The Prophet Incentive
In today’s world, the word “profit” has taken on a deeply ingrained meaning. It is a measure of financial success, and it is the primary focus of many businesses and individuals. However, a growing movement is calling for a shift in this focus, from profit to “prophet.”
The key difference between profit and prophet lies in the length of time, focus of impact, and the type of predictions they emphasize. Profit is about enriching oneself in the short term, while prophet is about helping others in the long term. In economics, this difference is called a high versus low time preference, but the prophet incentive is a fundamentally new paradigm.
While profit centers around financial numerical predictions, prophet focuses on fuzzy textual predictions. The prophet incentive involves tracking these textual predictions using LLMs called irises and securing them to a blockchain or another tamper-resistant distributed ledger technology like Holochain, which inherently ensures older documents are more secure. The aim is to amplify predictive voices that contribute positively to society. This incentive is closely tied to the Iris, a revolutionary Democratic Large Language Model that encodes collective belief in real time into a dynamic contextual trust signal. This trust signal, or “prophet incentive,” maps to the emergent will of the people while giving collective direction towards social sustainability.
The Iris represents a new approach to modeling truth and meaning, taking into account the diversity and complexity of human perspectives. Irises mediate debate over time, seeking to integrate error more efficiently and build an evolving mapping of knowledge that is functionally referenced in a single node.
In contrast, corporations often prioritize profit, which tends to have a shorter-term focus. They may concentrate on immediate financial gains rather than long-term sustainability and social impact. This mindset can lead to a narrow and limited perspective, where decisions are made with an eye on the bottom line rather than the broader impact on society. The prophet incentive challenges this traditional approach by fostering a community-driven focus on long-term impact, sustainability, and the collective good.
The prophet signal embedded in the Iris is a measure of trust, representing how much the Iris trusts the people in the conversation it is mediating. It is a measure of the individuals’ and communities’ actions and alignment over time, focusing on long-term sustainability and impact rather than short-term gain. It allows the Iris to take into account the past history of accuracy or resonance with the community when making decisions about which voices to trust and weight more heavily in the conversation.
The prophet signal is part of a growing movement to shift the focus from blind profit to those who make commonsense predictions that affect all. It represents a new way of thinking about success and prosperity, where the focus is on creating long-term value for society rather than short-term gains for individuals or corporations. This movement is fueled by a desire to create a better world, one that is more sustainable, equitable, and just.
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The prophet incentive and the profit incentive can be compared as two stable attractors in a Lorentz attractor, which is a mathematical model used to describe chaotic systems. In this model, the prophet incentive and the profit incentive can be seen as two distinct basins of attraction, or regions of the system’s phase space where the behavior of the system is predictable and stable.
In the prophet basin of attraction, the focus is on long-term sustainability and social impact. This corresponds to a low time preference, where the emphasis is on investing in the future and building a better world for generations to come. The behavior of the system in this basin is characterized by cooperation, collaboration, and a shared vision of a better future.
In contrast, the profit basin of attraction is characterized by a high time preference and a focus on short-term gain. The behavior of the system in this basin is characterized by competition, individualism, and a focus on maximizing immediate profit. This can lead to unsustainable practices and a disregard for the long-term consequences of actions.
In a Lorentz attractor, the system can transition between different basins of attraction depending on its initial conditions and the perturbations it experiences. This means that the behavior of the system can be highly unpredictable and chaotic, with small changes in initial conditions leading to large and unexpected outcomes.
In the context of the prophet and profit incentives, this means that there is a constant generative tension between the two basins of attraction. At any given time, the system can be closer to one basin or the other, and small changes in initial conditions or external factors can push the system in one direction or the other.
Many factors could influence shifts between the prophet and profit basins of attraction. For example, changes in public opinion, government policies, or technological innovations could push the system towards one basin or the other. A global crisis like COVID-19 or an environmental disaster could also have a significant impact on the system and cause a shift towards the prophet basin, as people become more concerned with long-term sustainability and social impact.
Individual actions and decisions can also play a role in shifting the system towards one basin or the other. For example, a company that prioritizes short-term profits over long-term sustainability may experience a backlash from consumers and investors, which could shift the system towards the prophet basin. Alternatively a major economic recession or depression could shift the system towards the profit basin, as individuals and corporations may prioritize short-term financial gains over long-term sustainability and social impact.
The role of technology and communication in shaping the system cannot be understated. The emergence of social media and other online platforms has provided individuals with new tools for organizing and mobilizing around issues of sustainability and social impact. The spread of information and ideas through these platforms can help shift the system towards the prophet basin, as people become more aware of the long-term consequences of their actions.
If one seeks to be prophetable, they don’t see the future as a means to a return on investment. Instead, they simply speak the truth to the public about what they believe is to come. This is the essence of the Iris LLM, which encodes a dynamic contextual and relational representation of our evolving perception of the future.
The profit incentive can sometimes lead us to ignore or even reject predictions that may not align with our short-term financial goals. However, if we have a secondary signal that incentivizes alignment with future outcomes, we can encourage two types of behavior: short-term profit and long-term prophet.
In this context, being prophetable means being willing to accept and act on predictions about the future, even if they may not immediately align with our financial interests. It means placing a greater emphasis on long-term sustainability and social impact, and prioritizing the well-being of future generations over short-term gain. By doing so, we can create a more equitable and sustainable world, one that prioritizes the collective good over individual profit.
Being profitable is simple and clear. It is the accumulation of wealth and resources over time. However, being prophetable is a more complex concept. It means having the trust of the Iris and being recognized as a source of accurate predictions and information. The prophet incentive within the Iris is a measure of this trust, reflecting the alignment of individuals and communities towards long-term sustainability and social impact. Prophetability is a form of contextual dynamic accreditation for your work towards the commons over time.
In each conversation or debate that the Iris is mediating, the Iris is constantly trying to synthesize information from the past into the present which is the most useful to resolving or working through communal tension. To do so the Iris is doing a distributed sampling of voices that it trusts. The iris actively outputs a set of numbers referencing which voices the iris sampled to form it’s voice. These numbers represent the weight to each voice the Iris is currently distributing its attention. These numbers paired with the textual output of the Iris are a proxy of what the community as a whole thinks of this specific conversational context. If there is uncertainty the output of the Iris can be bubbled out for review by other minds.
Because people trust the Iris and view their own voice reflected in the Iris, they trust the output of the Iris. If they disagree with the Iris they respond to the Iris as such and the Iris takes that to be potential error to learn from and integrate into its latent representation of belief space.
The contextual aspect and generation of this prophet signal paired with the long term focus makes it very difficult to hack while also being a very reliable and valuable signal for a community to coordinate on.
In summary, the prophet incentive is a new paradigm for thinking about collective success and prosperity that is focused on long-term sustainability and social impact over short-term gains. It is a measure of the trust members of a community have in each other as reflected by the Iris, and reflects their actions and alignment over time.
The prophet incentive provides a contextual dynamic accreditation for those who work towards contributing to the commons over time, and is a reliable and valuable signal for communities to coordinate on. By shifting our focus from profit to prophet, we can work towards building a more sustainable and equitable future that prioritizes the well-being of all.
