Join us at the SingularityNET Decentralized Governance Summit, April 21, 2023 14:30 UTC

You are invited to this important kick-off event for our next strides in Progressive Decentralization for the SingularityNET Project

SingularityNET Decentralized Governance Summit
Join us — Friday, April 21, 2023, 14:30 UTC
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SingularityNET’s founding mission of creating beneficial decentralized AGI is a large one and has a number of different aspects, all of which need to work together tightly.

There’s the decentralized-platform software layer, which is needed to make it feasible to run AI systems across large numbers of computers without any central owner or controller. The SingularityNET protocol and platform provide one portion of this layer, the NuNet decentralized compute resource network provides another, and the HyperCycle AI-customized ledgerless blockchain provides another.

There’s the Artificial General Intelligence aspect itself. Decentralized-AI-platform tools are mainly agnostic in regards to how AGI is achieved — be it neural nets, artificial life systems, brain simulations, logical reasoning engines, emergent combinations of different AI agents and paradigms, or something new and yet unforeseen. However, our team at SingularityNET has been putting significant effort into one particular approach to AGI, which is the OpenCog Hyperon framework, bringing together neural nets, logical reasoning, evolutionary learning, and other methods in the context of a distributed self-modifying knowledge metagraph. Together with Simuli, we are designing custom hardware to accelerate Hyperon processing; and with TrueAGI, we are creating tools to effectively deploy Hyperon for enterprise applications in conjunction with decentralized-platform tools where appropriate.

And then, just as critically, there’s the governance aspect. Who owns and controls the software underlying the decentralized network of Ai processes? Who decides how the decentralized network operates? Who polices fraud within the network? Who guides the goal system of the AI network toward beneficial outcomes, and under whose definition of benefit?

Once we reach human-level AGI, decentralized governance will take on critical importance. Governments and corporations will have a great interest in controlling HLAGI, and the best feasible defense against this will be a robustly decentralized infrastructure. No government or corporation has managed to take over the Internet or Linux, and we need HLAGI to be at least this robust if we want to have decent odds of the transition from HLAGI to artificial superintelligence being broadly beneficial.

Even before HLAGI is achieved, though, decentralized governance has a critical role to play. Decentralized HLAGI is most likely to come about if pre-human-level proto-AGI is already being developed and rolled out in the context of decentralized networks. This requires appropriate decentralized software and business models and also effectively functional decentralized governance, in which network properties and behavior are chosen collectively and mostly cooperatively by network participants.

While there’s a lot of talk about DAOs, there are not a lot of great models for successful formalized decentralized governance in the crypto world today. Most so-called DAOs are DAOs in name only or in formal structure only and not in an actual governance practice (for instance, a DAO governed by a majority vote among token holders, with a one-vote-per-token scheme, is not really too decentralized if the majority of shares are controlled by a small number of whales). But there are certainly bright spots out there. The Cardano network has achieved significant milestones of decentralized control, as has its Catalyst funding arm. It can be difficult to quantify or judge exactly how decentralized a system is, but there are some interesting experiments in DAO structures, governance, and tooling popping up across the blockchain landscape (and beyond).

There are also interesting looser, less formalized examples of decentralized governance in the crypto space and broader technology world, e.g., the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities demonstrate reasonably robust decentralized decision-making (though with some significant, well-known pathologies too), and one can also point to the Linux community and other open source communities.

A half-decade into the life of SingularityNET, we are now seeing unprecedented progress in the AI field, and it’s seeming more and more plausible that the transition from application-specific or training-data-bound AIs to HLAGI and beyond could happen in years rather than decades. This highlights the need to accelerate progress in evolving SingularityNET’s governance processes toward the ideal of decentralized democracy that has been a core part of the vision since the project’s inception.

The approach we’ve decided to take toward more robustly decentralizing SingularityNET’s governance is both aggressive and gradual. We are envisioning creating a new entity called Singularity Community DAO, setting up appropriate governance mechanisms for it, testing these out in practice, and then handing over more and more of SingularityNET ecosystem governance to SingComDAO, step by step.

The Deep Funding program provides a potentially very natural intermediate stage here — Deep Funding is providing funding to the community from the community, so it makes total sense that once SingComDAO has been shown to have a functional governance mechanism, it could take over management of Deep Funding from SingularityNET Foundation. Additional elements of the SingularityNET Foundation can be put into SingComDAO at an appropriate pace as things evolve.

There may also be reason to form additional ecosystem DAO frameworks to synergize with SingComDAO — e.g., perhaps a DAO for individuals and entities engaged in contracting out or performing work in the SingularityNET ecosystem or a DAO for charitable projects related to AI and blockchain.

What we need is diverse, serious, and rapid practical experimentation in the realm of decentralized governance, alongside our rapid progress in the area of decentralized software. The Decentralized Governance Summit we’re holding on April 21, 2023, is not intended to provide all the answers to these subtle and important issues but rather to provide an emphatic kick-off to a phase of accelerated activity in posing and refining the questions and answering them step by step as things advance, in coordination with practical activity like the actual formation of SingComDAO.

Please join us at the (online) event and join the conversation — your participation is exactly what this is all about…

SingularityNET Decentralized Summit
Friday, April 21, 2023, 14:30 UTC
Details

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