AKASHA at Dublin Tech Summit: From Collected Intelligence to Collective Intelligence

Transcript

Thank you very much Åsa, now we heard a little bit about blockchain this morning and our next speakers are going to tell us more on the same theme, we've got a fireside chat now, between Mihai Alisie, Co-Founder of Ethereum, and the Founder of AKASHA and Bitcoin Magazine, and he's going to be talking to Pete Townsend, Founder of Norio Ventures. Please welcome, speaking about going from Collected Intelligence to Collective Intelligence, Mihai and Pete. Good afternoon Dublin.

Dia dhuit Dublin. How are we doing? I see we got a nice change over the crowd going here which is fantastic and our minutes are ticking away, Mihai, you’re down to 18:48. Wow. Let's get started so, I’m Pete Townsend, Founder of Norio Ventures, Principal at thestartup.com, Author of Chaos, Co-host of MoneyNeverSleeps Podcast, available for download on iTunes and Spotify now. Mihai Alisie has joined us is visiting us from the the wonderful Canton of Zug in Switzerland where his headquarters is of the AKASHA Project, which he founded a few years ago, and he’s also well known as a Co-Founder of Ethereum

and Founder of Bitcoin Magazine, so, welcome to Dublin. It’s a pleasure to be here, hello everyone. So, Mihai, let’s get started, what we’ve kind of talked about is, with what you’re doing right now, there are some important formative moments of your life that took place less than 10 years ago more or less that have kind of led you down this path, maybe you want to just give us some insight into that? Sure so, if I was to pick the start of the formative moments, I would go to when I was around 10 years old and, y’know, as a little kid, when you hear thunderstorms and you have lightning in the sky and so on, it’s like magic and you’re afraid.

Then I stumbled upon one of these little books on physics in everyday life and then I found out that if you count the seconds between when you see the light and hear the sound, you can actually have an idea on how far that lightning is, and that made me believe that the world around you can be understood if you try to. In the next years I started learning English by watching movies with subtitles and playing games and that was also an interesting way of kind of tapping into a whole different areas of knowledge that were kind of encrypted before, and I had a strong interest in computers which led me to informatics in high school and later on in cybernetics, statistics and

information economy at university. So, this is around 2010, and this is also when, due to a family health problem - my father had a stroke - we went to this physiotherapy hospital, this is, by the way, in Sibiu, Romania, I’m from there originally, and that that's when I heard from one of the nurses that I was lucky and we were lucky to benefit from the treatment in this hospital and from the personnel, because the hospital was about to be shut down soon, and I'm like "why?" because I saw a miraculous recovery from my father and there was also a younger person that was in a car accident recovering, so regaining the ability to enjoy life. That's when I found out

that actually there were some deep interests involved, and that the owner of the building was actually the local church. I was thinking: "what, how can that be?" and then I said "no I'm gonna do something about it." For the next couple of days I really tried to figure out what I could do to stop this from happening and, in the end, I figured out that I cannot really do anything on my own and that's when I started gathering emails from all like the local newspapers, the local blogs, the local TV stations and national, and I asked them to look into these problems: "this is a good thing we have, my name is Mihai and this is what is going on."

And actually, the reporters started to go ask questions about what's going on; the largest newspaper in the the local area published my I email, which was a bit of a surprise, and the effect was that two weeks later a local politician capitalized on the public order because people were like: "what the church shutting this place down and how can that be?" Then this local politician said: "hey this hospital is actually a really good thing we have here, we shouldn't shut it down" so many people said "wow that guy is a really cool politician we should vote for him!" And then the hospital was not shut down. Yeah that was for me a moment when I realized that real change and making things happen is not just in

a movie/movies and you can do something and things happen or don't happen because people know about them or don't know about them. Yeah so like you kind of said to me earlier Mihai that once you get enough people caring about something that's when real change starts to happen. Now moving on from there and thinking about that important formative moment and knowing that you have this and that you can influence others right? Bitcoin Magazine, the opportunity to launch that came along, tell us how that started and how did that lead to the next thing? So, basically around 2011 in a random conversation with someone from Argentina -

Thank You Internets - he mentioned a decentralized digital currency thing named Bitcoin. I forgot the name Bitcoin but I recalled the decentralized digital currency, and then a couple of weeks later I kind of remembered and then I searched and then I stumbled into Bitcoin and I was coming already with this idea that some things happen or don't happen when people know about them, and when I was trying to learn is this actually a real thing you know or another Nigerian prince thing? It was hard especially in 2011, the main source of information was a forum - bitcointalk.org - a small village of sorts, and it was challenging that's when, some of the articles I stumbled upon were written by Vitalik, and we got in touch, and you

know we kind of agreed that it would be a really good addition to the landscape to have a coherent source of information, education, outreach, and so on so people more people get to know about this so maybe it would happen. And just again getting that community thing going, building that virtual, global community, right, to an extent. Then after Bitcoin Magazine or, that kept going, but Ethereum you were a co-founder of Ethereum. Yeah so you know, after launching Bitcoin Magazine and so on, it was like a really interesting opportunity to get to know this space from within, rather than from outside, and also it gave us... in the beginning it was like: "oh Bitcoin is the one, it's the Silver Bullet"

and so on but it was a learning experience for us to understand the limits of what this thing can be it's not that one size fits all and like all our problems are solved and so on. It was clear until 2013 that it was mainly designed as kind of a digital cash, single use case or application, in this case a decentralized ledger for digital cash. And then, round the end of 2013, it was also during some of the conversations with Vitalik that we were talking about DAOs as distributed autonomous organizations and how would that fit into the bigger picture. It was also a moment where we kind of realized that you have, and also you know

that question "what is blockchain?" that also the explanation shifts as your own understanding of what this thing is evolves and it was this understanding that evolved from: blockchain equals money of sorts, to: blockchain equals the world computer, a general-purpose, programmable kind of thing through smart contracts that was a really big shift and if you think about it we're here in the first decade after the invention of this technology still scratching the surface of what can be done, and, in January 2014, with Roxana and a few others, we travelled to Switzerland: as a co-founder of Ethereum one of the things I spearheaded

was the search for a jurisdiction: what would be the home for this project? And that's when we went to Switzerland, to the Zug Canton, which also might be known as "Crypto Valley" for some so if you've heard that that's Zug. Mihai came up with "Crypto Valley" right? down with Silicon, up with Crypto! It was during one of the discussions with the local authorities when I was trying to also present the opportunities: this thing is not just about Silk Road and, you know, the classic kind of cycle of mainstreaming "what about the children?" There's more than just the bad stuff, and, following this, there was the genesis of the Ethereum blockchain. So after we'd had a very

successful, and I think for a brief moment, it was the biggest crowdfunding campaign, that was successfully done as a one-time event so we raised the equivalent of $18.5 million in Bitcoin it was kind of a cypherpunk inception way of using a digital cryptocurrency on blockchain to build the next blockchain. And when the blockchain was launching - Ethereum - we had the first block it's was like "everyone, it's still working," the second block, the third, the first 100, "wooh this thing is live" so from like a dream of sorts it became like a platform for other people to build their dreams and also I felt that as a co-founder, my duty it was kind of fulfilled and I stepped down from the Ethereum Foundation as

vice president, and focussed my energy on trying to figure out what we can now build with this thing since it's real. Well, tell us about the inspiration for the AKASHA Project. So, I think in a way if you if I look at these moments that we you briefly touched upon I think it's a continuation of that lesson. The pieces that we tried to mix first was: can we built a decentralized social network that does not have a central point of failure or us being in the middle of this information flow between people? And, after a few weeks of testing, together with Marius and a few others, we actually got to the point: yes this can work but it's not just a blockchain thing. So, we have Ethereum and beside Ethereum we have a bunch of

other complementary technologies one of them being the Interplanetary File System, shortened as ipfs, and basically we used ipfs to store the information: the contents, you have videos, pictures, texts, and so on, and use the Ethereum blockchain as an index so people could see what has been published and then people would connect to another person and peer-to-peer. Yeah that's a big thing, it is all peer-to-peer right? I think, if I'm not mistaken, we were the first ones that we actually tried to mix this technology in this way, successfully, but now it's kind of normal like this was like early, or actually, late 2015. I mean if you think about some of the social networks that are out

there today there is a central priestess of trust component to all of that and that opening that up and saying that it doesn't need to be about one single group that has control of all that data that it can just be, its distributed, it's decentralized, it operates on a peer-to-peer basis that's a pretty strong proposition. Yep and there's also like this, we're in such a bad position like this is such a big problem when you think about like imagine this for a second so we are this 7 billion plus, planet, filled with beautiful human beings each unique in their own way and then we have like this giant hypercentralizing relationship established between these

human beings, and we have this entity running this service you know you have the Facebook and others but in particular you have Facebook being the biggest one, and you have this entity with ability with a single command line silence half a planet: where's the intelligence in that intelligent species? You also have these other problems so I'm gonna use this as a huge prop here, you know the data information-knowledge-wisdom kind of triangle and you have like the lower layer being data, and then you have information, and then you have the knowledge, and then, hopefully at the top there, you have some wisdom, but in the current kind of for the situation we have like a vast amounts of data the "Big Data," and you have like some information

and when I say some information when it comes to Facebook and other social network operators you have the information that is derived from your personal data that helps them serve you "better ads" and then you know the knowledge and wisdom is very thin so you don't have a pyramid there, so on the other side we also have this understanding and this talk about the "global village" but whenever you will hear this again about the global village also ask: who sees themselves as the mayor of this global village and in this case is like you have usually here an entity or corporation or some sort of person kind of already projecting themselves in that power position.

And on the other side, with AKASHA, what we want to do is we have a layer of open data and the information and all this stuff that can be derived with an approach that is interoperable by default and then, you know, in the hopes that we can redistribute knowledge and hopefully, from that, derive some wisdom in the society as a whole because we need it, if we are to stand a chance to solve some of these big challenges that we face as a civilization. Some of these peer-to-peer opportunities that we talked about before Mihai were along the lines of improving humanity and improving the ability for individuals to use the creative side of the brain right rather

than analytical side of the brain and by having this information presented in a decentralized way how these communities connected what what are some of the, perhaps, use cases that you think could be interesting that along the lines of helping humanity get back to that notion that was brought about the book sapiens of 100 to 150 people being kind of you know, the real climax point of what a group can get done. There's a lot of interesting research on this topic and maybe this is a rabbit hole that I explored a bit deeper because we were operating in this social network space and starting from the brain right, we are wired with this social brain and in nature you kind of

have these natural incentives like: sex is good, you do it, you ensure reproduction of the species we have kind of a similar let's say desire where we long to belong to a community or some group of people and I, an assumption here might be that this is nature's way of incentivizing us into connecting to this kind of network so like one of the key elements of humanity's success to this point was the ability to come together in groups and achieve what we cannot achieve as individuals so in a similar kind of fashion when we also look at the collective intelligence versus collected intelligence like again if you use this pyramid. Today and the

ways this information society is like a collected information society right so when I say collective intelligence, this also complements the side, and you have many people and projects talking about AI but when I say CI is like, and I know this metaphor is not really applicable, because we usually use both hemispheres, but I would say that the AI might be in a more like the logical, analytical side of the brain and then on the other side we have this creative side that is kind of natural to us as humans which kind of the creative side or the the right hemisphere and many of the talks and you know made about the future of our society or the implication of technology and so on, seem to kind of discard that humaness, that side of us, and what is humanity

without that thing? A big question there, so I think that also points to, and the CTO of NASA in his very cool presentation, was talking about you know we have this group of people on Mars for example or so, what if they cannot communicate with the home planet like what happens to them so I would argue that we as individuals being networked and part of these groups we exhibit this naturally, this collective intelligence, but simply, until now, we either discarded this side of our humanness; in general, masses have been seen as this dumb thing not from Freudian theory and so on, in general, looking at the psychology, but I would argue that we're

actually very smart and if you would look into the future, what does it mean, also when looking at the bigger picture, applying this on planet Earth let's say for now, and have, you know, the Internet of Things, smart cities, and all this discussion, like, what is a smart city if not it would be composed by smarter citizens so I come from this perspective that we could use this ability, natural ability of us to connect with each other, and these mini supercomputers in our pocket, to build something that facilitates this collaboration between us as individuals and as part of collectives without losing our individuality. Something to keep in mind here is that you know some people see these collectiveness as

using the uniqueness of the individual being absorbed in a poor kind of fashion, but that would be a dumb collective, you need diversity so all the talk on the differences among us standing in the way of progress this is actually a feature not a bug, that makes the collective smarter it brings up and opens it to many perspectives and I'm talking about race, knowledge, technology... a bunch of other things that come together in not something limited to to something specific, diversity is good in all areas here. I really like this smart cities concept, you know, well, rather than smart cities, we're talking about smarter

citizens, and that each of us are organic sensors in our own right, picking up human feeling and emotion and perception and sensation and that that then becomes part of a collective, right? And that you are you were bringing these communities together virtually I think it's a pretty strong proposition, a couple of the other things you talked about as well Mihai were: imagine being able to let it community know quicker that a storm is coming, or a tsunami is coming, perhaps crowdsourcing the conversion of an exoskeleton that is used for military purposes, using that as to solve paralysis, right? Or even getting a Big Pharma company to open source the development of a new

drug. Or not and relying on a Big Pharma company to steer the direction of our research but rather tap into the collective intelligence we have and analyze from you know purely humanitarian, or also from a humanitarian, not just the profit driven kind of: "what makes sense oh we won't invest in this, even if it will cure this disease for billions of people because it's not patentable or easy to make a profit from." And I think this also points out the way we are kind of in a hangover from the industrial society and like the military top-down control view, where even if you look at the companies and in general when you have a description of someone it's like: chief executive officer, chief

operating officer, why is it an officer? This, I think, points back to the military kind of way. And in military in general when you look you have strategy and planning around the enemy but the more you kind of base your whole strategy and your your plans around the enemy, the more you've become like that so hopefully in the next and what we will understand and what we can bring in the future would be this not just coming together against the common enemy but also realizing that it makes sense and everyone benefits if we come together for the common good, looking at that those win-win-win situations and it is possible. Also, multi testing of various governance systems:

today we operate in a world that was built under the limitations and some of the restrictions around 200 years ago so. It's outdated, it's become outdated. Looking at the future with what AKASHA will be enabling what are you most excited about? That's a that's a big one so I think this event is a perfect example of some of the things to be excited about, and it's not just one particular piece of the puzzle, I think the exciting thing is the convergence of all these things coming together so you have the communication technology, you have the manufacturing technology, like 3d printing, blockchain, and testing of these governance systems that you can experiment with, you have also the cryptocurrencies,

information as value, so I think what these things, and what I'm most excited about, is that: without even realizing it, we're kind of building the pillars or the puzzle pieces that would enable us to build new operating systems for our society it doesn't have to be you know one thing to rule them all it can be many, coexisting and coevolving, monocultures in general are not ideal right, so we're talking about benefits when it comes to resilience, faster response times, the ability of people to organize without having to go through the command and control, you have the increased efficiency and, sometimes, if you think about, it why do we have these

institutions why do we have this kind of government idea? It was designed to serve the citizens and make their lives better so if we have now the pieces to kind of operate, or if you like, build the next model, why not? I gotcha, makes sense, Mihai thank you, really appreciate you coming to Dublin to do this, thank you to everybody out in the crowd and we'll see you again soon, thank you.