Computational Social Order

Aug 18, 2023

Disruptive tech that will shape the computational future of social order.

In essence, blockchain has the potential to eliminate all mediation in society enacted by centrally-governed, trust-establishing third parties, namely: social, financial, judicial, academic and political institutions.

In general, blockchain technology renders redundant the social contract, which is commonly defined as surrendering some of our freedoms and submitting to a central authority in exchange for protection of our remaining rights.

In other words, a blockchain network establishes trust between parties as well as enables protection from bad actors by way of forcing all participants to communicate according to its underlying consensus mechanism, preferably the one that is fair and green, like PoS.

Apart from becoming a useful tool in any profession, AI has the potential to eliminate all menial work, both unskilled and specialised, largely physical and superficially intellectual.

Ultimately, AGI will be able to simulate entire societies of intelligent agents.

Presumably, the next step towards achieving AGI could be incentivising agents to approximate each other's behaviour by placing them in realistic environments and providing them with human-aligned goals. Perhaps, the undecidable problem of the next decade will be: "Is a given reward function human-aligned?". One way of ensuring the generally good-natured behaviour of agents could be to factor the well-being stats of surrounding agents into the reward function.

Crucially, quantum computing has the potential to render obsolete many of the fundamental classical algorithms that practically all digital systems heavily rely on for both their security and performance.