Can we use Tauchain, EOS, Tezos, Ethereum, to bring about a new Age of Enlightenment?

Introduction

In many of my posts I speak of legitimacy, of achieving mainstream adoption, about growth, about thinking beyond merely today's market cap, today's activist concerns. Some may not know this but I'm very much a supporter of transhumanist ideals and one of the big issues is dealing with the current sociopolitcal climate which promotes ignorance. The current environment promotes ignorance, diminishes science, and this is a big problem because when faced with a question about whether or not to fund research into anti-aging we cannot even determine (due to politics) whether aging is a disease.

The Age of Enlightenment was critical to the rapid technical progression of society from which we owe much of our success. Science as we know it came about due to the Age of Enlightenment.

French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715, the year that Louis XIV died, and 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution. Some recent historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. Les philosophes (French for 'the philosophers') of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffee houses, and printed books and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church, and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, trace their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment.[7]

The Age of Enlightenment is associated in history with the Illuminati. The Illuminati in history had the agenda of promoting the Enlightenment. The Illuminati basically were the opposite of ignorant and promoted the opposite of ignorance.

The Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, "enlightened") is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious. Historically, the name usually refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on 1 May 1776. The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power. "The order of the day," they wrote in their general statutes, "is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice, to control them without dominating them".[1] The Illuminati—along with Freemasonry and other secret societies—were outlawed through edict, by the Bavarian ruler, Charles Theodore, with the encouragement of the Roman Catholic Church, in 1784, 1785, 1787 and 1790.[2] In the several years following, the group was vilified by conservative and religious critics who claimed that they continued underground and were responsible for the French Revolution.

Anti-aging research

We all are forced to grow old and as we do, our healthspan diminishes. We lose our abilities to do what we did in our youth, our ability to think is diminished with age, our muscle mass goes down, our immune system weakens, and in many cases we consider this to just be aging. The anti-aging research movement is tasked with the mission to pursue research to identify the biomarkers of age.

Today we assume that if you're a certain number of years old that you are a certain age. This is inaccurate because not all humans age at the same rate. We do not yet understand exactly how old any particular person is and we don't even know for sure what causes aging although there are various theories. Any young person alive right now who does not want to grow old has a rational incentive to want to support any research into delaying, slowing, or suspending the aging process. If aging is seen as a disease then it is easier to fund research into the prevention of loss of healthspan at the very least.

Decision science

The science of making good decisions is also under developed. Decision making is critical for anyone in any profession. A doctor, a judge, a jury, a voter, we all have to make increasingly critical yet complex decisions yet we don't have access to good tools from which to do it. In order to bring about a new Age of Enlightenment we need to improve the ability of the ordinary person to make sagacious decisions under time constraints. In essence, the average individual in the future will have to make much more complicated decisions under much more vicious time constraints than we deal with today. These tough decisions which currently require in some cases years of contemplation will have to be made in minutes by people in the near future. Artificial intelligence in the form of intelligent agents or decision support assistants can help with this process and for collaborative decision making this is an area of active research but will be critical.

Knowledge generation and diffusion

Knowledge generation and diffusion is also a major problem. New knowledge is currently so difficult to generate that really it's mainly the work of Phd students and researchers. To generate new knowledge requires access to all of the old knowledge humans generated in history. By building on the old knowledge from previous generations of humans, the future generations of individuals will be able to create new knowledge. Knowledge is something we arrive at to explain some phenomena and science is part of the process for generating new knowledge. The problem of diffusion of knowledge is that most of the knowledge or ideas being generated don't effectively spread to the global population in a timely manner. The knowledge tends to be centralized, and in cryptospace that is just as much the case as anywhere else which limits the generation of new knowledge.

Tauchain + Agoras - knowledge generation, knowledge diffusion, collaborative decision making with AI support

Tauchain + Agoras as promised by Ohad Asor will be the first serious attempt by any team in cryptospace to try to solve the problems of knowledge generation, knowledge diffusion, and collaborative decision making. Knowledge, ideas, facts, can all be stored as triples on a giant graph. Subject + predicate + object is all you need to store any fact, any knowledge, in a coherent manner. Tauchain itself handles the meta language element of knowledge so that machines can parse (make sense) of the shared knowledge base while humans and machines both can contribute to the shared knowledge base as well as make use of it. This shared knowledge base concept is key to ushering a new Age of Enlightenment and Tauchain is really the only serious attempt at doing so.

Lunyr speaks of creating a shared knowledge base but their attempt seems based on economic incentives rather than by technical means. It also seems to be mostly humans interacting by economic incentives so their attempt I predict will not scale because machines (AI) cannot make sense of their knowledge base unless they have an appropriate meta language for all to understand. Tau (TML) offers the meta language which is the core component making a shared knowledge base for all (including AI) possible.

EOS, iExec, Ethereum, Tezos, and Intelligent Agents

EOS, iExec, Ethereum, etc, can all benefit from using intelligent agents. Intelligent agents can access a shared knowledge base from Tauchain for instance and bridge the knowledge through token exchange between platforms. So Agoras for example could have a token which can be bought and sold or exchanged for any other token and the Agoras token can represent the total knowledge of the shared knowledge base as well as other resources necessary to process that knowledge.

EOS in particular has the performance niche making it great for mainstream purposes. To do the decentralized Reddit, decentralized Youtube, to do the virtual worlds and ARGs, we will require high performance. EOS will be fantastic for performance as it's built for performance while making the tradeoffs in other areas. If EOS finds it's niche then it can provide the high performance assets for other platforms including Tau based apps.

Tezos can potentially fill a niche as well because it has a functional smart contract language. This language will be of benefit because for financial purposes a functional language is actually preferable over many other languages and Wall Street already uses OCaml which is similar to the language chosen by the Tezos team. So for Wall Street Tezos could find a niche for high reliability smart contracts designed to trade billions in assets in a safe manner. For financial purposes Tezos could have advantages and could be useful for providing funding or even ICOs.

Currently Ethereum has the momentum and iExec can enable the development of intelligent agents on Ethereum. The problem is while iExec can work on Ethereum it will not be as sophisticated as what will be possible on Tauchain. Mainly Ethereum has first mover advantage and a legitimacy hype advantage over all other projects mentioned. Ethereum will go to proof of stake just like EOS and Tezos are from the start, but and will likely be in a dominant position for years going into the future.

Out of all of these platforms it is Tauchain which will enable the best in terms of intelligent agents (AI) but for the most part it is possible to simply in a technical way, "outsource" or "license" the capabilities to other networks using an API, or using token exchange, to allow for Ethereum users to get the benefits of AI on Tau, or allow for Tau developers to raise funds via an ICO on Tezos or Ethereum, etc. And of course for very high performance where you need to build it quickly then EOS will work great and can bring in the masses.

Conclusion

If all projects work together toward a goal of bringing about a new Age of Enlightenment then we can all achieve much more collectively than we can separately. We all benefit from better science, from better knowledge generation, from better knowledge diffusion, whether it means higher quality research for building future platforms and apps, or better designs due to AI assistance in the design process, we can all benefit with better science and engineering. We also can begin to focus on bigger and much more universal agendas such as anti-aging research, curing diseases. While not everyone is an anarchist, or cypherpunk, or hacker, the vast majority of people do not want to die from heart disease or cancer which are the two leading causes of death. While our governments tell us that terrorism is a big issue and uses this to support massive funding budgets, the actual risks statistically speaking show that 100% of us will die from aging if we don't do anything to either suspend the process or slow it down, and those who do will usually die from heart disease or cancer.

Let's form an alliance to bring about a new Age of Enlightenment across all viable platforms. The platforms I mentioned represent platforms which meet my criteria for being viable for these purposes but as an individual you may form your own opinions or in the future we may use better tools to collaboratively determine a more precise and logical set of criteria. The point here is that those among us who do not want to die, who do not want to lose our health, who do not want to see our loved ones die and or lose their health, can all agree to support any technology which would help make possible the suspension or and reversal of aging.

A new Age of Enlightenment means putting a focus on proper science, on a new and measurable ethics, on effective altruism, on engineering a better quality and greater quantity of life. Beyond this we can debate but in order to use this technology for good we need to focus on transcending our limitations, whether it be involuntary ignorance, aging, diseases, etc.

References

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati
3. http://www.tauchain.org/
4. http://www.eos.io
5. http://www.tezos.com
6. http://www.iex.ec
7. https://futurism.com/is-aging-a-disease-one-medical-expert-thinks-so/
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037311/
9. http://dailysignal.com/2017/05/09/growing-problem-fake-science/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience
11. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/2016-anti-science-trump-pence-flint-nra-hurricane-matthew/