Hi, everybody. I'm jumping in with both feet on a subject I've written about in several recent stories. "Deodand," which was part of the Hugo-nominated second Metatropolis audiobook, for instance, is about the idea of autonomous natural systems that operate in their own interest through net-based legal and AI systems. ("Deodand" is an old English word referring to a physical object that has been granted personhood in order to be litigated against--eg., the ox-cart that fell on somebody and killed them and is now being charged with murder.) The rather simple question underlying this idea is, why stop at corporations as persons? Several nations have already enshrined or are in the process of enshrining rights for natural systems. Rivers, watersheds, coral reefs, mountain biomes, all could be represented by DACs, and the goods and services they provided defined in their charter. Might this be a better way to protect and promote the interests of natural systems and other species, rather than tying political actions to antagonistic ideological human-based movements? This is not "save the whales," it's "give the whales the tools to save themselves."
Do you think DACs could be used by our non-human ecosystem service providers?
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You could just say that giving natural systems representation is better than having them simply dismissed as "externalities." But I think we can go farther than that; it just involves considering the block chain to be one element of a larger power structure.
As to who protects the moraine, the answer is the same as it would be for any other DAC: the investors. They have a stake in the moraine, so they will act to protect their investment.
As you mention the moraine, bandwidth as an entity... is something to ponder.
Just some hypothetical thinking to contribute to this conversation.
I find it interesting that this forum thread petered out, because it's been my experience that the greatest opportunities reside in the space where a proposal is met with baffled silence.
Or, I could be completely off topic!
@FreddyFender Yes, a bit off-topic, but an interesting topic nonetheless. Granted that all models are imperfect, all DACs are doomed to fail if they don't constantly adapt/update their core model of what they are and who they're serving. I'll probably start a thread on viable systems at some point, if nobody else does, as that's the discipline that studies these things.
Mind=blown.
I was watching a hawk outside my office window this morning. I'm right downtown in central Toronto, but there he was. Does he live around here? What role does he play in the local ecology? I don't know. But I could. And that knowledge could empower both of us.
Massive thalient currency flow to the DAC of Whales after the result of the vote on the interspecies-internet pool.
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@vitalik is working on this, POC 42 if i remember well
All land is ϟacred, but here's an example ov a HIStorical landmark seeKing protectZ☰N:
http://www.powwows.com/2013/07/11/depp-wants-to-buy-historical-native-american-landmark/
How we listen, and the technologies that we deploy to listen with, are verticals/spheres for crypto-environmentalists to invest their T.E.A.R.S. (Time, Energy, Attention, Resources, Skills and $cores) towards.
What we humans actually do with the input that we receive from the animals will transcend hardware and software development, cryptophilosophically speaking.
The preferred method of determining what a person wants is to ask the person him/herself. It should be similar for other animals (at least those that are intelligent enough to make long-term decisions).
Well we could start an experiment to create a DAC for some endangered species. Im hoping to wrap up some co-working space shortly in Bali and am ready to commit work space and very basic accommodation towards supporting a person to work on this from the work space for free, along with a number of hours per week of my own time, if we could get some funds to support a person interested to do this.
Im thinking a stipend of 1K USD per month for 3 months renewable. Actually Im happy to go further and help start some form of Deodand incubator, if there are other interested parties. Im sure World Wildlife fund and other organizations may find this interesting. Something like Swarm for deodands but focused on the incubation more than the crowdfunding.
At the end of the day I see it more like an experiment and research activity, Karl, are there any researchers/academic institutions starting to look at this area that you are aware of or is it still firmly in the sci-fi writers court?
ranford, I think we could run such an experiment and probably should. At the moment I know of nobody who's seriously thinking about it in the terms we've put it here; on the other hand ecologists think about this stuff all the time, just not in the same terms.
Several points: with regard to communicating with/asking dolphins etc. about their needs, we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize. We can't literally ask an animal or plant what it wants; what we can do is monitor its behaviour and environment to determine what the likely optimum conditions for its thriving are.
Mary Robinette Kowal and I did some work on this idea for the "Metatropolis: Green Space" anthology. You can't merely seek to maximize the happiness of individuals in such a situation; if you seek only to maximize the happiness of wolves on an individual basis, for instance, you let them run down all the deer, but that obliterates the deer and then the wolves starve. You might recognize this problem from other contexts, for instance as "the tragedy of the commons."
The answer to the problem lies in ecology/cybernetics, which both understand the importance of feedback loops, boundaries, and nested systems. A given system (whether it be an individual dolphin or a whole forest) has "bounded freedom" within a larger system; that is to say, it can do whatever it wants until its actions threaten the higher-level system (which, if it is out of wack, will threaten our lower-level system too). Homeostasis in nested systems, in other words. We have to be able to measure this, determine the limits that maximize the health of all levels and the whole, and use that as the basis for "decisions" made by the actors at different levels (mouse populations, forest floor, forest, watershed). It's far from impossible to do this, but you'll note that such category- and boundary-setting can never be freed entirely from politics, a point I made in my first novel, Ventus, in 2000. In that novel, natural systems are politicized, but this is far from a bad thing.
EconTalk: Terry Anderson on the Environment and Property Rights
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/08/terry_anderson.html
for the record, it's been on my todo list to read your stuff Karl. I really respect the approach of writing fiction to make theory more tangible. Wish I had the drive to do more of that myself