Bioform Labs
Developing Sentient Ecosystems and Economics
At this very moment, the Earth and nearly all forms of life are being consumed by a voracious economic engine of industrialization and extraction. This dynamic cannot be reversed by applying the same economic system that created it. A new economic system is needed, one that is grounded in first principles, capable of learning and self-correcting without generating negative externalities.
Bioform Labs is a new AI-ReFi living technology studio with the mission of importing real world living social and biological entities such as forests, marine ecologies, habitats, communities, and socio-cultural systems into the virtual world to catalyze and measure impact on the real world — a process that we call Bioformation. Bioformation uses novel artificial intelligence technologies to transition to regenerative and inclusive economies, which includes the autonomous governance of communities, organizations, treasuries, and “sentient” markets reflecting the health, growth and sustainable development of real world entities.
Bioformation is based on principles of Bayesian mechanics and thermodynamics applied to the study of living systems. The idea is simply stated: We ask “how do real world entities maintain their existence in a dynamic environment?”, and replicate their processes using Bayesian principles, transcribing the mechanics of life into computer code. In doing so, not only can we replicate those entities, but we can also predict how they will behave in the near future. As a complement to Classical and Quantum mechanics, Bayesian mechanics is a physics of “living things,” and as applied to economics, it is life preserving, entropy capturing, and value generating.
Through the successes of the science of living things, and most recently, the mathematical modeling and simulations of The Free Energy Principle, there is now a rigorous and principled basis for the design of Bioforms that self-encode scientific practices for advancing, testing, selecting and improving predictive models of virtually any phenomena. The Free Energy Principle (FEP) provides a universal measure of uncertainty, grounded in physics, and as such, is a measure applicable across all domains and at all scales.
What we’re building
To apply Bioformation in these domains, Bioform Labs is developing an open source platform comprised of tools designed to encourage application of these scientifically verifiable protocols, digital twins, and predictive models that can direct capital and attention in service of accelerating the transition from extractive, exclusionary economies to those of value generation and inclusion.
Deploying Self-Determining Community Economies
When people live and work together, a living, dynamic system emerges that is defined and bounded by a common mission, relationships, and economic interactions. Bioformation is the process of creating a digital twin of that living system. And since the community impacts and is impacted by both social and natural ecologies, its digital twin incorporates these dynamics by simulating its characteristics, traits and features. As the community evolves, the states of these models evolve along with it, representing as closely as possible its state in the real world. To achieve this fidelity, sensors, data feeds, and community members contribute data and new policies to improve the overall performance of the community in attaining its goals.
In tangible terms, the community is transcribed into a geo-spatial digital form by collecting observations about its changing state. Observations can be collected from members (e.g. the availability and affordability of goods and services) or sensors (e.g. the amount of foot traffic and rainfall). Overtime, the digital bioform learns the preferred states and behaviors of the community and the relationship between them. This helps members of the community identify what’s required to maintain its agency and integrity as a healthy living system. Members are rewarded when they help keep the model up to date (e.g. by submitting observational data about the state of the system) and use it to test and propose ideas for how to improve the community.
Nurturing Natural Ecologies
Bioformation is also used to understand and cultivate natural ecologies, such as, aquatic habitats, forests, agricultural soil, wetlands, which are critical to a regenerative and inclusive society. As living systems, these real world ecologies maintain their existence by transitioning through a series of states (e.g. above ground biomass and below ground biomass) in response to external factors (e.g. rainfall, wind, fires, and harvesting). Much like with a local community, Bioformation here is the process of creating a digital twin of these living ecological systems. Once bioformed, the ecological states of these systems become intelligible to those who depend on and influence them. This presents novel ways to understand, interact with and nurture natural ecologies, especially those that are stewarded for agriculture, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity.
Bioforms facilitate deeper understandings and richer interactions between natural ecologies and the people and communities who steward them. These digital ecological bioforms are key to creating an economic system that regenerates rather than degrades natural and human resources. When paired with the right market mechanisms, people and communities can nurture their natural resources while creating new kinds of local and international financial liquidity driven by verified value creation.
Nature Backed Currencies (NBCs) and Treasury Coins
Bioform Labs is working with its partners to develop alternative market and FEP valuation mechanisms based upon improving the state of Nature. Rather than treating Nature as an expendable, fungible asset, whose value is set by pricing mechanisms, Bioform Labs is developing sentient mechanisms of value verification and exchange based upon the Free Energy Principle and Bayesian mechanics. The goal is to create a wholly new category of AMM (Automated Market Makers) and DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and associated Treasury tokens and liquidity pools. Regenerative Finance modules are being designed using Active Inference to create the proper mix of incentives to accelerate the transition away from fossil based industries. By having the computational monetary and fiscal means to credibly value and secure their Natural and human resources, the goal is to have Third World countries attain financial and economic sovereignty and to repay their foreign debt without constant exposure to international currency disparities.
