Combating the Metacrisis by Griff Green

Transcript

cool so welcome to the stage Griff green founder of giveth common stock stack General magic dap node and too many others for his talk on combating the meta crisis thank you Steph and thank you decentral here another one she couldn't name this many orgs that I found it uh yeah so thank you so much for coming to my talk combating The Meta crisis I want to talk about how we deal with the largest issues of our day uh this is and I think many people probably haven't heard of The Meta crisis so I'm going to give a quick brief introduction so a hundred

years ago there were only a few things that could destroy Humanity you know an asteroid hitting us like Kill the Dinosaurs but in 19 in the 1940s we created a nice way to Nuke the planet and now and since then we've come up with more and more ways to kill ourselves and uh well that's not good you know nuclear power risks climate change runaway AI or pandemics ecological collapse Mass extension extinction of the species how many ways are we going to come up with next you know I just saw on on Twitter today someone a crew in Japan made a way to actually turn images from your mind like read your mind and create images there's

new technology coming up every day that is creating more and more existential risk so the meta crisis is the crisis of crises we are having more and more crises coming up every day it seems that could destroy our way of civilization so when you survey all of these crises you end up recognizing one of the biggest issues behind all of them is our inability to coordinate globally So This Global coordination failures is key to solving the meta crisis we have to overcome that because we have just non-stop exponential technological

growth these two issues combined create more and more catastrophic risks that are going to lead to right now there's only really two potential scenarios that we see obviously the the most obvious one is catastrophic failures so we have some of these things just happen someone decides to you know play with some virus RNA in their basement and all of a sudden there's a virus that wipes out half the population oops right well the other scenario that could avoid these catastrophic failures is really dark some kind of dystopian centralized control structure where everyone is watched all the time to make sure they don't create that virus in their basement and it the real the likeliest

scenarios if we have a couple catastrophic failures and then we fall into some sort of dystopian centralized control out of fear this is the meta crisis so how are we going to address this because it's not something that can be solved it's something that we need to figure out how to manage maybe corporations and businesses can help us yeah not so much they have a lot of perverse incentives that actually create many of these existential risks move fast and break things right like we kind of ignore the existential risks that might come up with this AI program you know let's just let's just go get to Market satisfy our investors or oh yeah you know uh we could take care of our pollution ethically but well you know we

have a fiduciary duty to our investors so we're just going to pollute the river you know otherwise they would sue us clearly this is not the structure that's going to solve our problems you would think governments right the governments are uniquely positioned to deal with these kinds of issues but in the end there's there's a real geopolitical competition if the U.S decides to spend a lot of resources addressing some of these crises then China actually gains geopolitical advantage and this is what you see in climate change and and addressing this very well-known issue that governments are continually failing at actually working towards so there's these intergovernmental organizations that sprouted up after we created the nuclear bomb actually like

the UN and the U.N is of course they're going to solve these problems right yeah not so much I mean there's a war happening in Ukraine right now Russia is bombing Ukraine ever on a regular basis and they have 14 nuclear power plants including the largest one in Europe uh that exists like does anyone see a problem here right this this is there's a lot of issues and and there's actually some really cool non-profit work but they don't have the funding like Extinction Rebellion is an incredible organization globally just doing whatever they can to address this crisis uh of of like mass extinction but it's not enough it's not going to do it

who else is there uh are we screwed we have that choice we can be screwed you know we can just continue doing what we do in web 3 you know work towards building more pump and dump Ponzi schemes and you know trying to try to get that number to go up right or maybe we could actually use this Tech which allows us to coordinate globally in an effortless way to build the future that we want to see all of these issues right there's actually one that I think we've addressed with web3 and blockchain Tech I don't see the Global Financial

collapse the one in the bottom corner I don't see that one as a real issue anymore if all the Fiat currencies went to zero we have a whole network of really cool organizations that could address this issue ethereum Bitcoin Rye a stable like major shout out to amine I see him dancing around out there uh for creating a stable coin that doesn't isn't pegged to a fiat currency we have a network of networks that can address the Global Financial collapse if it ever happens so that we could continue our normal way of life and this was not created by governments it wasn't even really created by companies it was it was or obviously not non-profits it was created by purpose-driven economies so you know

there's a lot of words for these types of networks regen economies impact Dows I I'm I'm going for this one I'm going with purpose-driven economies shout out to Sherman from token kitchen for coining this phrase uh all of those economic systems that I had on the screen before they kind of if you if you like go up a level and look at the crypto projects in general they all follow the same pattern they issue a digital token and they use that token to reward the value creation that they want to see and then they ensure that there is some kind of demand for the token well if the project succeeds they have successfully ensured some sort of demand for that token and then they Market those use cases so that there's a group of people

who actually want the token that's created this token is effectively a package of digital scarcity that we can use to create real world abundance and get ourselves out of these crises so when you have people who create value and receive tokens and people who want the tokens for utility you end up with a market that then speculators can play with and it's the specular piece gets a bad name but honestly they're very critical to the success of the network because speculators can come in early and support the the or the launch of these purpose-driven economies and we're doing it we're addressing the crises one network of nested nested

network of economies at a time so like the climate crisis is is real and there is not a whole lot of action going on in the world uh in government space I mean they try they talk a lot but is anything happening well in crypto it's blowing up you know we got regen Network in cello and toucan building incredible infrastructure that anyone can use to actually build on top of and then we have Ponzi scheme projects like claima Dow that actually sequestered I don't know 17 million tons of carbon which is just incredible off of an OM Fork Ponzi scheme you know but they're building it on top of a network that's built to do this like that's great this is the Innovation that these networks allow and

of course refidal is going the next level yeah refat Dao uh refund I was partnering with a common stack to launch micro economies in various cities around the world to create incubate startups in the refi space it's super cool project and so yeah this these nested networks and there's going to be there's hundreds of projects that end up in this in this uh web of of economies these purpose-driven economies have a lot of interesting qualities first they rely on supply and demand for sustainability and for effortless coordination around providing value to society just like normal companies actually rely on supply and demand in

the market to provide value for individuals purpose-driven economy can provide value for Society at large which is usually only something governments and nonprofits can do and they coordinate effortlessly around it it's not like refidao has to ask solo if they can build on them right and the this is the best but most important piece is that there's actually entrepreneurial opportunities to make money in this space to make money saving the world and it's super cheap to deploy and and this low-cost actually avoids monopolies and it's these networks are very resistant to monopolies and actually anti-fragile because of their

interoperability if one project fails someone can just spin up another project and refill the void it's very anti-fragile and because of the win-win opportunities you have this natural free market cooperation and of course it doesn't rely on governments it can't be stopped it's Unstoppable borderless decentralized systems and at their best their protocols that anyone can build on well we're not there yet honestly it's still really hard to build in the purpose-driven economy space especially as a startup first off impact projects are not prioritized over the pump and dump scheme you know somehow the investors it's it's almost like a tragedy that

Commons issue free writer issue the investors are like no but my I got to get my wallet to have more digits in it you know uh well that's not going to matter if AI takes over the world okay like we should really think about the our priorities and also there is money in this space so they just have to take that Gamble and believe the other big issue is it's really hard to start one of these purpose-driven economies up unlike business models economic models need liquidity they need accurate price Discovery and this is something that the common stack has really focused on with its augmented bonding curve the augmented bonding curve allows micro economies to start up without the big VCS supporting them and still maintain liquidity and price discovery

uh there's a lot of issues of course I can't talk about them all uh so uh but one of some of the biggest ones are the current governance systems suck they're missing the full full spectrum stakeholder input it's all like how much money do you have okay you have a vote uh not the best and also our voting systems kind of suck anyway who wants to go read Forum posts all day and then like click yes or no like this is just dumb we can do better than this uh but I don't have time to talk about that so Lauren's talking about that tomorrow uh showing how giveth plans to bring world domination uh uh so check out that talk tomorrow at 10 20 and learn more about these issues on the impacts page right by the giveth booth

uh but one of the biggest issues with playing with this Purpose Driven with purpose-driven economies is we're actually creating existential risk when we play with new technology this is one of the biggest lessons of the meta crisis Bitcoin itself creates existential risk if we do have a Global Financial collapse and all this money goes funneled into the Bitcoin Network and one Bitcoin is worth a million dollars that means there's an incentive to spend more than six million dollars every 10 minutes on electricity to mine Bitcoin anyone see a problem right uh we have to be careful with how we design these systems when you build a bridge you don't just YOLO go to Home Depot and get

some cement you know your civil engineer looks at these things so we need to build a system of token engineering this is why uh the common stack supported the token engineering Commons and launching to build this kind of purpose-driven network around the study of token engineering and a major shout out to token engineering Academy who has been educating token Engineers for free and giving out certifications if you want to get in early on this new field of study that is the place token engineering Academy check them out uh but if we succeed at the token engine building a safe place to build purpose-driven economies and like we did so much work on Smart contract Audits

and you're welcome for that by the way if you know you know uh but uh but we really I mean Luna just happened and that was a token engineering issue they didn't build a good like uh they didn't build a good system there were no smart contract issues we need to build out that token engineering space but if we do that then we can build Global coordination networks to avoid the global coordination failures and we can still maintain exponential technological growth and mitigate these catastrophic risks so that we can have a functional technologically advanced Society if you like this work if you and you're building projects in this place I

recently launched a project called General magic that's a service dial that's here to help you build tools to adjust the meta crisis if you're building the public goods impact out space definitely look me up we can help if you need a designer or front end or any of that and uh also if this topic is of interest to you Kevin owaki has done a great job to bring people into this space he created crisisdow.com and a lot of the work a lot of the things I'm talking about here are derived from the work of Daniel schwartzenberger so thank you so much I I have a lot of Hope For Us in in uh in this in the web 3 space and to be here at 8th Denver is such a joy to be in The Vibes of the

biddlers so uh thank you so much for having me and I know we can make it [Applause]