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I was about ten years old when I stumbled across a book on artificial intelligence (AI). It riveted me. The profound implications sunk in. I’ve been passionate about ever it since. I spent nearly twenty years as a professional AI researcher. Three years ago, I stepped out of the AI world to work on something just as important: decentralization. These worlds will collide, soon.
Therefore an AI DAO is a DAO that uses AI technology. Or, it’s AI technology that’s run on a decentralized processing substrate.
Here’s what makes AI DAOs special over plain AIs: access to resources; the ability to amass more resources; and the possibility that humans can’t control them once they’re going. Before, we could have AI agents running around in Minecraft, but the gains there stopped in the game world, they didn’t influence Real Life. Now, there could now be an AI DAO that amasses tremendous wealth and does what it wants. The first AI billionaire is coming.
There are at least three ways to do an AI DAO.
- AI at the edges (of the smart contract).
- AI at the center (of the smart contract).
- Swarm intelligence — many dumb agents with emergent AI complexity.
The simplest way to get this going is on The DAO itself. If you’re a token holder, simply cede control to another smart contract running something AI-like to make the key decisions: for a given proposal, whether to join quorum, whether to vote yes/no, whether to split, and so on. The AI-like entity could start off ridiculously simple. As a simple non-AI baseline to get started, simply say yes to everything. The next level: use a random number generator, based off previous block hashes. The next level: perhaps a linear classifier that gives a “yes” if some weighted combination of inputs passes a threshold. And you could get progressively more complex, such as a feedback framework for sensing inputs, updating state, and making decisions, implemented in a modern recurrent deep network.
The ArtDAO Recipe
Here’s how an AI-based DAO would work. Call it ArtDAO.
- It runs an AI art engine to generate an new art image. It uses GP, deep nets, or other approaches.
- It claims attribution of the image in a time-stamp to the blockchain using ascribe. (Legally it can’t hold a copyright, because it’s not a human, though even that that law is in flux. European Parliament is even proposing that robots are “electronic persons” so AI holding copyright isn’t that far-fetched! Isn’t 2016 cool!)
- It creates multiple editions for the image, using ascribe, just like multiple editions for a wood etching, bronze sculpture, or photograph.
- It posts those editions for sale onto a marketplace. It could be centralized like Getty or Shopify, or decentralized like OpenBazaar.
- It sells the editions. It transfers the proceeds from the buyer to ArtDAO using the built-in cryptocurrency (say, Ether). It transfers the rights from ArtDAO to the buyer using ascribe. These are the rights to re-sell, to publicly display, more.
- Repeat! Create more art, sell it, get wealthier.
That’s about when the government might take notice too. That’s a lot of sales tax and income tax. But how do you tax a DAO? Especially if it keeps all the proceeds itself, rather than paying a human? The problem gets even bigger if the DAO expands outside the art market into producing other goods. This might be a fast-track to getting governments to pass laws recognizing AIs as people, who can hold copyrights and pay taxes like the rest of us.
So far, we’ve talked about an ArtDAO that generates visual fine art. It could also generate logos and themes for new startups. There are also AI algorithms that are pretty good at generating 3D designs, music, videos, and even entire films. Each of those could be put into a DAO.
We can get AI DAOs by starting with a DAO, and adding AI (DAO → AI DAO), vice versa (AI → AI DAO), or by transforming SaaS (SaaS → AI DAO). Let’s explore each.
In the recipe above, Step 1 could be expensive if baseline Ethereum was used for processing and storage, but we could outsource to 3rd parties. Processing could use a EC2, or a decentralized variant like Golem. Physical storage of the art work could be on S3, or decentralized with Storj, Swarm, or FileCoin; perhaps organized by IPFS.
Here’s another way to arrive at an ArtDAO, but in a fashion closer to The DAO. Like The DAO, it leverages futarchy, that is, prediction markets for governance. It also leverages TrueBit, where one can can request storage or computation task, to be solved by anyone in exchange for a reward. Here’s the recipe.
- Instantiate the ArtDAO with a normal crowdsale. Funds are held by the ArtDAO, which creates the shares for the tokenholders. The funds are used by the ArtDAO for various parts of its functioning. If its Ether is drained, it “dies”, unless made alive again.
- The first thing that ArtDAO instantiates (this is triggered by an external entity) is the process of choosing an external generative algorithm for use in creating these images.
- Several proposals are tabled to the ArtDAO upon which a futarchy is created for each proposal. The futarchy prediction market will bet which of these proposals will produce the highest income for the ArtDAO in two months’ time. The losing markets are closed and the winning markets keeps on trading, and turns into a normal prediction market: How much will the art be sold for in two months’ time. The ArtDAO is a maker itself for the markets.
- Now that the external generative algorithm has been chosen, it now solicits external actors to generate the images. This is where TrueBit comes in. In order for the proposal to have been accepted it needed to conform to how the TrueBit scheme verifies external programs correctly.