Blockchain Thinkers and Smart Contracts to take over the World?

Automatically-executing smart contracts and their impact on society has been contemplated in many different contemporary science fiction works like Daemon (Suarez), and Accelerando and Glasshouse (Stross). The interesting point is that artificial autonomous agents are becoming increasingly full-fledged participants in the real-life contemporary world. There are many forms of artificial intelligence in development, and also the advent of new kinds of information technology like blockchains.

Blockchains could be an explosive operational venue for new kinds of autonomous agents like distributed autonomous corporations (DACs), a long-envisioned concept in computing and science fiction. Blockchains are a universal permanent public transaction ledger where smart contracts can be encoded to conduct certain activities in the future. For example, a smart contract could be used to specify a bet between two parties about the maximum temperature tomorrow. The smart contract, itself being online, will automatically check the temperature tomorrow per a pre-specified information oracle (like an Internet-based weather site) and pay out the proceeds to the winning party. Similarly, more complicated arrangements like mortgages (with interest rate resets) and wills (payout per a person’s death) could be encoded in smart contracts.

Far more complicated smart contracts could also be specified, for example for DACs where all corporate documents are encoded to blockchains. This would include the operating charter, governance rules, financial statements, client contracts, licenses, and other documents for orchestrating all manner of corporate conduct. A DAC would engage in the full suite of activities conducted by any physical-world corporation, except that all operations would be triggered to execute automatically per blockchain-based smart contracts. Since all of the DAC’s activities are blockchain-registered transactions, its operations are transparent and publically-inspectable on demand at any moment. Other advanced entities could include Blockchain Thinkers and fully-autonomous Blockchain AIs.

Smart-contract entities are a new concept that is not presently part of everyday human life, but is contemplated in science fiction works such as Daemon (Suarez), Accelerando and Glasshouse (Stross), and the Golden Age trilogy and Hermetic Millennia (John C. Wright). These narratives provide various portrayals of what life might be like with humans and autonomous corporations living in coexistence. On one hand, there are many potential efficiency and transparency benefits that facilitate societal interaction as agent motives and activities can be observed more closely and constitute a truer measure of reputation. On the other hand, DACs are a monolithic code entity that may execute unstoppably despite changing world conditions. Code has always been law (inexorably-executing), but the context for human interaction with such code has been more limited. In the current connected world, humans may be increasingly living side-by-side with different gradations of code-based sentient entities such as personalized robots, artificial companions, Internet-of-Things smarthome networks, self-driving connected cars, and Blockchain Thinkers.

Ethics of the future: self-copies

Just as the future of science and technology is rife with legal opportunities and psychological study possibilities, so is it with ethical issues. One interesting example is the case of individuals having multiple copies of themselves, either embodied or digital.

1. Can I self-copy?

The first issue is how different societies will set norms and legal standards for having copies. The least offensive first level would be having a backup copy of mindfiles for emergency and archival purposes, much like computer backups at present. People take pictures and videos of their experiences, why not of their minds? The other end of the extreme would be the most liberal societies allowing all manner of digital and embodied copies. The notion of regulating copies brings up an interesting potential precedent, that currently, the creation of children is largely unregulated on a global basis.

2. When and where can I run my self-copy(ies)?

A second issue is, given copies, under what circumstances can and should they be run. A daily backup is quite different from unleashing hundreds of embodied copies of oneself. Physically embodied copies would consume resources just as any other person in the world and there would likely be some stiff initial regulations since national population doubling, trebling or more overnight would not likely be a useful shock to society. Not to mention the difficulty in quickly obtaining and assembling the required resources for a full human copy; despite the potential advances in 3D human tissue and organ home printers by then.

Digital copies is the more obvious opportunity for running self-copies and could be much more challenging to regulate. In the early days, the size and processing requirements of uncompressed mindfiles would likely be so large that a runtime environment would not be readily available on any home machine or network but would rather require a supercomputer.

3. Am I a copy?

A third interesting problem is whether it would be moral for copies to know that they are copies, and the related legal issues regarding memory redaction as explored in Wright's "Golden Age" trilogy. Depending how interaction between originals and copies is organized, it may not matter. Psychologically for the originals and the copies, it may matter a lot. The original may 'own' the copies or the copies may have self-determination rights. In the case of an embodied copy, it is hard not to argue for their full personhood but somehow a digital instance seems to have fewer rights, although it may come to be that shutting down an instance of a digital mind, even with a recent full memory backup and integration, is just as wrong as a physical homicide.

Interesting ethical issues could arise for originals and copies alike as to what to share with the others; should horrifying experiences be edited out as Brin's Kiln People do at times? There would be both benefits and costs to experiencing the death of a self-copy, for example. It would not seem ethical to make self-copies explicitly for scientific research purposes to garner information from their deaths, but it does seem fully ethical to have multiple self-copies for with different life styles, some healthier and some less healthy to investigate a) whether a healthy life style matters and b) to selfishly share exciting experiences from less risk averse copies back with the longer-lived healthier copy.

Indeed in the new medical era of a systemic understanding of health and disease where n=1, what better control examples to have than of yourself! However, epigenetic mutations and post-translational modifications may be much harder to equalize across copies than memories and experiences.

The issue of the definition of life arises as some people may want the abridged meta-message or take-away from experiences, indeed this is one of the great potential benefits of multiple copies, while others may wish to preserve the full resolution of all experiences. The standard could accommodate both, with the summary being the routine information transfer with the detail archived for on-demand access.

4. What can I do with my self-copies?

Societies might like to attempt to establish checks and balances to prevent originals from selling copies of themselves or others into slavery to reap economic benefits, as dystopially portrayed in Ballantyne's "Capacity". Especially in a potential realm of digital minds, there are many potential future challenges with rights determination and enforcement.

The 'AI abdication' defense is the argument that societies that are sufficiently advanced to have the ability to run self-copies would also have other advancements developed and in use such as some sort of consciousness sensor identifying existing and emerging sentient beings and looking after their well-being, a beneficent policing. There are numerous issues with the AI abdication defense, including its unlikely existence from a technical standpoint, whether humans would agree to use such a tool, whether a caregiving AI could be hacked and other issues. However, technology does not advance in a vacuum and society generally matures around technologies so it is likely that some detriment-balancing counter initiatives would exist.

For example, would it be moral to create sub-sentient beings as sex slaves or personal assistants? This may be an improvement over the current situation but is not devoid of moral issues. At some point, as more about consciousness has been characterized and defined, a list of intelligence stratifications and capabilities could be a standard societal tool. Animals, humans and AIs would be included at minimum. A future world with many different levels of sentience seems quite possible.

Science fiction invention tracking

Science fiction has served as inspiration for real world design so many times that it would be useful to have a wiki with a rigorous index of innovations proposed in science fiction and a column for tracking their appearance in real life. At minimum, it could inspire the realization of imagined technologies not available yet. There is occasional anecdotal mention of the implementation of SciFiTech but no comprehensive list of ideas.

Everyday life is replete with examples, conceptual if not all fully realized. Heinlein’s remote communications device is the cell phone. Stephenson’s metaverse is virtual worlds like Second Life, where teleportation is possible. The molecular synthesizer or nanofabber is imagined for every home like Stephenson’s matter compiler, but no solution is envisioned yet for the deke (matter decompiler/recycler). The Internet was conceived in many science fiction tales (including Vinge’s “True Names”). The space elevator. FTL (faster than light travel). Immortality. Uploading and rembodiment. Distributed intelligence (Accelerando, Slant, Permutation City). Post-material scarcity. Transhumanism, posthumanism (To Hold Infinity). Multiple self-copies (Golden Age, Kiln People). A deeper contemplation of multiple permanent self-copies (digital or otherwise) and their interactions would be interesting, as would a more profound examination of the struggle for resource control across the universe informed by the ways in which society is currently evolving.

Concepts contemplated in great depth in science fiction (for example, Karl Schroeder’s (Lady of Mazes) rich virtual reality narratives with full upload copies of friends and family available for consultation and communication) become simplified in the early stages of their real life realization (Karl Shroeder’s narratives become Charlene Li’s “you’re friends are with you all the time [via Loopt, Latitude]”).

Upload world science fiction

It is strange that there has not been more in-depth exploration in science fiction about what mind upload societies would be like. A few aspects are examined in books like Accelerando, the Golden Age, Permutation City, Diaspora and the Cassini Division. Many issues could play out in fun ways in science fiction.

Trust in an upload world
In a world where everyone has uploaded their minds into computer banks and experience is simulated in virtual reality, what is real? How will checks and balances be established for trust and security? How do you know you are not being hacked? How do you know you are getting the bandwidth and processing power promised by your service provider? If you instantiated into an embodied form to go off-bank to check, how would you know that this has really occurred and is not a simulation of an embodied download by the service provider?

A science fiction story could revolve around escaping the upload service provider, finding its deviance (it has shockingly slaved entire banks of human minds to its own nefarious purposes) and overthrowing it to restore order only to find an even more evil system, like a spam-protection unit gone awry with emerging AI, now has the upload society in its clutches. The discrimination practices of the future could be delivering slower run-time environments to certain groups. The thematic issues to examine are the integrity, influence and control of an upload society.

Motivation and activity
What is the nature of being in an upload world? Is the construct of the individual still relevant? What are the driving motivations? What are the activities? What do minds do with 24 hours of run-time each day? If individuals can make copies of themselves, what are the legal and practical issues? How can constructive behavior be incentivized instead of regulated? An interesting story could ensue as an extension to the Kiln People concept, where a copy of a person mutates and wants to kill the original to assume its legal status. An interesting branch of future law may deal with copies interaction.

Societal dynamics
It could be interesting to look at how society redesigns and reorganizes itself in an upload world. Different subgroups may edit their utility functions in different ways. What are the reproduction norms? Do types of gender proliferate? Which memeplexes would arise and predominate? In the Post-Scarcity Economy, what will be organizing factors for society?

Information evolution
How do the Internet and the individual and the group evolve? In one interpretation, they are all just collections of information. Does distinction become meaningless at some point? Are there other distinctions that would be more relevant in an upload world? What establishes who owns, controls and has permission to view and create different information, whether people bits or data bits?