As we begin to ramp up for OODAcon 2023 (October 25th in Reston, VA), we return to the Fireside Chat with Futurist and Author Karl Schroeder on Digital Self-Sovereignty, Blockchain, and AI at OODAcon 2022. Find below a transcript of OODA CEO Matt Devost’s conversation with Schroeder about his book Stealing Worlds and how he integrated his ideas about self-sovereignty into his worldbuilding for the book. A link to the audio file is also included in this post.
We learned a lot from guests like Karl Schroeder over the course of the entire day at OODAcon 2022. And we will continue the conversation later this year, in October, at OODAcon 2023. Please join us. In the meantime, enjoy this first installment of this fascinating conversation.
OODAcon 2023
OODAcon 2022: Digital Self-Sovereignty, Blockchain, and AI
A Fireside Chat with Futurist and Author Karl Schroeder
Fireside Chat Description: You are big data. Every day the technology you own, use, and otherwise interact with (often unintentionally) collects rich data about every element of your daily life. This session provides a quick overview of how this data is collected, stored, and mined but then shifts direction to look at what technologies might empower users to better collect, access, and authorize the use of their own data through blockchain, digital autonomous corporations, and smart contracts.
A Working Definition of Digital Self-Sovereignty
“So what inspired you to kind of blend that technology stack together to create this vision of the future?”
Devost: Karl and I have the toughest job of the day – which is following Vince Cerf.
Let me give you a little bit of background as we wait for Karl to come up here. All of the speakers participating today are somebody that is in the OODA Network. It is people that we know, we’ve interacted with – with one exception and that is Karl. I picked up his book a couple of years ago – which is a science fiction book, and we’ll discuss some of the thematics – and I kept reading it going, wow, wow, wow. So of course, I did what any good person does, and I researched him on the internet and found out that he is also a futurist and involved with things like the XPrize and working with companies to understand which direction the future is going. So I reached out to him and said, you know, to my partner, Bob, I’m like, we need to get Karl here to speak at the event because it’s like having William Gibson and Alvin Toffler embodied in one person on stage. So, Carl, welcome, and thanks for joining us here down in DC.
Schroeder: Thank you so much for having me.
Devost: I highly recommend the book Stealing Worlds. So one of the things that I liked about the book was this world that you built – so I want to start there – which applies to all of these interesting technologies. There is blockchain technology, there is augmented reality, there is gamification to create this space that kind of defines an environment where individuals are able to achieve some aspect of digital self-sovereignty. Individuals are able to use these technologies to kind of go off the grid or onto a friendlier grid. And artificial intelligence is used to give autonomy or a voice to elements of the environment that we would consider to be unvoiced. So environmental impact sensors, et cetera.
So you address these issues of what happens if the trees have sensors, and the trees have a voice and there is some sort of AI representing it. So what inspired you to kind of blend that technology stack together to create this vision of the future – that was balancing out some of the net positive, net negative through some of these disruptive technologies?
Schroeder: Well, in a lot of ways the systems that are described in Stealing Worlds are kind of fork and toe – they are a combination of wildly different things and ideas to achieve a particular result. And I mean, blockchain itself is a great example of putting together game theory and incentive systems and this bizarre intersection of different ideas to create a stable Bitcoin. And I’m doing the same sort of thing in this book where I have augmented reality, live action, role-playing games, gamifying economics for the purposes of bootstrapping community.
A lot of the book is set in Detroit. So they are literally rebuilding the city by imagining ahead what it could be and gamifying themselves into it. But to do that you don’t use one thing.
Schroeder: You combine all these diverse sorts of systems and traditions and one of the messages there was that you don’t look for the “one technology to rule them all” kind of thing, right? We have this immense smorgasbord of things now that we can take and combine in unique and interesting ways. And there are communities out there that are doing that. Some of us write about that. Cory Doctorow writes about this kind of cobbling together of systems all the time.
“…owning the data about you that is gathered in such immense amounts by actors like Amazon. Amazon knows more about you than you do, right?”
Devost: Yes. I used to have Corey as required reading for my class at Georgetown, which people always thought was interesting for that particular reason. One of the thematics that I really enjoyed was the concepts around digital self-sovereignty. So for those that are not familiar, would you define from your perspective: what is digital self-sovereignty and what are some of the enabling technologies that will allow us to achieve that?
Schroeder: Yes. Self-sovereignty in this context can easily be confused with the libertarian idea of a sort of self-ownership. But what I really see is that it is about identity and the actual boundary of the self really. There is a movement in cognitive science – Extended Mind Theory – which says basically that we think not just with our grey matter, but with the physical world around us, and literally the objects and people around us are part of our thoughts. There is a book called Cognition in the Wild that describes how this works using near-shore ship navigation as an example. The point is that if the self is extended into the environment around us, then if you have other actors who are controlling that environment – then they are able to influence who you are – not just what you do.
This is a much more fundamental level than simply controlling what you decide to do in a sort of manipulative sense. Who we actually are as people is partly dependent on the context that we are in – largely dependent. And so I get terrified when I think of the sort of Ready Player One kind of vision of the metaverse – where we are in these virtual worlds that immerse us entirely in virtual sensations and places and so forth. Because what that is saying to me is that half of who we are is being swapped out by somebody else. So self-sovereignty, in this context, means controlling, or owning, or making accountable that half of yourself. What information can come to you, what representations and ideas can influence you, and – on a more prosaic level – owning the data about you that is gathered in such immense amounts by actors like Amazon. Amazon knows more about you than you do, right?
“…self-sovereignty is about privacy. But it is about the privacy of your extended self – not your personal ‘me sitting in the chair right now’….”
Devost: That was a favorite quote of mine from DEFCON a few years ago. Richard Dean said as it relates to that, that “we are known better than we know ourselves” – because of the data that is aggregated and the habits. So that self-sovereignty allows us to take back control of that – not only the way the environment is influencing us, but the way that our data is shared with all these providers.
Schroeder: Yes. And to crunch down into the details Tim Berners Lee has a project called Solid and has created a company called Inrupt – dedicated to a form of self-sovereignty where you own the data about yourself. So let’s say your medical records – that is your data. You store it in a particular pod. Your ownership details, your mortgage financial details – that kind of stuff. You also own that. So it is not the bank that owns it, it’s not the hospital that owns it, right? You have possession of that data, and you decide who gets to see what parts of it. I have a story called Eminence in David Brin’s anthology Chasing Shadows. And the story uses the idea of homomorphic encryption.
At one point one of the kids in the story is accused of stealing something. So he goes to the police, and he gives them the record that has tracked his motion. His cell phone basically has tracked where he is every second of the day for weeks. And he gives them his data, but – because it is homomorphically encrypted – they are allowed to make certain queries. So they can ask “Was he at the scene of the crime?” and get a yes/no answer out of the system – and know it is correct without actually finding out where he was. So privacy is preserved in, in that context, using that technology. To make it really, really simple: self-sovereignty is about privacy. But it is about the privacy of your extended self – not your personal “me sitting in the chair right now” – but the rest of me that is out there in the cloud and right now is owned by Amazon and other actors.
New Economic Models, Value Propositions, and Drivers
“…we start to enter a sort of post-monetary economy by finding different ways of incentivizing behaviors. Everything is going to be upended in the next few years.”
Devost: Interesting. And pulling that thread just a tiny bit more with regards to the economic model: right now, the economic model for how we interact with this data is driven by us being the value proposition. Amazon gives me book recommendations because I let it store the data. What will be the drivers to change the economic model? Do you think it will be driven by citizens that are more privacy-aware and want this digital self-sovereignty? Or will there be a new economic model that emerges that is a driver?
Schroeder: Well, I think we are going talk a lot about economics today. And in Stealing Worlds, I borrowed a lot of ideas from Elinor Ostrom and the economics of the Commons. And again, that is something I share with Cory that we are both really interested in “commons” models of allocation of resources. And I think for thousands of years we have had very simple toolkits for allocating resources. Money is a system for allocating resources, but now suddenly we have vastly more sophisticated ways of doing that.
And we are using those systems in our computing environments all the time. But one of the things I proposed in Stealing Worlds was that all the various ways we have of allocating resources through computing networks might start to bleed into society and become models for the way that people exchange services and work together – such that we start to enter a sort of post-monetary economy by finding different ways of incentivizing behaviors. Everything is going to be upended in the next few years. Let’s say that Elon Musk’s robot project works and suddenly the cost of labor plunges towards zero – while at the same time, we have massive amounts of wealth flowing from us to the billionaires, and soon the trillionaires, that we don’t own anything anymore. <Laughs>
This is the sort of scenario that I’ve got going in the book. And what do people do in that circumstance? Well, they have to invent their own world in which they do own things and essentially play them and create their own economies – basically bootstrapped out of nothing. Because we all know that a lot of what goes on in economics is a sort of consensual hallucination – which is what money is. It is all social engineering on a certain level. And we now have the tools to start reinventing that kind of thing on whatever level we want.
That sounds really abstract but imagine super-empowered community organizations. So the local Rotary Club with the power that, you know, the Stasi used to have in East Germany. <laughs> Or the CIA used to have in the sixties. Like massive amounts of computing and modeling and all kinds of access available to smaller and smaller groups of people. It is almost unimaginable what can happen there.
Bob Gourley and Vint Cerf Discuss Early Silicon Valley Lore, the Future of Neural Interfaces and Science Fiction
The Keynote Conversation at OODAcon 2022: OODA CTO Bob Gourley and Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf
The OODAcon 2022 Welcome Address by OODA CEO Matt Devost: “Surviving Exponential Disruption”
OODAcon 2023
Welcome to OODAcon 2022: Final Agenda and Event Details
