Leaders as Proxies; Sentiment as "Extended Will" of The Community, And Why I'll Never Be A Dictator
The reason why I put community sentiment first
Vlad Zamfir triggered a public storm recently when he challenged Nick Szabo in his medium post. First I want to say I've been positively inspired both by Nick Zsabo and by Vlad Zamfir. Positive inspiration is the highest compliment I can give to either of them. I also think we need to have public debates and would at least admit that I would like to see a structured organized debate with both Vlad Zamfir and Nick Szabo as participants.
I think it is important to put all ethical questions up for discussion. Whether it be the balance of privacy vs transparency, or immutability, or any other factors which influence governance. I do not think we should avoid or shy away from the debate but at the same time I realize it's difficult to have a debate because as Ohad Asor said in his most recent interview, the discussions don't scale. Currently we rely on community representatives to have public debates just so we can explore both sides of an ethical question and in medium format where people post blogs back and forth I do not think this is satisfactory nor does it scale long term.
In my view, my personal opinion of what is right or wrong is not enough to determine the right and wrong choice for millions of people. No matter how smart I might think I am, no matter how much I might study an issue, I can never in my opinion make the decision for millions of others who may have different knowledge, values, etc. We rely on satisficing due to the fact that at the end of the day brain power is the bottleneck and limitation. For this reason we don't really have what I would call moral clarity in the community but it is due to not having the tools to have well reasoned debates.
Leaders as Proxies
The concept of legal proxy:
A proxy is a person who is designated by another to represent that individual at a meeting or before a public body. It also refers to the written authorization allowing one person to act on behalf of another.
This is what I consider to be a leader in a public space. In other words this is a public servant who acts on behalf of the community they represent. This is not so different from what a software agent in artificial intelligence is supposed to do. The software agent is supposed to act on behalf of and in furtherance of the will of others. So this concept in my opinion hits at the root of the debate between immutability (fully autonomous software) and semi-autonomous software.
Fully autonomous without human sentiment in the loop would be like the AI which cannot be shut down, which is set, and which just runs, and if the community doesn't agree with the actions it takes morally then it's just too bad. If human sentiment remains in the loop then these software agents would be what I call the extended will or extended mind. In other words, when a human represents you in court, or in some official capacity, or is your political advocate or community advocate, they are a proxy who is fulfilling the obligation of pursuing your will. The human in this position isn't supposed to be in charge, or responsible for the decisions they make on behalf of the community they serve. The programmer simply writes the code on behalf of the community they are supposed to serve, the politician writes the laws on behalf of the community they serve.
Tauchain offers the promise of scaling discussion and of tracking sentiment
In Tauchain we have different options available to the community which are not available for Ethereum or Bitcoin. The unique competitive advantage Tauchain offers is state of the art community governance. We don't have the capacity for governance on Ethereum or Bitcoin because we cannot even discuss certain topics in a debate format. Even if we can discuss the topic, we cannot make progress and it's very hard to receive the input of millions of Ethereum users vs the situation of The DAO when it was just thousands. It becomes a situation where the community resorts to positioning Vitalik as the emperor who decides the disputes but this is centralizing around Vitalik who is just a person himself.
Tauchain does not require centralization around Ohad. This is something which in 2019 probably doesn't make a bit of sense because Tauchain isn't yet built and currently obviously is centered around Ohad. The point is if Tauchain can be built and if it does scale discussion, track sentiment, and do some of what many hope it can do, then Ohad will not remain the center of gravity. The community itself is the center of gravity and Ohad would just be one of the programmers, perhaps the lead programmer, but this does not mean every moral question or decision will be his decision.
In my opinion there is both power and freedom in this mentality. When you're not responsible for making the decisions for millions of people you can avoid a lot of stress, a lot of very difficult decisions which no normal person should have to make. If you can simply tell the community the choice is theirs, and provide them with the necessary tools they'll need to make the best choice they can? Well in this situation each individual owns their own choices, their sentiment would determine the direction of the ship. Tau could allow for avoidance of contradiction, for agreements to be made between millions of people, and for these agreements to be encoded as "contracts" or as "code" or as some combined hybrid. In addition, we will have the capacity for software agents, for bots, which can respond to sentiment, so we would have both a protocol which is self adaptive according to the will of participants and apps which can be adaptive to always changing concepts of right and wrong of an evolving community.
The questions of privacy, of immutability, of how to manage AI safely, are in my opinion too big and too important for one person or a committee of persons to make. In my opinion a community has to make these decisions and right or wrong the community has to accept responsibility both for the benefits and risks. The community which has evolving opinions over time (due to the composition of the community changing over time) in my opinion needs to have the ability to always change or update according to current ethical standards. The programmers who disagree with the current sentiment of the community can simply refuse to write the code. Eventually Tau will have program synthesis so even if the programmers don't write the code the community would still get what it wants by more direct rather than proxy means.
So it comes down to the community, down to the people who must decide what is right and what is wrong. Sentiment analysis and scaled discussion will allow millions of people to participate in questions without having to rely on proxies. It's going to be literally for you to decide what you want Tau to be, how you want Tau to be used, what you think are the red lines to not cross.
Mmmm...after visiting the site. Some nice ideas about enhancing communication between different cultures and languages yes.
Thoughts do have value, yes, in as much as they can enhance quality of life in general and in particular too. But then it is also true that, as the saying goes, "great minds think alike". This stems from the fact that anyone can discover the truth about anything at any time anywhere in the world - right where they are, within the realm of the reach of their own private minds.
This makes knowledge of the truth, or better put, insight into the true relationship between things, which is where the value of it lies, not something to which property rights can be attached.
Open rewards for sharing knowledge and insight in an intelligible manner, like in upvoted post on Steemit, should be perfectly in order though.
Not condemning the Tau though - I know far too little about that chain to speak an opinion about its makeup or about the philosophy behind it.
Just saying things the way I see it.
Sounds like an interesting project. Thanks for making me aware of Tau!
How do you think the development is going with this project? Do you think it will be long before Tau offers value in terms of a product?
I've blogged also about progress on that front. Development of TML is active and there is monthly progress. Currently TML.CPP is around 80% complete. By that I mean it integrated binary decision diagram and partial fixed point logic. It can run logic programs but it is missing negation.
I think once TML is complete then we can begin actually developing Tauchain using the Tau Meta Language to do it. We will be able to use machine intelligence to help us develop Tauchain in ways which no other project is doing. The machine intelligence could be considered "intelligence amplification" to assist with deveopment of Tauchain by scaling discussion, and by automated reasoning, etc.
For law, for morality and ethics, we benefit greatly from decidability. Partial fixed point logic in theory is supposed to support this critical function. I will know only when it's being used if it's meeting my expectations but right now it's looking good.
For me Tau will offer value when I can leverage TML or Tauchain itself to put my ideas into code. This I think will happen sometime later this year. I think right now the debugging and optimization phase is the main focus and this will be the focus probably for 3 more months.
From there I think we will have something to work with. Product I estimate to arrive in 1-3 months time but valuable product will not be here until later. I don't predict how long it will take but I do think once you have a functioning TML people will be surprised how quickly things snowball forward. People right now I think underestimate the benefit of machine intelligence because it's something very few developers ever used but then if it does work everyone can contribute to development which is why I think it will snowball forward.
Wow very exciting stuff. So you are saying after TML.CPP is completed things will snowball forward? thanks for the information and estimated time frame looking forward to the developments.
I expect things to snowball forward because once it becomes easier for more people to get involved in developing Tauchain then we will have much more rapid rates of progress. Additionally, if you can scale "conversation" then you can scale development. What is collaborative development? A group conversation of a formal sort.
Code is speech just like these sentences are speech. More speakers = more code. Knowledge also compounds upon itself.
Tau will make proxies obsolete. And ... sentiments? If you rule over / or proxy-lead / say, christians ... is you goal to be to send them to heaven ASAP? So much about the value of sentiments. They are not definable. Their semantics is weak to non-existent.