Video: Long Term Info-structure | Juan Benet (DocDrop)

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[Music] good evening I'm Stuart brand from the long now foundation and the recommendation for Knights for tonight's

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speaker came from Danny Hillis who is co-founder and co-chair of the long now foundation and the designer of the 10,000 year clock were installing in

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West Texas and he has 300 patents invented was a large part of inventing massive parallel processing and meta web which is part of how Google search

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actually works and things like the pinch that you do to make things larger and smaller on your iPhone that all comes from Danny he is particularly interested

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in how the internet and everything else having to do with the infrastructure info structures of civilization going forward can best to go forward and so that's why he's strongly recommended the

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speaker tonight who is in the thick of that in various respects please welcome one vennett [Applause]

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thank you for hosting me tonight it's a huge honour for me to be here with you today and to be introduced by Stuart brand thank you for being you Stuart my name is Quan and I'm from Earth more

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specifically I am from the internet from 1995 to 2018 mostly that's most of the mimetic things that are flowing in my brain and I am a product of your work I'm a product of the work of the people in

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this room and watching this stream thanks to you to your actions your thoughts your memes I am Who I am today my learning and my capabilities have

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been shaped but by what you've done the technologies that you built the systems that you designed and deployed and the thought that you left us or you gave us

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so for me this is really about getting to discuss important matters with my mimetic family with my broader tribe and without exaggeration with many of my

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heroes so thank you Stuart thank you Kevin Thank You Danny for inviting me to to this place and thank you so many of you who are here today who care about thinking in the long term who care about

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these systems who care about where humanity is headed who don't have your head in the sand so to speak and who are here with us to to think a little bit

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broader so today I'm not giving just a seminar but I'm giving a hyper seminar so that means that we'll be going through at hyperspeed and through many things and many times but more

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importantly it is to mean that it it is aimed to be consumed as hypermedia interlinked and Inter twinkled with everything else most of the audience for this discussion are actually actually in

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the future people that will watch this for years to come hopefully if it's any good so for those unfamiliar with hyper seminars let me give you a few pointers I am NOT going to explain everything that would take me a century and I would

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do a terrible job of it so there are many better teachers that have existed and many better explanations that are at your reach so I invite you to pause and go look at something else along the way now your best viewer will be a computer

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capable of playing the audio and video stream perhaps with captions in your favorite language or with controls to pause the stream speed it up or slow it down as you see fit the 20 teens web or better

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will do just fine if you are with me in the physical room today you probably can do all of that so don't worry it's okay because you'll get enough context you are living here with me in my time so

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you're probably familiar with most of the things you'll see and you'll be able to rewatch this later on it's a plug for you to become a member of the long now so you can watch it in HD you also get

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to ask me things in person afterward which hopefully that will make you know make amends for you not being able to pause me in mid-flight and then go look up something so one last note once

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recorded I hope to go back through this hyper seminar and annotate and link the hell out of it maybe with tools like hypothesis or formats library or other things that you might make that will take some time to do and so don't expect it at the same

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time as the audio and video for this drops but perhaps in the future maybe in a few days a few months a few years we'll have it certainly you know before the long now is passed so with logistics out of the way some

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preliminary thoughts I try to see our multiverse through many different lenses though I often fail this talk will survey many things and many times as I said and it is meant to be a memetic four-course dinner it aims to raise

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questions more than answer anything it is meant to remind us to have more perspective and it will sound some dire alarm bells that I'm quite worried about but it's also meant to comfort - comfort

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comfort I was actually born in Mexico so that my accent sometimes comes out and to give us a sense of excitement I want to I want you to leave this conversation inspire to work on something

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so I will relate some stories unfolding now and tell you about some new magical technologies that are that are growing and I'll try to inspire you to do something and so that's why we'll start with some perspective setting now I will

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have hope to do a lot and I will probably fail at some of it but give me your feedback later on and I will get better so hopefully in the future I'll do this again and more people in the future will benefit so with all this set up out of the way let's get to it

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first course let's get some perspective I'll take you through a couple of quick exercises just to get us on the same page I need you to shake out of your day-to-day and think much broader the

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first one is very easy so let's just look through a few images just to get us on the same page now I'll try this again and this was not quite at the speed that is a signal

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there it would take us a lot longer but I can't even try to do it you know proportionately I could try to like do it log proportionately maybe

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so let's write like once for I guess technically this happened very quickly my mistake it's taking too long let's

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speed up a little bit took a long long time between the formation of our galaxy to the formation of our Sun or so I'm told I haven't personally verified the fact but so far

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the explanations fit with all of our other frameworks so seems to check out actually didn't look like that it looked more like that and quite quickly we got

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we think we got the first few organics and unicellular systems I think this is probably a few billion years off or something this transition to go to a

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flurry cellular things I'm sorry yeah eukaryotes took a while like think about that you know 3.52 to 2.1 billion years ago a billion years just go to go from

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unicellular things to eukaryotes even if that's off by say 500 billion years still a very long time think about that 230 million years ago dinosaurs 230 million million years ago

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think about how much happens in a day and how much happens in a year and how fast the world changes it's absurd that the world was so so similar for so long we're really young I am totally not

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following the right timing but you get the idea this all happened like really quickly right so here's another here's another way to look at it this is a little bit of a different exercise and and by the

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way I think this is both of these exercises are best done by picking a time scale something like a day a week a month a year maybe and then mapping that time scale to that day week and so on

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proportionately and just try to put yourself through that experience to the experience of seeing out you know the galaxy forming for a long time way before our Sun happened or the earth

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appearing and maybe the first few life-forms and waiting for a very very long time before you get to to more complex forms of life I have to thank Carl Sagan for this because thanks to

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cosmos I got to understand this I wouldn't have been that clear otherwise so the second exercise I want to do is similar but we'll look at it all in context so a million about a million

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years ago fire and stone tools 100,000 years ago cave paintings and more advanced language 10,000 years ago writing agriculture farming and so on 1,000 years ago science the printing press the Enlightenment Newton's laws

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and so forth a hundred years ago steam power railroads lightning involved the telegraph cars airplanes the computer the bomb the internet the Xerox Alto the UNIX the web Google Wikipedia

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oh yeah that's where those are ten years ago the cloud mobile phones optogenetics 10 years ago with the cloud mobile phones optogenetics CRISPR

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autonomous cars machine learning block chain systems polar bears dying out and so on so that's pretty striking even

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in a log plot it's fast it really what's going on right now is really different from anything that has that we know has happened before and it's even crazier when you try to think about it

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going in the other direction so indulge me a little bit and you know in some wild speculation let's try to go forward in time as far as we can so within ten years maybe virtual reality augmented reality more automation people in Mars

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we hope within a hundred years more drastically by a mechanical mechanic bio mechanically augmented humans maybe artificial general intelligence maybe uploads maybe colonies and Mars and

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hopefully nanotechnology within a thousand years yeah within a thousand years more interplanetary travel warp drives AGI Eden or health potential

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apocalypse who knows within 10,000 years dyson sphere's maybe interstellar travel I don't know within a hundred thousand years maybe our on-demand probes within

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a million years we just completely lose the ability to just think about this because what's going on what we're part of is something so profound so different

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from the rest of what we see in space the the rest of the static stuff we see in space so profoundly different that we are changing the universe in ways that we cannot foresee at all what will what

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will do so it is it's really hard to understand what's coming it's really hard to know what's coming even around the corner or something like 25 years from now 50 years from now and so on and so this is exciting but also terrifying

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because it can go very wrong and the the last perspective setting oh yeah one one one thing as the Android Android David says from from the movie Prometheus big

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things have small beginnings and so when you think of all of the things that you associate with and with technology and so on and even going back to the beginnings of life all

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of the all of this it has had quite a small beginning and so it's hard to predict not only hard to predict but it's hard to to estimate the value of something it's really hard to understand

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how things will turn out over time we can only go for it and try to guide it along the way and make sure that it doesn't go in bad directions and make sure to as much as possible steer the ship in the right directions but what I

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want you to take away from this is things are being played with right now that that are presenting some radical changes to what it means to be human in ways that you know even though they

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cannot be astounding technologies of 100 or 1000 years ago are barely going to compare to so with that you know there is danger there is a lot of danger with

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us so there are some very very big challenges so we could blow ourselves up we of course could be subject to some random cosmic disaster something you could go wrong with some viruses whether

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it's by our own doing or not we could be the recipients of some other von Neumann probes knows we could have you know a eyes could go bad uploads could go bad I'm actually more worried about bad

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uploads and bad a eyes you know the devil you know it might be more likely than then you know some randomly sampled intelligence going bad we can wear you know destroying our plan and or

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destroying our version or our what we think our planet is and so on so I'd like to think about this in terms of the doomsday index and so this is a little bit of like a kind of a silly thinking

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tool but it's think of it as another one and another exercise so consider for a moment how much money it would take to

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annihilate all of humanity if you know some nefarious individual or smaller organization wanted to do that let's just think about it for a moment and think of like what what you would

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guess you know these each of these time skills it would have cost so I would

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guess that you know ten thousand years ago nobody could have done it even if people tried they couldn't they just couldn't do it even a thousand years ago with powerful empires they couldn't have

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gone around and actually found all of all of you all humans and killed everybody even a hundred years ago with the you know extremely powerful powers

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of those days it was quite difficult to to get to that point but something happened in 1945 we unlocked an extraordinary extraordinarily powerful

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thing and then we mass-produced for not quite mass-produced it but produced a lot of it and stockpile it and made much more efficient systems so I claimed that around you know in 1945 through 1968

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could have cost somewhere in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars to build a nuclear program and and do that now whether or not you can wipe out all of humanity by nuking everything remains to be seen

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I'd rather not see that so but what's worrisome is that this is still decreasing recent questions around biotechnology and the potential ills

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that could come from engineered viruses and so on make this number go down and so I've I think curious about this question for quite quite a while as to what what exactly is there is a number today some people as have told me that

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they estimate this to be in the tens to hundreds of millions which is quite low some people think it's much much larger than this some people just think you know even if with all the money in the world you couldn't convince you know

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even ten people to go through the through with us I don't know I don't know where reality lies is it over here is it down here but I would certainly really like it to be up here

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so I really want to make sure that we don't screw this up we just saw how long it took to get here we have an extraordinarily lucky we're part of an

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extraordinarily lucky thing we don't even have a word for this what is it that we are like we think beyond our species or our Intel our you know our civilization or our life tree or our

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planets or our galaxy we're part of the we're an extremely lucky part of the universe and yes we are the universe awakening to know ourselves but we certainly could screw part of it up we

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certainly can't blow up the universe thankfully but we could do something to set us ourselves back at least another 300 million years like that you know back to the dinosaur time and and back

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here thankfully I don't think we are even remotely capable of wiping out life on Earth it's great this is why I sleep soundly at night but but I do think it is very possible for ourselves to wipe

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out ourselves like humans so we should you know be careful with these things because you know this is the budget of most this is a yearly budget of all countries or letting the top countries and they can all afford the doomsday

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index so you know every you know some it's very hard to have a country go rogue like that but pain maybe maybe they could or what about you know people individual humans you know this is the

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Forbes 1000 richest people like you know so the leaderboard of the richest people and they say a surprisingly large amount of money compared to you know these numbers that we were saying before so so

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this coupled with like the you know what is the what is the incidence of sociopathy right like how many at least people are gonna go crazy and and try something bad so of course you know

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nothing has happened so far humans are fine clearly everything is okay right well no because as we saw here we didn't have to worry about this 100 years ago we have to worry about it now so there's

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a lot of people that have you know made this made this case much better than I am here or that I will you know and and you can look up you know this is a great moment to pause and go look up

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ex risks and you know that all the set of arguments and discussions on what our specific ex risk that we should be worried about how to mitigate them what people are working on this and so on but what I want to give you here is an idea

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that we should be working as hard as we can to get this number to go up and we should be thinking of a bunch of ideas around that so things like hey maybe we should be controlling some technologies but hey who controls the controllers can you trust your governments maybe yes

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maybe no maybe not all governments and certainly governments change so what happens when those controllers switch to something else so this is a big part of so all of the blockchain world in a

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sense is a response to government controls over money to a big degree beyond just the interest in digital currencies or cryptocurrencies the ethos of the entire blockchain movement is a

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concern that the powers that be might not be do acting in the best interests of other people so are we going to trust you know the entire all of the governments in the planet to to all

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behave correctly for all time maybe not and so maybe we need larger scale systems that can detect problems going on along the way we could agree to not build some technologies probably won't work some people will do it at some

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point and I think the keys in making it ridiculously hard or expensive to wipe out humanity this is kind of the cryptographer approach to this you think of a security problem and you say how can you make it as ridiculously

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expensive as possible hopefully so expensive that you couldn't you know you couldn't do it if you try it for all time but hey if you can at least raise the bar significantly to decrease the probability of someone doing this then

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hey that's good to do and so yeah this is very very hard to do but there are some ways for example replicating and backing ourselves up as soon as possible so this is becoming interplanetary right and so look at this isn't this beautiful

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wouldn't you don't we want this like now so go go SpaceX so this will take a while but you know it'll take a while to get this to be fully self-sustaining so that if something goes wrong on earth at

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least Mars will be safe you know I what fifty years a hundred years certainly way longer if you know the people that work on things like SpaceX and all of the other space companies weren't doing

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we're doing what they're doing and when I point out by the way here when we thinking about controlling some technologies that today means get the governments the governments controlling all these technologies and deciding with what happens with them but hey who's

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actually trying to get us the space and back ourselves up it's not a government it's a corporation what how is a corporation a lot of people agreeing upon a singular mission with you know

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equity and you know financial markets involved and short term Wall Street perspectives you know they're not public yet but you know that how is the thing like that actually you know one of the best hopes today for our long-term

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survival why is NASA so underfunded why are all the space agencies around the pond is so underfunded this is ridiculous and it should show that there's something really wrong going on with our governments there's something really wrong with how we're prioritizing

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things with how we're thinking about problems with how we elect who we who we make part of those conversations and what we're worried about when you tap into the Twitter stream today that the problems that people are

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arguing about don't even figure in these time skills that we're talking about at all and so I want you to think about the problems in your daily life and when you find yourself worrying about something that won't matter a year from now or ten years from now or a hundred years from

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now maybe maybe you shouldn't worry about it so the last thing that I would you know say we we should do is convince everyone not to do this but you know

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education has failed to contain even the floor Flat Earth movement and we have a picture of the earth dammit right Thank You Stuart so so we need

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drastically better knowledge distribution systems I'm not even gonna call it education because education today just means school and and I really just mean we need to rethink drastically

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how we get humans to know things anyway I want to leave you with two options and then switch to the tech stuff because you know enough enough for that perspective setting it's all kind of scary and downer so you can either go

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extinct or you get or you can not go extinct and those really translate to either you do nothing or you do the

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average day to day or you get trapped in like the you know millio of things that the all of them you know methods of control want you to to worry about and you know I really think that this is bad

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and they're responsible or you could work on solving these problems you could actually go into figuring out how to you know preserve the species how to back

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everything up just in case how to back ourselves up how to you know move to the next realm meaning what happens with brain machine interfaces what happens with with uploads make sure AI goes

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right please like right now this is a very very important thing to work on but you know sometimes making art about this can have a huge impact sometimes giving

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giving other people and interest and an insight into this stuff will help drastically make the change and I think we have to look no further than the Whole Earth Catalog for this how many how much of what we do today is inspired

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by that movement so just whatever you're doing I'm sure it's very important and valuable just make sure that it stacks up to this because if we don't something

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could really go wrong and you know I considered hey telling you kind of like my story about how I got to this but you know it's kind of like less relevant I'll just mention that the stuff that I'm working

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on is an attempt to go and fix some other stuff and I'll just and it turns out to be extremely concrete it turns out to be very very simple day-to-day activity can actually have drastic cosmic impact because again big things

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have small beginnings so I'm pretty interested in on three key problems the secure communications for q-man humanity kind of things so this is making sure the internet goes well or bye goes well

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I mean continues to to exist continues to operate is safe makes does not have suddenly border springing up which by the way is a looming threat and that

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also means perhaps encryption fully encrypted communications between people so things like tor and so on the second thing that I that I really care about and I'm working on is secure computation

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for Humanity so that means it is very very important that the computing systems that we use which by the way us humans are no longer like our ancestors in the savannas with the tools with like

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the stone tools we have very different tools and we're plugged into these things now these things are part of us so stop seeing yourself as separate from the devices and the internet and so on I think it's time that we acknowledge the the thing that's going on which is we're

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integrating into a whole organism as a whole we have built a nervous system or over the last 50 years we've plugged ourselves into it and though it's still really slow that we still have to type and read and so on and we have a really

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bad you know low bandwidth channel it is drastically faster bandwidth than before and it is about to get drastically better as things like BMI hit so

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start considering how you relate to your fellow humans stop thinking as much about yourself and think more about the us because we are becoming in us many people would argue that we've become and we've been in us for probably a million

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years or so you know in terms of tribes and and so on but I think this is a different scale of an us that we're that we're forming and there's their stuff

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around the secure computation stuff that it's very basic it's very day-to-day things like making sure that when you use the service it will survive in a catastrophe so if you can't connect to

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the backbone of the internet you should be able to to work and so on I'll talk about this more later but that's kind of what I mean and the last one is the secure flourishing of knowledge and so this is kind of a catch-all for a lot of stuff

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and you know things about better knowledge distribution systems figure into this I am obsessed with knowledge package managers being able to construct entire mimetic packages that people can

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consume and install and then level up with so things like that I mean book textbooks right like talk about a great package manager right like you just print the thing make your thousand copies and distribute it all over the

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world I think and look back at how what a kind of tremendous impact that had so think of better tools like just the printing press was a tool let's get it very clear like that was it simple maybe

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not that simple but I'm simple to copy construction that you could easily spread through through the world and then drastically level up the bandwidth

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of communications with humanity and so think of things like that today so today we're inundated by bits so that's not it we're not we don't want bits faster what we want is the right bits so maybe when

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you look at a page you shouldn't just look at all bits the same maybe computers should be able to tell you what's true or not so when you say see a statement like hey the earth is flat maybe the computers are good enough now to be able to tap into some database of

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collective knowledge to sanity check statements against the the actual reality that we have we have we're sitting on hundreds of years of the best method of finding things out we have the

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scientific method we have the data we have the theories we have the explanations why are we not cleanly plugging all of these things into how we consume information why are we letting

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six soon to be eight billion people on the planet axis tons of information memes as beneficial and dangerous we know them to be and just treating all information equally this is a pretty big

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danger so anyway I will I could probably rant about this for days so I will move on for a moment perspective setting it's probably the longest thing it's definitely the longest thing I'll end

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soon even though there's three things to cover because I think that there is a massive crisis in perspective I think that today we live in a world with a crisis of epistemology we don't know what to believe most people don't know

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about science most people don't know how they could reason through something and how to learn about it and so I think that uh you know if I could convince everybody in this room to do to do something I hope it is go figure this

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you know perspective Epis Tamala g problem help people around the planet learn better and learn the right things and get to truth to actual scientifically verifiable theories so

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maybe you can't prove something to be true but we can certainly prove a lot of things to be not true and all of those things shouldn't be controlling people anymore anyway so computing we are in

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this crazy face transition from a you know pre harnessing computing species used to a post harnessing computing species and we've had we've gone through packet switching through building of the ARPANET to the Internet and the web and

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all that kind of stuff and we now are you know fully integrating with these systems I'll just go through the entire history of computing in diagrams really quickly this is one of those cases where you can

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pause and ponder that is you know Grant's Anderson's three blue one brown matte amazing math videos go check them out I'll go back and explain these No okay

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all of those have laughs to last one I know you know about Merkel trees so I'll explain the last ones because these are the ones that I'm here to explain the the rest of the stuff you can find

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much drastically better explanations from other people but I wanted you to get a feel for for what's really going on most of the advancements in computing can be boiled down to just how can we

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get bits of data to different places faster or better or more securely and how can we get functions to be applied to those bits of data to compute other data or other functions again faster

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better more securely so in the in the current you know kind of web 3.0 movement that's that's going on that encompasses both the decentralized web and the blockchain systems what we're

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dealing with is this we're addressing this problem which is we live in an extremely complicated environment where there are tons of different actors it could be malicious or rational so that's what the green hat is it's an

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accountant's hat where the rational participant will stick with you if it's in their best interest but we'll definitely defect if it's in their best interest to do so and the the the reason

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why the word blockchain has such a big hype is that it's an example of a crypto system that takes that very seriously and has been deployed globally so it's a it's a system that removes trust from

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the equation as much as possible so that you can have a trustworthy system where you can reason about the the operations that you're that you're asking the system to do so again all a blockchain really is it's just a ledger of data

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that we all agree is right that you're not gonna suddenly see a ledger of data that is there's and because you know data is just because programs are just data you can think of shoving programs into this

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ledger of data and then running them effectively that's what bitcoin bitcoin did it from the very beginning I started as an idea of just pointing just keeping in a method of account but perhaps

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having as a venue to import actual programs and having them run is an extremely useful thing the programs at the beginning just manipulated those the balances in accounts but this was a point in the design space that hadn't it

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was very different right so the throughput of a blockchain today is abysmal a bad so you can this is partly why all of this development happened not in Silicon Valley because most of the kind of alley people said you're telling

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me an accounting system that is worse than my pocket phone will be you know will run the economy of the world this is insane and you know they were right in in a bunch of perspective like yes

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though that system as is won't run the whole economy but it's a model it's at OE system that works damn well and shows how a much drastically better system can

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be built that run processes transactions across the planet so that that's you know in describing blotching systems and you know in a nutshell it's really just about having a way to reason about the computation agreeing having consensus on

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the outcome of events and being able to upload your own little programs to have them run it turns out that that is a surprisingly powerful primitive and what we are seeing today is is the emergence

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of an entire range of applications that are building sort of a a are taking this system as the basis of a new legal structure in in computing so think of smart contracts and so on where you know

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if you think of the vast majority of legal contracts on the planet have something to do with moving around ownership or moving around or or setting some terms and so on and now you can do this entirely in a computer and Trust it

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in a way that you don't fall into this you know malicious rational problem you can just trust the the computers are doing the right thing and so this is why this is why there is a ton of hyper on the blockchain space

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and some and so on if you're very familiar with cryptography and cryptanalysis been you know known for a decade and a half yes this is what

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happens with computing transitions we find a really good system that happened to punch through the you know the activation energy barrier and then everyone rallies behind that system and says oh yeah like you know and this is all it's all part of the blockchain

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world and you can see this with a lot of the higher you know there's a number of older companies that are jumping into the space that are really just building systems that they talked about decades ago before maybe not decades but at

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least a decade and a half certainly before Bitcoin and this really just consensus systems and good crypto systems but they're all labeled blockchain now because the the blockchain movement has garnered such strength I want to distinguish this from

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this decentralized web stuff which is a similar but subtly different what the decentralized web stuff is about is taking the existing current web computing platform and taking the links

00:38:48

in that computing platform and making secure links out of those so it's in a different point in the design space and it is converging quite quickly to - blockchain systems and so the the joke

00:38:59

here is that you can think of decentralized web websites or datasets and so on as being you know equally equally sound and equally secure as as blockchain systems just in a different nature so there's no consensus involved

00:39:12

and Sarah Lee and so on if you said hey let's take a decentralized web system and put some consensus on it then I would say you have a watching it's a way to like heal the divide between the two now a very significant thing that's

00:39:25

going on around all of these systems is that they present a pretty surprisingly good chance at building secure robust

00:39:38

systems that you can rely on even in conditions where your government's your your are against you corporations to trying to derail you and so on and so that sounds kind of crazy but but in but

00:39:52

in reality like what we're dealing with is just weaving cryptography and weaving certain systems theories and ideas into a system capable of processing functions

00:40:04

that's really all it is processing functions in a way that nobody can interfere with so if you know that the function applied then that's fine and safe I'll mention this stuff and you

00:40:18

know I won't talk very much about ipfs you can find plenty of other talks about it we address a number of interesting interesting problems a thing that we really care about is offline so most people on the planet are not plugged

00:40:31

into the computing system the same way that you and I are they have local networks they have maybe a good a very high latency but and very high bandwidth links a moving a package like a package

00:40:44

hard drive from one place to another but but they're not constantly connected to the internet the same way you and I are so we need to change our computing platforms to address this kind of stuff and I'm proud to say that that our work

00:40:57

has been you know helping a bunch of these conditions we know certain communities that are using the stuff in offline regions and we also know that it's being used actively to fight certain censorship things so for example

00:41:09

the I profess was used in the in the recent referendum in Catalonia there was a a an attempt to you know this was an example of a Western democracy

00:41:21

immediately deciding to silence you know a strong push for the before for voice from from people and they just went through to the roots of the internet to the to the ISPs and to the managers of

00:41:36

DNS in in Catalunya and blocked a whole bunch of websites and it turned out that our system just works even in that environment and so I was capable of moving around information so there are a

00:41:49

whole bunch of other systems like this that that are being built right now and are on are getting deployed and need of course a ton more work to get there but but the insight here is that we are we are using cryptography and group

00:42:02

dynamics which we'll talk about in a moment very briefly and we're using distributed systems to yield a computational platform that is really native to the internet is

00:42:14

really coming from the electronic frontier not from you know the segregated partitioned different old-world old-world giant models so so you can think of think of blotching systems and

00:42:26

decentralized web systems as as a as an emergence that is building a new jurisdiction in the world which is the internet jurisdiction now how it relates to other governmental jurisdictions and

00:42:38

so on is still yet to see this is a baby thing that's really dumb for now so I think of like the worst possible optimizer you can think of and that's what it is maybe not not evil one yet but but but that's that's the the that's

00:42:51

kind of what's happening it's it's a new way of getting safe and secure computing and and when these things get completely encrypted then then you're in a whole different different ballgame and you

00:43:04

know a lot of people ask me why why I'm so pro encryption and and you know it's a really hard question there's a lot of people on both sides of the encryption and you know Pro encryption and against encryption debate that um maybe don't

00:43:16

see the full implications of being on either side and in the in the anti encryption side you see a lot of what has been saying hey look we're the good guys we're trying to keep people safe we're trying to make sure that no bad

00:43:30

groups go around and do anything you know bad to our societies and so on so we need to be able to look at everything we need to be able to wiretap everything and and you know what like they're right like you wouldn't they are the good guys and to a great extent they work really

00:43:43

hard to keep everybody safe and they have very legitimate reasons to be worried about bad things going on as we saw before like you know doomsday index you know it's very easy and cheap for small groups now to cause serious harm

00:43:55

and damage to the entire species so naturally a lot of people who have the mandate to do something about it or trying to but on the on the flip side on the other side there's this massive concern that what happens when those

00:44:07

groups change what happens when a movement as powerful as the Nazis in the 40s Rises takes control of that machine and now Institute's the worst Orwellian nightmare you could possibly imagine

00:44:18

right like that's why that's why we need encryption systems and this it's it's a it's hard like this this stuff is not easy to contend with because you know damn you do damned if

00:44:31

you don't having fully encrypted systems will allow some bad people to get away with that stuff having no encryption encryption systems can allow authoritarian regimes that are completely unprecedented to this day and so when thinking about these systems you

00:44:45

have to like pause and think through what you're building because by the way a lot of people are building a lot of stuff right now sometimes not really thinking that much about it which is should give us pause but you should really think through what are the

00:44:57

properties that you want the Internet to have what are the properties that you want to bake into the network into this nervous system that we're building and what do we want the rules to be like that's what's getting figured out right now and if you're not part of the conversation please join it because you

00:45:09

this is the stuff is gonna matter for the next 20 years a lot and so I think the you know the crux here for me is you know what potential negative futures am

00:45:21

I trying to avoid and there is a very real bad potential future where the advancements of machine learning the advancements of surveillance technology we have the advancements of you know robotics and so on empower a small group

00:45:34

not to annihilate all of humanity hopefully that won't happen but but really to control vast numbers of people in ways that are extremely difficult to avert so think of the resistance groups that we know so much about in the 40s

00:45:46

and the 30s they were able to mount resistances against bad groups because they were able to get information to each other quickly and safely and and they were able to do things that today any government would be able to spot so

00:45:58

think of the massive treasure troves of personal information that the big date big you know personal data corporations or the data monopolies things like Facebook and so on have collected in all of us and think of where are those bits

00:46:10

of information about us stored and what did you say what did you say over the last five years in those systems did you say all positive good things about every government or every position did you say any bad things about bad groups what did

00:46:23

those bad groups suddenly get into power what if those bad groups get not only beyond into power but in a position to be able to find you like that's what some people are in the world are actively worried about right now beyond

00:46:35

it being a theory it is happening and you know there are some of their tearing regimes where it's potentially pretty bad and there are others where it's not so bad yet but it

00:46:47

you know we can see the glimpses of something that so for example the current credit system that is being instituted in China is a good indication of what happens when you empower a government to look at everything that

00:46:59

you're doing and then rate your based on that what happens to dissent what's what happens to different opinions what happens with the potential of you know positive change that is against the line of the party that is potentially very

00:47:12

bad and if you think that this is so far away from us think again groups like you know again in the Western in in certain Western democracies this has happened in the past and it could happen again and we

00:47:26

have seen some indications that even now where different groups are taking cues from how China's managing its internet and trying to apply this to the rest of the world so there's a a nice interesting window right now where we can build really good systems deploy

00:47:39

them everywhere and then have a much safer much safer computing infrastructure for everybody and now what are the rules of such an infrastructure we don't know yet we need to figure this out what should be allowed should should it really be the

00:47:52

case that anybody can send any other message to anybody encrypted it's a hard question so far everybody has thought yes and I am very strongly in that position but hey you should figure it out and you should participate in network knowing what you're

00:48:03

participating in so you know join the conversation and holla I've taken way way too much time on this I'll blaze through this stuff like really quickly because all of this you can find online you can pause and ponder

00:48:16

you can pause and look look through and so on the you know I think the biggest thing to me that that people don't talk about enough in terms of Bitcoin and crypto comics is think of the enormous

00:48:30

amount of computing power dedicated to the Bitcoin blockchain I'm not gonna claim how it works I'm just gonna point out that this thing you know last time I looked it's consuming about as much

00:48:42

power as Australia so talk about the insane level of power that just you know Publishing a paper on the web can have right so you publish a paper on the web

00:48:56

with like a good incentive structure and the code you know you have to get there and then you get this you know ridiculous thing happening right and so this is this is powerful human

00:49:10

coordination and and this is just the you know the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg like the kinds of systems that we're gonna be able to build with reasonable and good incentive structures are incredibly powerful this is you know what we're thinking

00:49:22

about in terms of data storage is like hey can we can we take this idea and repurpose it to build the biggest memory on the planet can we big Li just ever-present storage for for everything

00:49:34

for all programs for all data for you know the very valuable pieces of knowledge all over the world can we just back up and replicate everything and can only encourage just people all over the planet to do this and so this is the kind of thing that becomes possible when

00:49:47

you think with crypto economics and so it you know it's really combination of economics cryptography distribute systems game theory and so on and it's an amazing new field that's gonna deal

00:49:57

with very powerful structures so one thing that I'll mention is credit assignments so I've been recently obsessed with this problem which is how can we assign credit for the success

00:50:10

among the multitude for decisions so I'm packing that a little bit when you think about endeavors think of the blue dot there think of all of what it causes and all of the participants that that influence that endeavor and think

00:50:23

through the potential benefits and punishments that need to be properly propagated through the system I claim and you know this is like the subject for the entirely new talk I claim that that solving this system for

00:50:36

humans let alone for machine learning for humans is one of the greatest challenges that we have in economics in this century if we get this right we could rewire our economies to actually do good things how many people here

00:50:49

think that our economies are completely running amok and like causing all sorts of damage to the world think about the environment think about like I think about like what we value today think about like the short-term returns think about NASA being underfunded think about

00:51:02

how much we pay attention to things like a doomsday in there is the Forbes list actually an accurate representation of what humanity values absolutely not I'm sorry but but this is because we don't have good

00:51:14

credit assignment at all we all over the place there's all sorts of leakages where we don't have good wiring of the system we don't have a nice back prop system set up in place and then you have to have people at the end people like

00:51:27

Gillen Moscow you know manage to to understand the game well enough to amass a whole bunch of capital and then say hey look like I've I figured out the game I succeeded at it some one degree and now I can do something that's really

00:51:39

valuable let's back up humanity but that can't be our best way of working that can't like we have no hope of surviving if that's the way that we do it and so I think we really need to step back think about these problems and building a much

00:51:52

better way to encode our values into our economy and and if we do that which is totally possible because again money is just an invention if we do that then we will see just very quickly new new

00:52:05

systems optimizing for the right things and hey guess what it's a good time to do it because script economics allows you to test and play with these things so you know join us in this kind of stuff I talk a lot more about this thing

00:52:19

in in this podcast and there's other other many other people that have been thinking about this problem for a very long time so you know join the conversation and I think we solved this problem in the next few in the next few

00:52:32

years then it could you know radically change a lot of the world so you know hyper seminar there's a lot more to say there and in in one minute I will try to do the section of knowledge which is

00:52:46

that but what's going through my head right now is I this is the thing that I care about the most so I'll just really talk about it more at length in the future I know I'll just

00:53:02

say that the most valuable thing that humans have ever created and/or will ever create is our knowledge and you know you can disagree with me if you want and and I think that we don't we have not organized their species for

00:53:15

that yet and we we don't think about permanence very well and so when you think about that that a horrible doomsday scenario of humanity being wiped out if you think about the threat models do you do we care if all of humanity gets wiped out of course we do

00:53:30

but you know what do we want to back up just in case maybe maybe there's a situation where we get ourselves knocked back a thousand years but maybe we can recover in like a thousand years is know not bad I mean go go back to think about that 15 billion year timescale thousand

00:53:42

years is nothing but but it will only happen if we back up our knowledge well and thank you long now to we're actually working on it for being like one of the only groups on the planet that's working on it

00:53:55

but but you know we have to work on this on this more because our permanent systems need to be so good that even bad groups can't systematically go and find those caches and they store them we have

00:54:07

to not only make it insanely expensive and hard to to to destroy our information but close to impossible for example let's build a satellite launch into space and then have it beam back all of you know all of the information

00:54:20

by all the information we have to figure out what all of the information want to keep is but that's a really good potentially good system and really hard to to to go against you know hard to figure out what it is and so on there's all all ton of really hard problems and

00:54:32

maybe that's not the best idea but it's an idea that gets to want to what I'm describing so we should give digital information print like qualities today books will survive vastly longer than

00:54:43

hard drives if you if you some Cataclysm happened our hard drives would be toast very quickly and if we didn't get the data out of them quickly enough then we're gonna have to resort back to ebooks and so we'd have a dark age in

00:54:57

there and this is you know Vint Cerf and a bunch of other people and you know hundreds of people are working on this but we're not working on this in a very well integrated fashion so we need to and we need to like take take these

00:55:09

kinds of yet like right now like you know this is this is not the same thing right and so when you have a sorry I'm still like a you know normal biological

00:55:22

human you have problems so the when when digital information which today you know it's hosted a particular spot and when you try to view it like your computer sends messages to that thing and then it

00:55:37

retrieves it real-time and like that's our basis for information management like that's super dangerous massively dangerous so you know this is something that we're trying to address in the IP FS project and so on but we're very far

00:55:49

from from from fully fixing it and and it's gonna take a lot of very interesting solutions to gather up all of you know the compendium of all human knowledge to try and and and save

00:56:01

safeguarded and so you know when we think you know place to this just I want to leave you with this idea which is archiving dimensions think of you know what should we archive think of the

00:56:14

public record versus private stuff like private stuff maybe shouldn't be archived but public stuff should definitely should we think of the amount and it's a lot easier to replicate a petabyte a lot harder to replicate a yottabyte so let's think of like the

00:56:27

really important stuff to back up and and back it up in a way that is that it's safe against you know different kinds of you know degrees of threat model like what are we gonna survive through you know again you know the are

00:56:39

we worried about bit rot are we worried about you know people going in destroying data centers are we worried about civilization collapse and what are we worried about extinction by the way one of the silver linings and all this

00:56:51

like you know dire stuff is uh it turns out that you know we generated all our knowledge and what 10,000 years since writing 100,000 years since language it's not that much so if we go extinct

00:57:04

it's fine but you know it's probably good to you know leave records of who we were and so on for the next groups and you know think you know thankfully Voyager is out there already carrying that but you know

00:57:18

I'm particularly interested in this civilization collapse one because that one is really dangerous right now and we could make a very significant effort to to prevent this we're you know we could

00:57:31

have most of the hard drives on the planet not work and we could still you know not lose very many years in our in our knowledge time scale and and so I want to fight for that for that future oh and by the way the type of storage

00:57:43

media matters a lot here so when you think about the sizes and thread model and how you want to survive like think of all of the considerations that went into where the long now clock is and you know how how you got to put in in like the right place to like survive for ten

00:57:57

thousand years like that's a very long time and a lot is gonna happen in the planet so storage media really matters and then how you do it so you know it's a you know in archiving of knowledge

00:58:11

right now we're doing just the easy stuff and if we don't do all of the hard parts of you know this demand of the space we're we're in a very precarious position to the point where we could see another collapse like we saw 3,000 years

00:58:24

ago so 3,000 years ago there was a small civilization collapse in in the eastern Mediterranean where a lot of cultures kind of collapsed very quickly there's a whole bunch of theories and questions around why there was a seminar

00:58:36

previously about it and we could see another case like that in the future through many of the possible things that could happen to us and if we didn't back up our knowledge then we're gonna setback people a lot longer than we hope

00:58:50

to so in closing I'm sorry that uh that I've you know taking you through this crazy ride and roller coaster of ups and downs and so on you know people asked me when I when I talk about this stuff how

00:59:04

can you be happy when you think about all the stuff and in reality I'm probably one of the most optimistic people you do one of the more optimistic people you'll find because I have this person just you know crazy perspective

00:59:18

and I identify with this you know fourteen billion year thing going on and I know that you know overall things are going pretty well and overall you know we're doing really well for a bunch of monkeys and we're like doing really well

00:59:32

for for most life-forms that we know in the planet and we just have to not screw it up and we have to push the frontiers and get to better places and try to you know make something out of this great

00:59:44

gift that we have and the amazing thing is that the world is amazingly malleable so all of this stuff that we've been talking about all of these technologies were built by small groups of people sometimes individuals sometimes just a

00:59:57

single person playing around discovered something ridiculously powerful that leveled up and empowered all of humanity and with our software platform it's just not much easier you don't even have to manufacture the thing you just have to

01:00:10

ship a new piece of code and upload everything you know upgrade everybody and so I encourage you to become a cyber Wizard because really what we're doing here is magical like it's really weaving

01:00:21

you know spells you know we're typing in our weird languages and shooting spells out to the rest of the world and causing crazy systems to emerge and I encourage you to get involved in labs so this is you know things like the Lausanne and

01:00:34

Xerox PARC and so on and I and you know after all I haven't mentioned open source at all in this talk and I've got to open source is one of the most important changes to how we work that's happened in in a very long time it has

01:00:47

enabled all of us to align yeah open source or free software you know there's different ideologies but but a lot of the same shared perspectives it has enabled a tremendous amount of

01:01:02

collaboration and cooperation across international boundaries across organizational boundaries across governments it enables humans to just collaborate on things in in in the digital you know world in the electronic

01:01:16

frontier in a way that you know just the world of atoms doesn't do at all you know not on the same scale and so you know I think I encourage you to join to

01:01:29

work on these problems I encourage you to to think deeply about the stuff that matters most of you the problems you want to solve and the encourage you to build and find it or find or build a community that it's gonna work with you to do that and you

01:01:42

know I think I think we can totally do it I think we can totally solve all of these problems that I described today I didn't mention a single one that I didn't think was solvable said maybe that one probes thing that's kinda scary but I think everything else is totally

01:01:55

solvable even like the scariest AI problems or the scariest you know optimize your problems or you know the doomsday index and all that kind of stuff it's all solvable and it's just gonna take small groups of people it

01:02:09

doesn't even take action of millions you know it's up to you thank you

01:02:14

[Applause] ok everybody relax I'm sorry for staring every we got a

01:02:41

little chance there be a little more specific about your personal work and interests would you see something about file claim which you've been focusing a

01:02:54

lot of time and and inventiveness on and sort of how file coin fits into this spectrum you're just described yet totally so the fact one project is an attempt to weave the crypto economics

01:03:08

that I described in terms of Bitcoin to convince people all around the planet to devote all of the hard drive space that are not using and wire it all all up together in a cloud storage platform and then build all of the you know user

01:03:21

interfaces are on top of a system like that to enable people to just hire that storage as they would any normal cloud computing thing so so think of it as weaving script economic incentive

01:03:34

structures into a system that convinces people all over the planet to take whatever hard drives they can find plug them together into a system and do something useful in most of the computation in Bitcoin is just completely wasted so in fact on all of

01:03:48

the all of that you know crazy exponential of power is useful valuable storage and so we're building we're trying to build like this you know permanent memory for for Humanity in a permanent in the short time or permanent

01:04:00

in that it will only prepare man if we keep upgrading the systems and upgrading the media but we think that if we we've the right incentive structures we can we can probably do something like that as I understand it the the Bitcoin mining which is what uses all that enormous

01:04:12

amounts of power Austrailia worth of power is improvable fork or things like that which are a part of the functioning of the system and you then replace that

01:04:24

with storage which is valuable and there's somehow an incentive what's the incentive providing storage yeah so the the way the falkland protocol works is that we take the proof of work function and we found this took a while of

01:04:37

research by the way we figured out a way to get a good proof of work that uses a thing we call proof of replication it proves that you're backing up a specific file at a specific moment in time and if you do that correctly then

01:04:49

it's it's the equivalent of brute forcing a hash in in Bitcoin it's the details are much more complicated encourage you to look at you know hyper seminar go find the paper read it go find like higher level descriptions and

01:05:01

there's a number of talks but but the inside is just take the proof-of-work function a Bitcoin have it do something useful and in this case is backing up storage file corn operating now

01:05:15

functioning system like Bitcoin yeah it's gonna it's gonna launch in the near future I profess as a function and system so you can you can use that Rockland will be will be hopefully up by

01:05:27

the time most people watch this but not not yet we hope to be out in the in the coming months months to a year or something and then the interplanetary

01:05:39

file system which are you the divisor of that or the instigator of it or what yeah weird instigator is the best yeah so that and that is a working system you can use it today in fact most of our

01:05:52

websites run on ipfs that system is a way of addressing all content and you know giving you that print like qualities and undressing it through cryptographic hashes to be able to find

01:06:05

them find the content from anybody who has a copy so think about right now of all of the people in this room that have computers and imagine in bits of information that you might want to get that other people in this room might have or maybe in other people in this

01:06:18

room people in this building or this block or this city right now the way that we address information and move it is by going all the way to the backbone and back and so ipfs is a system that just you know leverage the spirit of

01:06:30

here to build a system like that and then figures out all the content addressing to slot it into the web so the idea is that you as a user never see anything change it just gets better in anime it's one of the cool things is

01:06:43

that makes offline work so if today right now the internet connection to the backbone here in this building broke then we couldn't interact with each other even though our computers are effectively more powerful than you

01:06:55

know the entire Apollo space program we we could not work with each other the way we expect and that's just because of a flaw in how we build the web we build a web in a way that encouraged just the

01:07:07

content to go into the into the you know into the cloud and encourage you know large corporations to run these systems instead of just enabling linking across the devices in this room so with IP FS we can build something imagine like the

01:07:21

Google Docs or a chat system something real-time live and have it work locally and you can have this work in an environment where you know it's effectively the difference between being online and offline kind of goes away

01:07:33

offline online being means just suddenly being able to talk to everybody else but you should be able to interact and have you know computation with the people around you without having to depend on some random server are in the middle of nowhere that you don't know anything

01:07:46

about so where does the concept of content address fit into this and what is it better than and why is it better so a Content address is being able to

01:07:58

look at a specific file and derive an address from the contents of the file itself so specific way of doing this is we run use a cryptographic hash cryptographic hash is just a big function that you feed a bunch of

01:08:10

information into and pops out a number and that number is guaranteed to be unique for that content that number is so big that you will never get the same number for two two files even if they differ by only one bit you'll never get

01:08:22

the same number that's you know condition of the cryptographic hash and and this is you know probabilities thing I will plug Grant Sanderson's video on how big you know to 2 to the 256 really

01:08:34

is to convince yourself that the probabilities of you know two numbers being the same they're so low so we use a cryptographic function to take any piece of content or you know really in our DFS fragments of content and give those fragments of content addresses

01:08:47

then we can build files out of those fragments of contents and concatenate all of them together and you end up with a single hash that represents arbitrarily arbitrary large amounts of data it could be a big file it could be a directory of files it could be an

01:08:59

entire you know data set it could be an application and could be the data of an application and so on and so it it a when you do that that address that that identifier does not depend on anyone

01:09:10

except the crypto so you can derive that address I can derive that address for the same piece of content anybody else can derive that address it doesn't rely on going to a specific server contrast that to how it works today so today if

01:09:23

you want to post a picture on and say Facebook or Google or something like that you grab a picture and you upload it to the server and you get a URL that says you know facebook.com/ slash my picture a dot jpg and then you can go and give that address to somebody else

01:09:35

but what that means with those people if they want to see your picture they have to go to Facebook servers and ask them for my picture that JPEG now hopefully Facebook is gonna return the same bits that you gave Facebook they could return

01:09:48

something completely different or the connection between that person and Facebook could be gone so there's all these problems that emerge out of using addressing that points to servers and so if you use addressing that points to content instead a lot of that stuff goes

01:10:00

away you still have to solve a problem of how do you find the content how do you not map a cryptographic address to you know the participants in the network that have that content but we have really good routing protocols in you

01:10:12

know people have invented pretty good routing protocols and that's a much more much easier problem to solve then you know I'm disconnected from from Facebook and but I'm you know I have I really want to be able to work with people next

01:10:23

to me and I can't and they said a fond dream it's this pointers are being instantiated Chile Oh can use it today so it's been live since 2015 people that can go and use IP FS and can build

01:10:35

theirs you know I bet that by now you probably most people in this room have at least encountered some piece of content that is close to three professors you know not it's not huge yet but it's getting to the point where

01:10:48

it's I've been seeing it pop it into the web in a whole bunch of places you can see the URL you can see URLs and you can see the hashes and in there and order some of the pioneering usage the rumor so I think the very first use case was a

01:11:02

just a lot of people playing around with it personally like most computing technology it was just hobbyists playing with it and using it to move around their own files now there's two sets that we think are you know really

01:11:14

important one set is all of the groups building blockchain applications to address content in a secure way and they need something like I profess to do that they can't address content in HTTP the same way because it's a different

01:11:28

security model so all of those kinds of applications use IP fast to point to images to point to contracts point to you know that kind of stuff the other set that we really care about is what we call large volumes or data start sharing

01:11:41

so think of in a really large archives of data so this can be from you know in the small side hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes and in the large scale and you know petabytes or potentially exabytes

01:11:52

that's a really massive data set you can move around data sets like that using using IP FS and so you can address the all of the content of a data set and distribute it and so that's a very

01:12:05

interesting useful cool use case let's go out of the weeds and back into doomsday here your major interest this must have come online

01:12:18

Tocqueville favi from Denmark says how expensive is it to make doomsday very expensive in other words you know what's the opposite graph of can this be done cheaply or is it gonna cost a trillion

01:12:32

dollars to make doomsday cost a trillion dollars so cryptography teaches is that it's actually quite cheap to build things that are on the other side really expensive to break so I would suspect

01:12:44

that we can find a really good ways of replicating ourselves that aren't there are in my or not just revoking ourselves but but preventing them say that are that are much better so this could be this could mean as simple as just

01:12:56

changing how we I think it's very keys dependent so if you think of biowarfare or something like that the addressing that looks very different than addressing nuclear weapons right but in all of those scenarios there are probably really cheap ways to address

01:13:10

them it's just more of a human coordination problem like when you think about the problems that plague our governments today they're really not that expensive or that hard to do it's just like a huge coordination hurdle that you can't get people to agree you

01:13:23

can't get people to decide to do something so we figure out how to do that right we can probably do a lot of this other stuff really cheaply the question has come up from Jay Bryce Smith her name I can't quite read he

01:13:35

must've written it in the dark has to do with elections and you know the worry that people are having that the elections can be the polling places

01:13:47

can be fiddled of the people can be fiddled the machines can be fiddled the code can be fiddle how'd he make a fiddle free election process and as your technology gonna help in that so it can

01:13:59

and surprisingly we already was part of an election in a weird way so the the Kellyanne you know temp to to do the referendum not quite an election for a

01:14:12

representative but it was definitely a vote that was submitted to two people in that case it happened to our system was used to distribute information of the where people could find the polls and get to them which was trying to be

01:14:24

silenced so that's an example where things can help definitely getting certifiable information is really valuable if a polling place gathers the data and got it gathers all the information and posts

01:14:36

you know a certifiable link to it so you know cryptographic hash of the data and so on then no other participant along the way can tamper with those results now I'm not sure that that's a really

01:14:49

the bottleneck you know today I think the the real bottleneck is is in human systems I think humans are going to find a way to subvert the majority of these systems and I think in that case I think

01:15:02

potentially corrupt economics and blockchain systems could actually have a more interesting angle where you could do things like just incent a lot of people that are either trustworthy or

01:15:14

have a really high collateral to pay if any problem happens is found in the election and then have a good systematic way of sampling that and checking that they've done the right thing and so you could build just a group of Auditors

01:15:25

that are paid rewarded very highly for good honest work and if anything is spotted being wrong have massive massive punishment you know monetary or hopefully just monetary but but you can

01:15:40

do systems like that with watching systems and I don't think any of them have been are being deployed yet but I think we could see something like that up here the next two or three years now the will to do something like that it's a whole other matter I mean how can you how are

01:15:53

we gonna convince a government to do that when we can't even convince them to to like let other you know independent arbitrators come in and check elections or things like that well you know the one of the benefits I suppose of

01:16:06

blocking starting as a monetary system Bitcoin and so on is that the whole idea of incentive got built in from the start and so realistic incentive money based

01:16:19

seems part of all you want to do file coin is part of what I hear from the etherion people and so you know that you guys take incentive more seriously than most yeah I said I think game theory is

01:16:32

probably one of the most important sciences to understand this these days because game theory enables coordination of large groups of actors in ways that you know we don't really do well yep and

01:16:44

and and I think it's you know thanks to you know my men and a bunch of other people that that pioneered this stuff but I think it hasn't been I don't you know I think there's a long way of

01:16:57

there's a lot more to discover in those areas and a lot a lot of ways to use game theory to to build much better societies now the careful though because game theory can also be used for bad really easily right like you can for

01:17:10

every good use case you can probably find bad use cases you can somebody so in this case we had someone like Satoshi creating a thing to build a payment system that you know governments can't

01:17:21

kind of rate control and that's pretty cool but you could equally have an incentive structure for something quite nefarious and and so it game theory and the vast deployment of game theoretic

01:17:34

systems enables groups to you know without revealing their identity potentially cause significant harm so there's something we have to be really careful about and so we're starting to see in the deployment of prediction markets things like auger and so on that

01:17:47

the ethical contract being able to check the ethical Ness Rolly award are being able to check how ethical a contract is is an extremely important piece of the puzzle

01:18:00

if you don't do that right you can yield something pretty pretty bad now when you couple this with fully encryption that's when things get really scary because when you can have contracts or prediction markets emerge that are

01:18:12

opaque and we can't tell what's going on now that's where you can have some you know pretty bad and ethical activity happening so you know I right now we're in a point where a lot of the primitives are being built and people are figuring

01:18:25

it out and we can see around the corner that a lot of potentially really good valuable things can be built with these incentive structures and attentive systems but we can also already see a bunch of really bad ones and so really right now is have time to figure out how

01:18:38

we should govern these systems what the rules of deployment should be what should we deploy what should we not deploy how do we know what we're doing and I think in this environment you know contrary to most other computing you

01:18:51

know revolutions I think the block chain systems revolution is drastically much more concerned with governance and ahead of the curve than almost any other that I've ever that I've ever read about so I have you know it wasn't around for all

01:19:01

of them the but but it's but it's still far from from from where needs to be because I think this one needs a lot more so even though we're ahead of the curve from everybody else I think we still need a ton more work to really be

01:19:14

sure that we're gonna deploy really good safe systems for everybody there could be some some bad things that get deployed so help us out yeah governance keeps coming out saying it's really one

01:19:28

of the things that impresses me about this whole blockchain world is the amount of very high-minded focuses put on the whole idea of governance and trying various approaches to make sure

01:19:40

that it's ethical all the way down r/w has a question which others have brought up with quantum computing looks like it's coming along and we're talking about crypto currency and crypto

01:19:54

everything and quantum is supposedly this great decryption capability when quantum arrives is that it for blockchain no I mean there are quantum safe systems I mean the current systems

01:20:07

that are deployed are I mean this varies across the systems and what you could do I believe for example in the Z cache I think I think a quantum computer could probably decrypt the log but in in other

01:20:19

cases but we already know crypto that that even will be saved through quantum computers it's just a matter of efficiency today because we don't have quantum computers C cache doesn't have that if they were around the corner then

01:20:32

we would we can upgrade all these systems to be to be post quantum safe would want some help blockchain um I mean you could definitely do things like so one thing

01:20:43

that we're interested in is so storage markets is one thing like what happens when you computational markets so this is a form of computation that it's not like it so it's for theorems it's wanting a log and everybody kind of agrees and everything we're starting to

01:20:56

see the first few systems that allow more scalable computation models but but where this really is gonna head is just think of a normal operating system task scheduler of just being able to describe a job and have it be done once or close

01:21:09

to once and an expectation once and then get to that degree of efficiency around the planet and then we'll have you know markets that run these kinds of computational systems in various degrees of security now being able to plug in a

01:21:22

quantum computer to that would be really cool because then we can run a ton of computations really really well or so just being able to enable anybody to use a quantum computer would be really cool right now most of the the way that

01:21:34

quantum computers are gonna get developed is only a few corporations or governments are gonna get access to them and that's not great so you know there might be a democratizing force question from anonymous do you think having such

01:21:46

a small subset of the human population fluent in these technologies is contributing to our potential demise do you think more people need to learn computer science you think or what I mean you know the coding is being taught

01:21:58

hither and yon mostly as a place for an idea for employment and all the rest of it we all need to understand blockchain because if so there's no hope for me I I think that I think that we're

01:22:14

reaching a time to a lot of people say that you know you can't really be a renaissance person anymore and you can't really learn a lot of things completely thing that's false I think today thank you a lot of people in this room are

01:22:27

successful because they learn a lot of different things so I think we're reaching a point where the specialization is gonna matter but I think your ability to integrate across a bunch of different specializations is gonna matter more and so absolutely

01:22:40

everybody should know about computer science but more importantly everybody should know about science and just like how we figure things out and you know what is like the actual epistemological foundation that our entire civilization

01:22:52

is built on because when you go out into the street and you start asking people like I can get probably guarantee you the 99.99% of the people you'll talk to don't really have a good understanding of how to get from hey we made some observations to here's a testable theory

01:23:05

- hey this is the body of knowledge that we know is true and this is a crisis I think like somehow somewhere along the way we got comfortable with the fact that this is going on and we think that it's okay and it's not it's really

01:23:18

really bad and it's probably gonna cause tons of problems in the future if we don't don't fix this and I think what's really good about social media social me it is like this you know kind of love-hate relationship I have with social media because on the one hand

01:23:30

it's you know every time I look at almost any kind of social media stuff I just get really depressed and angry and and it's because you know anger flows through social media much better and like there's a lot bunch of interesting studies of why and so we just we've

01:23:43

built this amazing nervous system and we've tapped into just this kind of broadcast channel with anybody can say anything to anybody else and the things that propagate the most are just these extremely angry often fake things and so social media just gets us all to be

01:23:56

really angry and about things that don't even exist which is you know crazy but on the flip side what the silver lining in all this is that right now by giving everybody a voice and creating this

01:24:08

broadcast channel we're now suddenly getting to see all of these different perspectives and natures all these different perspectives and levels of understanding around the planet and and we're getting to see that them all in

01:24:19

one go like this isn't we don't get to pretty and that they're not there anymore we don't get to pretend that they don't exist or the that you know everything is you know peachy and and everyone you know agrees on on the very basic facts

01:24:32

of life we can you're getting to see right now that of the sake you know six-two gonna be a people a billion people on the planet like most of them disagree about the basic foundations of reality and most of them disagree about

01:24:44

what's true or not in in very basic testable things and this is something that we really need to correct as humanity and we should you know be working on this and and working on you know gentle compassionate ways of doing

01:24:57

so of helping people level up helping people learn I claim that humans are so good at learning and our brains are so powerful we could be learning at you know kind of PhD levels across multiple fields and I think that this is true

01:25:09

about almost everybody on the planet I've rarely found people I've rarely found people that you know if you if you don't like you gonna step back and try it you know you have to tell my really hard to like decomposed pieces of

01:25:21

knowledge into into something that you know they'll be happy to accept a lot of the times is just a version to it and and you know people are super capable and so I think it's it's a a we need to approach this from a perspective of try

01:25:33

and level up everybody on the world think think like Carl Sagan did like why did he do cosmos he wanted to get everybody on the planet to understand what's going on and like we need you

01:25:45

know thousand more more pieces of work like that so last question Kevin Kelley raises you use the word we who's we for you who's we for me it so I

01:26:01

think for me and I probably used to knit a few different contexts there we for me is I think probably are the the case where it makes the most sense to say it

01:26:12

it's perhaps our tree of life because we don't yet have contact with other trees of life and I think at that point would be really great to see or other intelligences I would you know let's

01:26:25

distinguish intelligence from life and so that's probably the thing that I'm most you know excited or worried about like hey you know the the earth project is going really well or oh no like there's danger on the earth project and

01:26:38

so that's mostly what I probably identify with but you know I think we're part of something much bigger than that even our entire life you know the vastness of space is really

01:26:51

enormous like I'd encourage you to spend like a week of your life just pondering the enormity of space and just pondering just how many galaxies we know about let

01:27:02

alone might exist and what if you know the you know I think for five different versions of the multiverse that exist now that we you know conceive of we are part of something so enormous Liebig the

01:27:16

and we are so young you know how it's it's a how dare we think that we haven't figured out how dare we think that you know things like the second law of thermodynamics have it all spelled out

01:27:28

we barely we barely just got out of you know like you barely just took our blinders off and I suddenly understand what more the universe's and so there's so much more for us to learn so much

01:27:40

more for us to discover and so much potential like a I you know it's it's an amazing amazing to be alive it's amazing to be part of humanity this juncture it's if I can if we can do something to

01:27:53

help it survive and help it point in the right direction that'd be awesome if we can help explore more that'd be great but I think most most importantly let's just not screw it up sir here thank you thank you

01:28:13

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