(2023-07-08) Science Fiction Writer And Futurist Karl Schroeder On Digital Self Sovereignty At Oodacon2022

Science Fiction Writer and Futurist Karl Schroeder on Digital Self-Sovereignty at OODAcon 2022. Find below a transcript of OODA CEO Matt Devost’s conversation with Schroeder about his book Stealing Worlds and how he integrated his ideas about self-sovereignty into his worldbuilding for the book

In the meantime, enjoy this first installment of this fascinating conversation.

This session provides a quick overview of how this data is collected, stored, and mined but then shifts direction to look at what technologies might empower users to better collect, access, and authorize the use of their own data through blockchain, digital autonomous corporations, and smart contracts.

A Working Definition of Digital Self-Sovereignty

Devost: I highly recommend the book Stealing Worlds. So one of the things that I liked about the book was this world that you built – so I want to start there – which applies to all of these interesting technologies

A lot of the book is set in Detroit. So they are literally rebuilding the city by imagining ahead what it could be and gamifying themselves into it. But to do that you don’t use one thing.

Self-sovereignty in this context can easily be confused with the libertarian idea of a sort of self-ownership. But what I really see is that it is about identity and the actual boundary of the self really

There is a movement in cognitive science – Extended Mind Theory – which says basically that we think not just with our grey matter, but with the physical world around us, and literally the objects and people around us are part of our thoughts

There is a book called Cognition in the Wild that describes how this works using near-shore ship navigation as an example.

in Stealing Worlds, I borrowed a lot of ideas from Elinor Ostrom and the economics of the Commons. And again, that is something I share with Cory Doctorow that we are both really interested in “commons” models of allocation of resources

Money is a system for allocating resources, but now suddenly we have vastly more sophisticated ways of doing that.

Let’s say that Elon Musk’s robot project works and suddenly the cost of labor plunges towards zero – while at the same time, we have massive amounts of wealth flowing from us to the billionaires, and soon the trillionaires, that we don’t own anything anymore. This is the sort of scenario that I’ve got going in the book. And what do people do in that circumstance? Well, they have to invent their own world in which they do own things and essentially play them and create their own economies. (Drop Out)

Matt Devost and Karl Schroeder Discuss The Future of Exponential Innovation, Socio-Techno Economic Systems and The Deodands Project

of the second half of OODA CEO Matt Devost’s conversation with Schroeder about his book Stealing Worlds

You just spent time with the XPRIZE folks

there are a couple of areas that are changing rapidly

space

robotics

I am not as interested in the metaverse as [much] as a lot of people I know

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

what is something that has surprised you the most over the past five years?

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

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”

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.

it doesn’t produce an image. It produces a device. 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

You cannot actually have technology advance beyond a point where you can simply summon any device to do what you need

one thing that I, that I found interesting in the book Stealing Worlds... 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

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

what happens in the novels is that people basically invent their own economies

There are a lot of online games – massively multiplayer (MMO) games – that have their own built-in economies.

I just worked with a design company to create one of the systems that I describe in the novel Courier Commons, see video

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. (see Maneki Neko)

And then you get points.

two things about that. You are doing something not for money, but you are doing what is essentially an economic activity

this design team that I was talking about actually built this. So it exists, right?

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. ([virtual economy])

The other one that I’m working on is The Deodands Project.

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.

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).