We present Part II of the Fireside Chat with Futurist and Author Karl Schroeder on Digital Self-Sovereignty, Blockchain, and AI at OODAcon 2022. Part I of the conversation can be found at:
Science Fiction Writer and Futurist Karl Schroeder on Digital Self-Sovereignty at OODAcon 2022
Featured Image: OpenAI’s DALL-E with the prompt “A forest with legal personhood defending its interest in the style of Kipling.”
Following is a transcript of the second half of OODA CEO Matt Devost’s conversation with Schroeder about his book Stealing Worlds – and Shroeder’s insights about the coming wave of innovation, what has surprised him most in the last five years, work he has done with a design company to bring a technology system from his book to life in the real world, and his ongoing efforts with The Deodands Project. 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 2022: Digital Self-Sovereignty, Blockchain, and AI
Part II of A Fireside Chat with Futurist and Author Karl Schroeder
Matt Devost: I want to shift a little bit. You just spent time with the XPRIZE folks – the most recent event that you were at [before joining us here at OODAcon]. What sort of innovations would you like to see, or think are probable over the next 10 years, which will be disruptive?
Karl Schroeder: Well, there are a couple of areas that are changing rapidly, and you have to look at things that have not changed and so we have looked away from – the obvious example that comes to mind is space. Nothing changed there for the last thirty-five years. So we have all sort of thought “Okay, we understand space and what it can do. We put up satellites every now and then. That’s what space is, right?” And we spent an immense amount of money to put an astronaut up every now and then and they rode around like on a bus for a while looking down. So, we understand that. But that is not what the next twenty years are going to look like. Everything is changing there all at once.
And when I was at XPRIZE, I was meeting all kinds of young, 25-year-old CEOs of space companies building everything you can imagine – automatic factories and power beaming systems and so on and so forth. So that is going to change very, very quickly. Let’s see…robotics. It only has to do a few things to be massively disruptive. So the Tesla Bot is not going be able to do very much, but my mother is in her late eighties, and she’s having trouble now getting herself out of the chair to go to the kitchen to get something. All you need is something that can do that for a person, and you have a massive disruption.
So, yes, just two areas. I am not as interested in the metaverse as [much] as a lot of people I know. It’ is really popular. But, to me, everything that is interesting happens in the world that I can see. So for the last twenty years, I have been writing about augmented reality and extended cognition and augmented cognition – as it pertains to your immediate environment. I am not interested in stepping into somebody else’s virtual world. I am interested in overlaying this world with the indicators that I need to know how to navigate my way back to the airport after I’m done here – and things like that. Where to find a shop that, you know, in my immediate neighborhood and I can see an explosion in that sort of thing as soon as we get augmented reality glasses that actually work.
Devost: As a Google Glass adopter – I was one of the first early candidates – it was pretty fascinating the impact that technology could have. For navigating unknown cities, you are getting the turn-by-turn directions – but probably one of the most interesting things is I participated in an event where they had an icebreaker app. It basically knew some things that were of interest to you, and it navigated you to other people in the room that had similar interests. Which is kind of a fascinating use of technology. And that was then years ago. I do want to ask this, and I warned earlier, what is something that has surprised you the most over the past five years?
Schroeder: I think for me it is the discovery that the computing technologies that we are working on and with these days are actually social technologies. Blockchain is a social technology. It only works because we have basically started training computers to do the kinds of things that we do when we decide whether to trust people. You know, Bitcoin works because the system builds a network of trust, and it does so in ways that are analogous to the way that we designate people in certain ways. So, for instance, the President of the United States is not something that exists as an objective object. It is not like an electron or a proton, right? It is a socially constructed thing. A bitcoin is socially constructed by the computer network. And I think it’s really valuable to look at a lot of these technologies as evolving away from nuts-and-bolts algorithms towards metaphors or analogs to social systems that already exist.
There is a convergence, in other words, and social systems become much more interesting as models than technical systems for what we are evolving into. But I am a designer, really, and I design ideas and what we were talking earlier about, or you were talking about exponential change, and I just want to throw an idea, again – this is a design and intervention.
You have heard of the “Technological “Singularity” where, you know, the pace of change goes exponential – technological change becomes so rapid that we cannot track it anymore. I have an alternative to that – that I call the “Technological Maximum.” And it is simply based on the same kind of technological hack that gives us DALL-E and Midjourney and other systems that create something out of nothing. What if you have a system, like MidJourney, where you give it a prompt, but it doesn’t produce an image. It produces a device.
Schroeder: So you say, “I want something that toasts my bread.” And it produces a design for a toaster in exactly the same sort of diffusion model way – but using technical plans and things rather than a library of images. Then what you have is what I call tech technological maximum. You cannot actually have technology advance beyond a point where you can simply summon any device to do what you need. That is it. So how far are we away from that at this point? I’ll throw that out as a question. And if that kind of system is possible – then change is going be asymptotic. Boom. Boom. And then flat – because at a certain point, we can do anything technically and there is no more advancement after that.
Devost: I would be interested to see how we build trust into that model – which has come up multiple times as well, you know, how do I trust that it is going to toast my toast and not give me cancer along the way. But I love that concept.
Two additional questions I wanted to touch on with you: one thing that I, that I found interesting in the book [Stealing Worlds]- and we actually had a keynote on it in the Fedcyber days – on gamification and the role that it plays. You really viewed, at least in the book, gamification is a key driver of these alternative economic systems, of building community value, of being able to utilize resources that were unutilized through these collective things – but then also as a mechanism for evading the system – if we talk about the system you defined as representing a portion of our environment and being digitally manipulated.
Can you step us through why gamification was so appealing to you? Do you feel like it really is a great change agent? Because we are gamifying everything, right? Like, how many Twitter followers do you have? How many likes did you get? You know, there are whole subcultures where we are gamifying everything in our life. So do you feel like that’ll be the key driver for some of these changes? Technology changes?
Schroeder: Well, this is related to the idea of trust and the erosion of trust because very closely related to issues of trust are very closely related to issues of incentive. How do you get people to do things? So in the absence of trust, you can still have incentives – and you can therefore gamify things that used to require trust. Or, in situations where there used to be trust, you can replace trust with different incentive systems. It is unfortunate if you have to do that – because trust is always a better option – but what happens in the novels is that people basically invent their own economies. This is happening all the time right now. There are a lot of online games – massively multiplayer games – that have their own built-in economies.
The space-based ones are, I think, the most sophisticated for this. So what I have happen is people say “Okay, let’s do this, but let’s do this with a LARP – a live action role-playing game.” I just worked with a design company to create one of the systems that I describe in the novel.
I’ll briefly describe it: It is a courier system where you’ve got a phone app and you say “I am going to be going downtown to the phone app. Is there anything I can do?” And it says, “Well, yes, there is actually a package you can deliver for us. And it’s at such and such a location.”
You walk out of your house, you go to the location, and you find chained to a bike rack by a bike lock is this briefcase. It is opaque and white. You cannot tell what is in it. So you say “Yes, I might take this – and the instant you click “I might take this” on the phone, the briefcase goes transparent, and you can see what’s inside it. Because it is made of – I forget the name of it – it is a kind of plastic that if you put a current through it – it goes transparent. So, okay. That is what I am delivering. That’s fine. You get an address, the bike lock automatically unlocks, you have the briefcase, you can take it downtown. You deliver it to where it is going go and, at that point, it will unlock for the recipient.
And then you get points. Now let’s say you are playing a live action roleplaying game where you are “The Count of Such and Such” – and you are carrying a very important, or you are supposed to carry – a very important diplomatic pouch in the game, right? Well, then, that briefcase can be instantiated as the pouch in the game. And you get prestige, you get all kinds of different advancements and so and so forth in the game from carrying this package.
Now, two things about that. You are doing something not for money, but you are doing what is essentially an economic activity. And the other thing is that this design team that I was talking about actually built this. So it exists, right? So right now you have in the world a system that can gamify a particular kind of economic activity. Now you can start generalizing from that to all kinds of other different things that you could do in the city during the day that would also give you incentives in the game, but would also provide real world benefits. So, take that, multiply it by a million and you get a new kind of economy.
Devost: Interesting. Of course, my mind instantly went to Daniel Suarez and the crowd swarming to compile the components of a bomb.
Schroeder: Right, right. Didn’t exist. Yes.
Image Source: Open AI’s DALL-E with the prompt “The Deodands Project”
Devost: Right. So thinking through the risks of that as well. Sure. My last question was actually going to be – and you just answered it. If you could will into life in the next five years any technology from the book, what would it be? So would that be your answer? Or would there be another one that you would select?
Schroeder: Well, apparently, that one has already happened. The other one that I’m working on is The Deodands Project. And this is a design hack like the “Technological Maximum” as an alternative to the “Technological Singularity.” The Deodands is an alternative to the “Killer Robot” vision of ai. A Deodands an artificial intelligence that thinks it is some particular natural system – such as a forest, a river, or a pod of whales – and acts as a rational actor to defend its and further its own interests. In other words, the forest wakes up, the river wakes up. They start to litigate. They start to make business deals. They start to function as agents in the human economy on their own behalf. This is a deodand.
And we are not very far away from building those as well. We already have legal personhood for natural systems. So the Magpie River in Quebec, for instance, was just granted legal personhood (see also: Quebec’s Magpie River Is Now A Legal Person). Once you have a river that is a legal person – and you attach an artificial intelligence to it that thinks it is that river – then you have an entirely new kind of agency in the world. And, in Stealing Worlds, I have millions of these things appear. The entire natural world wakes up and says “Oh, well, we’d like to play too.” But of course, they act in their own interests – which turns out align pretty closely with ours. So I would like to build deodands. And I am actually working actively with a group of pretty amazing technologists and thinkers to do that right now.
Devost: Interesting. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. And Karl will be with us for the whole day and through the reception, so please interact with him and welcome him into the community. Love the book, love the insights. Thank you so much.
Science Fiction Writer and Futurist Karl Schroeder on Digital Self-Sovereignty at OODAcon 2022
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