, and is the reason why governments take so long to pass legislation or process documents for their citizens. Every one we automate speeds up the assembly line.
People Make Mistakes
Every human in a system also adds to the possibility of human error. Documents are improperly signed or organized all the time, and people often miscommunicate in disastrous ways. Computers, on the other hand, do not suffer from the ambiguity of human language. They are increasingly superior at trading stocks, diagnosing illnesses, and even forming and testing scientific hypotheses.
This problem even compromises the essential decision making of organizations. Human power structures are not usually meritocratic; despite the good intentions of anarcho-capitalists, even competitive, for-profit enterprises are mired in patronage and nepotism. Even in (relatively) transparent democracies, the electorate’s general ignorance results in the appointment of incompetent officials.
A little application of game theory goes a long way. We now have video games that can simulate running both companies and countries, and the AI is pretty smart. They’re already used for practice by the Pentagon and Wall Street, and will soon be capable of replacing administrators in all sectors of government and industry.
Even the worst calculator on the market is more accurate than a human being. The only time programs do make mistakes is when they’re coded improperly–glitches are also human errors. Eventually, artificial intelligence will take over programming, itself, reaching a state known as the singularity.
People Lie
Simply put, computers do what they’re told. Humans not only make mistakes, but often err on purpose for a variety of reasons.
The most common motivation is laziness. Humans do not like to work, which is why we’re forced to pay them–people work because they need to buy food, shelter and entertainment, unlike machines. As a result, we waste up to 3 hours a day at the office and underperform at every task.
Not only do machines not get tired, but they don’t get greedy, either. Corporate employees will steal resources, administrators will embezzle funds, and government officials are typically worse. A computer will never lose your bitcoins for the reason that it wants to go on vacation in the Caribbean.
This corruption has reached a horrific scale: more than 1 in 4 people now pay bribes a year, and up to 70% in countries such as Kenya. We cannot truly measure its extent, but it is potentially the greatest source of inefficiency in our society. People cannot be trusted with more than so much power.
Then what will people do? In a world without corporations and bureaucracies, where manufacturing is automated, many people will be unable to work. Programming will become a standard focus in school systems, but there will not be enough jobs for everyone.
The upside is, we won’t have to work: decentralized autonomous organizations will do it for us at subsistence cost. Basic income will become the norm by economic necessity, a trivial expense in comparison to civil dissent. People will focus on whatever they are most passionate about, which is a future we should be looking forward to.
TheOneLaw 
Thomistic Cajetan 
Eden Landau 
closetothetruth 
bruno cecchini 
Andrew is almost completely correct, with one minor omission:
the only thing humans can provide is Creativity,
but this is not possible with AI.
Other than that, humans are perfectly loathesome and ultimately disgusting creatures.
Doesn’t it count as creativity if an artificial intelligence composes its own song, for example? That’s going to be a common reality in a few years. Next is books, then movies, then video games…
99% of popular songs, seem to already be written by monkeys. So I generally agree with that statement. Most modern pop songs, contain an overuse of certain key words, such as love, baby, babe, hurt, miss you, and/or insert your sexual innuendo. Cussing/cursing, and repetitive lines. Just give it a nice beat, and voila. Just look in Japan, and that popular Anime computer singer that uses modern tech to do live performances. Selling out concerts of full audiences too, that is pretty crazy to think of it.
What you won’t ever see is a Mozart AI, however comparitively speaking modern pop has little to compete with AI. I thin they can come up with much better music. It is way too generic, that is essentially what makes you successful nowadays. And that my friends is the reason why AI will take over the music industry, because generic is precisely what AI is pretty good at doing.
With me, you can insert your sexual innuendo wherever you want, baby.
this is insane. the tech is no more or less free of human values than the human are who start it and give it its initial orders. DAOs could easily do evil just as easily as good. And the evil might be unstoppable. For god’s sake, the best DAO-like example many of you advocates point to is Suarez’s Daemon. You might think the Daemon is good, but Suarez has made it very clear that he thinks it’s very evil. You can’t get out of value judgments by handing them over to supposedly neutral technology. The very fact that some blockchain advocates see the Daemon as good while Suarez sees it as evil shows the tremendous difficulty in making value judgments at such a wide and abstract level, particularly when we try to shift ethical problems off of us and onto rule-based processes.
To bear down on your example, I cannot see for a moment how DAOs can make assessment of credit worthiness less corrupt than they already are. Despite their not using blockchain technology, at an abstract level, companies like Fair, Isaac are decentralized and autonomous and they follow their own rules very precisely–and they are evil as hell (although they also do some good).
Your half-formed thoughts about politics, philosophy and technology go nowhere near as deep as they need to. I suggest you put down the blockchain and go read deeply in the history of ethics and politics, and technology in politics. but you won’t do that, because you already know the answer–and people who already know the answer historically have far too often been the ones who unleash serious evil on the world.
My thoughts were not based on some fiction book I’ve not read. They were based on the work of Vitalik Buterin and other forward-thinking techno-decentralists. No corporation is decentralized and autonomous because humans don’t always obey the protocols–that’s why we have embezzlement. Computers do what they’re coded to, and if they were coded to embezzle, we would see that in the code and not implement it.
Yes the point is that there are many jobs that can be created out of this industry. Its a good thing as opposed to a bad thing, many think that being unemployed by a robot is a bad thing. its not, once disruption kicks in, you will have other important new industries created by those robots. The more we reduce scarcity, by using 3d printing and many other things such as crypto currencies, the better we will be. Now instead of having 1/3 of the money in the economy going to the financial criminal banksters. It can actually go back to creating this tech and its full infrastructure. That infrastructure is important to create the network effects that will create the sort of future we envision.
Inefficiency equals people starve and not having homes. Instead of paying bribes, God forbid people can use that money productively!
I don’t use that term for DAOs, I use Distributed Autonomous Organization is more accurate for the purpose, without going too much in detail, the reality is the machine will not replace human but democratize the participation access on a lot of subject.
That’s true of some decentralized autonomous organizations, but if you consider decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs) to be a subset of DAOs, then it’s not true of all of them.
For example, a corporation designed to provide loans or mutual funds for investment in could operate on a crypto blockchain using basic AI such as risk calculators and trade bots. It would be a fully digital entity with no human operators.
Yeah, I did already scratch on that subject, we use already AI for such purpose so is nothing new, is the participation part you mist, I know some P2P lending try in the pass (Prosper) to count on the wisdom of crowd *bad idea* if you don’t use AI. At the same time your assumption is a *bad idea* because is more about the *game* then just for the money.
We build Distributed Collaborative System which
is a conjecture between Distributed Autonomous Organization
(DAOs)+Decentralised Autonomous Corporation (DACs) or DAOs+DACs=DCS.
Oesterlé–Masser
conjecture
This is the dumbest idea to come out of tech culture since virtual pets.
I’m perfectly fine with DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Companies)! Yes…People make mistakes – and hence why many of today’s innovations are with us. Hence we have things like: 3m sticky notes, X-ray images, Stainless steel, etc. One can learn creatively from mistakes – take that away and we’re not better than the AI.
This article is awesome! I’ve been telling all my friends for months now that Bitcoin and the blockchain are so much more than just a currency. It’s the beginning of an entire autonomous economy and governance system.
Well done, man. I’m sharing this one for sure
Thanks 🙂