DEVCON1: How Blockchain Technology Can Help us Achieve Prosperity - Don Tapscott

[Thom]

I must respectfully disagree. Not every event can be known in absolute terms, but some can.

Did team A or B win? That is a fact which can be determined absolutely, based on the objective rules of the game, not "oracles". Did Albert Einstein die or is he still alive? That too is a fact with absolute certainty. Science is NOT based on consensus. Scientists rely on consensus in some cases, and when they do it's an approximation, it's theory or hypothesis, not definitive as in repeatable with the same known conditions.

Although math is concrete, its application and how it correlates to reality is open to interpretation.

I've been thinking a lot lately about consciousness. Ultimately each of us interprets our sense data and in that way our view of reality is never objective. However, we conceive of an absolute, objective reality and without that our communication would be impossible and our ability to survive, to learn and adapt to our environment would be fatally impaired. Humanity operates within a shared context, and I guess you could call that a consensus of the interpretation of our senses.

BM has said he believes in the philosophical view known as solipsism, yet he interacts with me, you and everyone as though we are independent and separate entities. So I must question whether he truly does believe in solipsism. Actions follow belief. Thought first, then action, cause and effect.

It's an interesting topic to ponder. Perhaps all that exists is consciousness, and everything is just a manifestation of that. As much as that idea may point to reality not having absolutes, the one absolute that is inherent in that perspective is that consciousness exists. I don't see how that can be denied without using consciousness.

I found this video to be one of the best explorations I've heard on the topic of consciousness, with minimal metaphysical overtones. Obviously the topic itself is metaphysical, there is no escaping that. What I mean is this video avoids the typical new age and religious conjectures I usually find with this topic.

[luckybit]

Below are my opinions on the nature of reality...

Reality isn't absolute. There is fuzzy logic. Meaning the numbers between 1 and 0, true and false, or the percentage something is true or false.

Our reality is made up of consensus. A scientifically recognized fact is only a fact because of scientific consensus. A computer can and does use logic to determine true or false, and that logic is the closest we can get to proving anything in life, as it's accuracy is more accurate than any other tool we have.

So you can prove something is logically true. 1+1=2 is logically true. When you're dealing with something which cannot be proven in that way, like what happened during an event, now you've got many perspectives who have to report in and you deal with a percentage of true and false. The true outweighing the false makes truth in that case which means consensus.

A computer can prove theorems, it can do math, it can do logic and reasoning, and depending on the strength of AI it can use it's abilities to find facts. This doesn't mean a computer at this time can reveal the nature of reality, or tell you what happened at a sporting event. It could give you probabilities about which team should or could have won, but ultimately only the oracles can tell you who won.

You can have an AI or something similar watching the game through people's cellphones, it might be able to determine who won, but at this time prediction markets with blockchains are the closest human beings can get to determining truth. Truth isn't absolute in any case, there are always percentages, even with logic, even with reality, and it's only true or false because of logic, and computers happen to be good at logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving

[Thom]

You failed to address the central points of my skepticism, which are extremely important. The quote dealt with practicalities but I raised the issue of who decides what is true.

Any Tom Dick or Harry could put up a semantic website with disinformation, so how is a machine to decide if it is accurate or not? THAT is the key concern I have.

The blockchain logs the truth. There wasn't a blockchain before so you had no way to log what is true. A blockchain is a way to have a unified source of truth.

Perhaps through AI / neural net intelligence coupled with big data a statistical guess can decide reasonably accurately what is true or correct.

Computers already use algorithms to decide true and false. Anything a computer cannot deal with, a human could be paid to deal with. Once it's confirmed true either by human, computer, or a combination of both, then it's on the blockchain.

Truth is absolute, not a matter of consensus. It's about provable facts. Going back to the wikipedia example, how can the assertions submitted as fact / truth be verified or proven?

On the other hand your price feed example is about consensus. In that case (and others you pointed out) truth is effectively equal to consensus. That isn't always the case however.

How do you establish the dividing line between factual, objective, provable truth and effective, practical truth by consensus?

Regarding the use of big data, I agree that access control is key to secure privacy. I also agree that with cryptography it would be possible to mine big data from a blockchain database leaving privacy intact.

It's definitely worth considering as a future feature / work proposal.

[luckybit]

On this topic...

Enigma’s computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, we use a modi-fied distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchainis utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system. Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data.
For the first time, users are able to share their data with cryptographic guarantees
regarding their privacy.

@bytemaster  It might be a good idea to add the same functionality that Bitcoin will have (Enigma) to Bitshares. The ability to do big data analytics is extremely powerful when combined with privacy. Suddenly people could sell their data to be computed and used by algorithms without any loss of privacy, and they could be in complete control of which algorithms could access it, or possibly even revoke access.

Of course this would require Bitshares have either the ability to compute data or that would have to be outsourced via UIA, but if we had these abilities it could help both users and developers know how to improve Bitshares, or to be used for FollowMyVote (most of politics is about knowing the voter and how they think).

[luckybit]

You failed to address the central points of my skepticism, which are extremely important. The quote dealt with practicalities but I raised the issue of who decides what is true.

Any Tom Dick or Harry could put up a semantic website with disinformation, so how is a machine to decide if it is accurate or not? THAT is the key concern I have.

The blockchain logs the truth. There wasn't a blockchain before so you had no way to log what is true. A blockchain is a way to have a unified source of truth.

Perhaps through AI / neural net intelligence coupled with big data a statistical guess can decide reasonably accurately what is true or correct.

Computers already use algorithms to decide true and false. Anything a computer cannot deal with, a human could be paid to deal with. Once it's confirmed true either by human, computer, or a combination of both, then it's on the blockchain.

For example prediction markets allow humans to determine true and false. Oracles are the mechanism you'd want to look into, and distributed oracles are basically how Bitshares currently determines things like the price of Bitcoin. How do we know the price in the price feed is the true price? The fact that multiple oracles all agree that it's true, the fact that the humans agree it's true.

The same would work for a sporting event. Is it true or false that a certain team won a game? A prediction market would let humans try to predict which team won, but then you'd have humans who would report the result with their reputations on the line. Those humans of course would get paid to report correct results, they are the oracles of truth.

Tapscott rightly says big data is not the way to go, it is counterproductive to a free society b/c it violates privacy, an essential ingredient for a free society.

Big data is the way to go. It doesn't violate privacy when it's decentralized and private. For example Enigma the MIT project may in fact be able to do big data on the blockchain, without violating anyone's privacy. You can also do big data to private information in other ways, possibly through homomorphic encryption for instance. It is a myth that big data is counterproductive to a free society.

What matters for a free society is access control. Privacy is access control. You probably don't care if AI or algorithms can access your data and compute it, as long as no human beings can access it. So as long as the results of that computation are under your control, then you don't really lose anything but you do gain the ability to do serious analytics on your own data. Finally you could use different methods like homomorphic encryption or the Enigma method to do analysis of everyone's data without any way to determine the identities of the individuals or see the data.

My own opinion is, I'm absolutely and unequivacally in favor of big data. I do not believe you must sacrifice privacy to achieve security when you can find ways to increase both in the same solution. I do not believe you must lose privacy to analyze data and fully homomorphic encryption shows that you do not need to, as well the method of just using the blockchain to anonymize and chunk the data so that it's computed across many non-colluding computers all over the world. The ability to bring big data analysis to the masses is the holy grail, allowing for all kinds of powerful machine learning and apps.

http://enigma.media.mit.edu/
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/09/a-darpa-director-on-fully-homomorphic-encryption-or-one-way-the-u-s-could-collect-data/

[Thom]

You failed to address the central points of my skepticism, which are extremely important. The quote dealt with practicalities but I raised the issue of who decides what is true.

Any Tom Dick or Harry could put up a semantic website with disinformation, so how is a machine to decide if it is accurate or not? THAT is the key concern I have. Perhaps through AI / neural net intelligence coupled with big data a statistical guess can decide reasonably accurately what is true or correct. Tapscott rightly says big data is not the way to go, it is counterproductive to a free society b/c it violates privacy, an essential ingredient for a free society.

[luckybit]

I am about to watch the video, but from my reading of the wiki I am highly skeptical of the practicality of the "Semantic Web". Besides the need to prove the facts asserted, some "certification authority" needs to verify the claims made,  a problem in itself. An interesting experiment would be to see if the wikipedia database could be processed to produce a semantic web representation. It may also be impractical for the reasons stated in the wiki:

While learning the basics of HTML is relatively straightforward, learning a knowledge representation language or tool requires the author to learn about the representation's methods of abstraction and their effect on reasoning. For example, understanding the class-instance relationship, or the superclass-subclass relationship, is more than understanding that one concept is a “type of” another concept. […] These abstractions are taught to computer scientists generally and knowledge engineers specifically but do not match the similar natural language meaning of being a "type of" something. Effective use of such a formal representation requires the author to become a skilled knowledge engineer in addition to any other skills required by the domain. […] Once one has learned a formal representation language, it is still often much more effort to express ideas in that representation than in a less formal representation […]. Indeed, this is a form of programming based on the declaration of semantic data and requires an understanding of how reasoning algorithms will interpret the authored structures.

You're not considering the potential of a semantic web, with value transfer, with blockchains. It's literally going to change life as we know it when we combine these aspects.

A semantic web is capable of evolving into a smart web. Smart in the sense that it can take advantage of machine intelligence. Then you have stuff like dbPedia, the Internet of Things, the Blockchain, and you can build distributed computing into the semantic web.

At this time it might sound alien or not make sense, but you wait and see if I was right. The semantic blockchain web is what I'm predicting.

[Thom]

I am about to watch the video, but from my reading of the wiki I am highly skeptical of the practicality of the "Semantic Web". Besides the need to prove the facts asserted, some "certification authority" needs to verify the claims made,  a problem in itself. An interesting experiment would be to see if the wikipedia database could be processed to produce a semantic web representation. It may also be impractical for the reasons stated in the wiki:

While learning the basics of HTML is relatively straightforward, learning a knowledge representation language or tool requires the author to learn about the representation's methods of abstraction and their effect on reasoning. For example, understanding the class-instance relationship, or the superclass-subclass relationship, is more than understanding that one concept is a “type of” another concept. […] These abstractions are taught to computer scientists generally and knowledge engineers specifically but do not match the similar natural language meaning of being a "type of" something. Effective use of such a formal representation requires the author to become a skilled knowledge engineer in addition to any other skills required by the domain. […] Once one has learned a formal representation language, it is still often much more effort to express ideas in that representation than in a less formal representation […]. Indeed, this is a form of programming based on the declaration of semantic data and requires an understanding of how reasoning algorithms will interpret the authored structures.

I liked what Tapscott had to say in the video. He didn't mention the semantic web by name, nor talk about it directly. You could argue he did in concept but IMO even that's a bit of a stretch.

After reading his bio on wikipedia I was keeping my eye open for signs of "globalist" leanings, but the video conveyed an entirely opposite attitude.

However, I tend to judge such things from a perspective of looking at a long history of actions and statements, so although I really like what the guy said in this video I don't have much to assess his motives. It's more a matter of what I'm aware of than what he has done or said though. Bottom line is he leaves me with the impression he believes in empowering the individual, not the collectivist thinking so dominant in many movers and shakers of this world.

Thanks for sharing this info luckybit. As always you post some interesting material worth looking at.

[luckybit]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLzwYthfcVc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Tapscott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

How will the semantic web and blockchain change the concept of the firm, the corporation, business, and allow us to achieve prosperity?