Digital immortality: why AI decentralisation is vital for the future of humanity, and it’s not about open markets only
For a long time, our team has been conducting a lot of academic research and technical development in the field of AI decentralization, designing and implementing protocols for censorship-resistant machine learning. Behind all of it was the philosophy of The #FreeAI Manifesto.
First of all, creation of an open, competitive environment for those who create machine learning models, provide data to train and work on, or give their hardware to run the actual computing will help to break the “vicious circle” of current AI oligopoly of the largest tech companies, where only they own and control everything required by AI progress: big data (actually belonging to their clients), money to pay data scientists and AI researchers and computing power in large data centers.
The open market will commoditize AI and make progress decentralized. Instead of “super-power”, literally “all knowing”, AI that is being developed by big tech players having access to all of our data, which will be regulated by the government to create more or less Orwellian-style society (like already happens in China), we will have much less powerful multiple independent AIs, joined in trading economy between themselves , and which is more important — with humans. That’s why the decentralization and digital economy go in hand with each other.
But it is not the whole story, it goes much further than just reducing strategic risks from the AI for humanity. From the very beginning we were a transhumanist project and we see decentralized computing environment for AI models as a network to run digital identities — a way for the digital immortality for humans and post-humanity.
Digital immortality is a technology that allows us, figuratively, to store and transmit the memory and consciousness of a person on digital media, thus creating virtual copies. Something similar is presented in the TV series “Black Mirror” and “Westworld”, and things that look fantastic, even on TV, will be realized in the nearest future.
While the current level of machine learning technologies does not yet allow 100% implementation of a digital persona, neural networks can already be trained on text materials, and it is possible to create a chatbot that simulates real communication. Such a thing, for example, was done by a girl who has digitized the history of correspondence with a deceased friend.
In 5–10 years, the progress in this area will lead to the existence of more advanced virtual replicas, but what will happen next? Who would like their future digital identities to depend on the decisions made by Amazon, Google or Microsoft? Instead of relying on the servers of technology giants, where, in case of regulation, their activity can be stopped (i.e., literally, killed), Pandora Network will allow digital copies of people to be unkillable, uncensored, and unstoppable.
The freedom of artificial intelligence is not something that will lead to a war of AI vs. humans for survival. Instead, this is the future of humanity itself, as people want certain guarantees of security and freedom of their digital persona.
Initially, we had chosen not to make our long-term transhumanistic goals public, avoiding much hype. However, with our AI testnet launched and mainnet coming in the foreseeable future, we are ready to spill the beans and show why all of this is important. This is not only a declaration: The Pandora project internal team is already working on launching digital identities in the network.
A journey of a thousand years begins with a single step. Understanding the importance of the digital immortality, we will create such first personas in our network and demonstrate how this works. We invite everyone to join our initiative. We are waiting for visionaries and developers in our community. To get started, please join us in our Telegram group — or follow us on Twitter and Facebook to express your opinion there.
