
Human-First: Decentralizing Identity and Governance in the Era of AI - cypherpundit
https://words.democracy.earth/humans-first-decentralizing-identity-and-governance-in-the-artificial-intelligence-era-4a2ddbbdda90
======
Moodles
This reminds me of a previous job. The management—none of which were technical
people—just loved the idea of investigating “the blockchain” and “IoT” and
“machine learning” and “AI”, but had no clue what it meant. I left after a
couple of months.

Has anyone else read this article and had the same experience as me? I
genuinely second guess myself when reading it: have I lost the ability to
read? Am I stupid? I read all these words on the page yet I have absolutely no
comprehension of what was said. What on Earth was written on the “formalising
humans on the blockchain” section for example? There sure are a lot of words,
but nothing actually got said.

What, _exactly_ do they want to do with a blockchain and _why_? It’s a simple
question.

Oh, they have some cryptocurrency token they want to sell. Gotcha.

~~~
paula_berman
The why blockchain question is addressed in the first sentence. Of course, it
is a short answer - it's not explained further because we have an entire paper
just dedicated to that which most of our readers are familiar with: check
paper.democracy.earth for that. Happy to answer any specific questions
regarding formalizing humans on the blockchain, it is definitely a dense
subject, but a key point for expanding the positive impact of crypto (if done
right!).

~~~
Moodles
No it isn't. There's no need for a blockchain here, and you either know it and
just want to make some $$$ selling your pointless tokens, or you're clueless
about the tradeoffs associated with a blockchain.

You obviously won't talk about anything technical to do with the blockchain:
how the consensus algorithm works and why you chose it, who sells the coins
and why, why you need coins, what security guarantees it has, why having all
nodes of a network sharing a copy of the same ledger and constantly engaging
in a protocol to agree on the state of the ledger is at all a good idea, and
so on and so on... You just want to argue with me a bit to muddle the waters
so people side it's one side against another and the truth lies somewhere
inbetween. Fact is, this project makes no sense.

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ryanschneider
> What, exactly do they want to do with a blockchain and why?

Here’s my take: they want to enable voting online with some level of trust.
One major problem with online voting is ensuring each voter only votes once.
In traditional voting (e.g. for a political office) the government is the one
ensuring each eligible voter only votes once. Since the point of this is to
“decentralize” voting, they need a complicated cryptographic approach to stand
in for the governments role in ensuring one person one vote instead.

~~~
Moodles
And how, _exactly_ does a blockchain help with voting? Be specific: what is
being hashed, what signatures, where? What kind of cryptography and exactly
how is it used? It’s so frustrating when these MBA types just wave their hands
and say “decentralisation!”

Why do they have three types of coin they want to sell? So you’re suggesting
the whole point of this is for voting with governments you don’t trust. Why
would such a government implement this then? How does having the entire
blockchain public to all help with voter anonymity? Do blockchain schemes
actually have a good record of not being hacked (answer: hell no). The article
never made any specific claims as simple as “we are using s blockchain
because...”

Basically, they used a lot of buzzwords to try to confuse people into
“investing” in their coins.

~~~
paula_berman
Blockchains help with governance and identity (which are the same thing) by
instituting global personas that can signal preferences in a censorship-
resistant way. If you do not think there is a dire need for such mechanisms of
global governance you might not have been reading the news of the past decade.
The tokens are going to be granted as human rights, each with a specific
functionality and reasoning behind them (identity, voting credits that account
for time, and votes). You also have it completely wrong that this is meant to
be used by governments: it is a peer-to-peer governance system. Any
organization, collective, digital community can apply it - including a
government - but the design is centered on the individual, not a centralized
authority. Finally, I suggest you go do your research about the organization
and history of hacktivism behind it and you might find that this could not be
further away from a bunch of MBA types waving decentralization. Here are some
links to get you started:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democra...](https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UajbQTHnTfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UajbQTHnTfM)
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/sifogl4zimwkkei/Democracy%20Earth%...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/sifogl4zimwkkei/Democracy%20Earth%20-%20Social%20Smart%20Contract%20-%20Paper%20v0.2.pdf?dl=0)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJfT-0v5AJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJfT-0v5AJI)

~~~
Moodles
As I said: be specific.

You obviously won't talk about anything technical to do with the blockchain:
how the consensus algorithm works and why you chose it, who sells the coins
and why, why you need coins, what security guarantees it has, why having all
nodes of a network sharing a copy of the same ledger and constantly engaging
in a protocol to agree on the state of the ledger is at all a good idea, and
so on and so on... You just want to argue with me a bit to muddle the waters
so people side it's one side against another and the truth lies somewhere
inbetween. Fact is, this project makes no sense.

------
RobLach
Quadratic voting on the blockchain should be a library you can throw into your
blockchain project, not its own token with such a marketing effort behind it.

~~~
Moodles
It should also be a thing that actually exists and makes sense first.

------
SmooL
I fail to see how they solve the central issue: validating that someone is
actually a human and not a bot.

Even the hash of the video of the father declaring the birth of his daughter;
all it proves is that the video was _created_ before some specific date. It
_doesn't_ prove that the details in the video are real, or even that the video
wasn't just created by an AI.

~~~
santisiri
that’s why it’s a voting mechanism and not based on artificial intelligence.
only humans can acknowledge other humans. in the original paper is referred to
as “attention mining”.

------
BucketSort
I think most of what they say is fear mongering and totally irrelevant. For
example, the image that says "the biggest threat to democracy: these people
never existed" and showing the AI generated faces. How is that the biggest
threat to democracy? Aren't things like the two party system, a corrupt media
that pushes political agendas instead of reporting objectively, social media
polarizing people with echo chambers and feedback loops which create social
fires over simple things, etc more of a threat to democracy than spoofed AI
people walking into a voting booth? I understand that they would like to push
their platform as a saving grace, but it seems like yet another crypto scheme
that is trying out the political angle.

~~~
paula_berman
Democracy Earth actually started as a political party and then moved to
working with blockchain technology due to the censorhip-resistance and
incorruptibility properties. I recommend you research the organization. The
article argues that many of the problems you mentioned can ultimately can be
traced back to AI and the centralized internet architecture underlying it. If
all you could get from it is that fake AI people will be walking into voting
booths than clearly you did not give it the serious consideration these ideas
deserve.

~~~
BucketSort
Your only comments on your account defend the organization and you have not
disclosed your apparent affiliation:
[https://words.democracy.earth/@paulaberman](https://words.democracy.earth/@paulaberman)

