Simocracy at Funding the Commons

We as human beings are only able to have strong deep relationship with maybe roughly 150 people in our lives. It's

called Danbar's number.

I'm David Dao. I'm the co-lead of protocols research and development specifically on economies and governance. I've been working in this

governance. I've been working in this sector for the last almost 10 years trying to bring funds from one place to the other place.

This is not a true task because in between there are a lot of middlemen taking chunks of transactions. It's also

really difficult to build trust between A and B. And so these problems are all very human nature problems and they require a lot of cognitive workload for us to handle and frontier technologies

like AI and blockchain technology allow us to offer some of these cognitive workloads and allow us to concentrate on the human part. I'm leading the Hypersex

Foundation where we try to build new ways to fund public goods. This includes

region of land projects, open source software, journalism, community events, all the stuff that really adds to society, but that nobody of us alone can

actually fund. So, we need to coordinate

actually fund. So, we need to coordinate together to fund these goods and and services. The simplest way you could

services. The simplest way you could explain a hypersuit is if you just take a piece of paper and you write on it, I did X in this location at this time and

I believe that this was impactful. And

then you take a a second piece of paper and you say like this was impactful because of this evidence. And you put these things together to create a record

of what somebody did and how impactful it was. And then somebody else can come

it was. And then somebody else can come along and has potentially observed what I did and takes another piece of paper and writes, I confirm this was really

like impactful and adds that piece of paper to kind of the stack of papers so that we have kind of a living record of things that either have been done in the

past or it could also be something about the future and the kind of additional data or additional opinions that we have about this activity.

I'm super excited at this because it's one of the large scale real world experiments bringing these digital technologies into the real world.

The Frontier Tower is this wonderful collection of diverse and beautiful people over many many floors each with their own preferences, values and

perspectives of the world. I came now to the Frontier Towers for the funding the comments event. How do we fund this

comments event. How do we fund this event? How do we fund the tower? How do

event? How do we fund the tower? How do

we structure the governance around this?

How do we make this transparent? We're

running two phases of the experiment.

So, we were able to get a $15,000 budget where the first $10,000 we just distribute among all the floors and see how are they going to allocate the funding if you give it to them. It's

just like give it and observe. Are they

doing impact reporting? Are they trying to involve the floor members in finding projects to pay? Are they actually just paying and spending it maybe on uh their own interests? And so this is the first

own interests? And so this is the first kind of map to traditional experiment.

Give the money and see what might be wrong in the system or might work in the system. Right? Phase two is then the

system. Right? Phase two is then the interesting part. Now we're saying,

interesting part. Now we're saying, okay, we have this baseline of this is how the real world does it or like the current situation and we have the second opportunity of $5,000 that we offer

using AI native um integrations and impactation.

All the floors are creating a digital twin of themselves. They talk to what we call democracy. They give an 15 to 20

call democracy. They give an 15 to 20 minute interview about what they care about, what they value, what is an high impact project for them. And so by talking the AI learns about your

preferences and values and also beliefs.

We copy you into a digital version of yourself. We call it a sim. And

yourself. We call it a sim. And

afterwards they they just they're super curious. They chat with the with their

curious. They chat with the with their twin. For example, one person from the

twin. For example, one person from the 14th floor was Judy. She's a really wonderful woman who cares a lot about community work and gardening and the soil. And so her sim of course proposed

soil. And so her sim of course proposed her to go and get some local like groceries and food. And she loved the suggestion.

My name is Judy. We're in the Frontier Tower in San Francisco. I've been a steward of the 14th floor which is the human flourishing floor. So the human flourishing floor was kind of

established to have people be human while in this very very tech focused world. I think the tower is a really

world. I think the tower is a really interesting experiment of human behavior and coordination. This tower has kept

and coordination. This tower has kept people from being too tunnled into their single world. It's also a playground to

single world. It's also a playground to see what emerges when you let people self-direct. But it feels like a

self-direct. But it feels like a experimental blank slate. I've seen the evolution since then and it's been a really yeah beautiful unfolding.

So I think the biggest threat to human flourishing right now is a combination of separation and acceleration. And I

think it would be a really beautiful way to like experiment with distributing the community fund that we already wanted to raise. The two of us could be

raise. The two of us could be represented by two different Sims that talk to each other for hours and hours

and they could even simulate these discussions 50 times. Think of all the times in this discussion I should have said this or that. Your sim has all the opportunities to do it over and over

again.

We observe that the floor don't talk too much to each other. So they don't really know each other too well. So sometimes

they'll figure out who is my adversary in this tower like I'm leading this floor who has like different opinions and so one floor lead she spend the whole morning to talk and find other

floor leads and try to convince their digital version to her ideas. This is

what excites me about these new technologies.

Ming and I had sat down and we said if we were to get a community fund now, we wouldn't be able to steward this money responsibly because we haven't figured out the governance mechanisms and the

coordination mechanisms and the decision-m having this funding experiment and having that be uploaded as digital twin for democracy was kind

of the perfect solution for us.

We also see successful smallcale community governance. So small

community governance. So small communities, we all know each other, we trust each other. When that sense of trust and familiarity breaks down, the

rules of governing comments break down too. And I think the new technologies

too. And I think the new technologies that we are living now in this intelligent age is a groundbreaking way to expand Elena Arstrom's ideas to much

larger numbers than 150 by creating a digital twin of you by having them talk and take that cognitive load of you and then you come back and you do the final decision making.

There's a third part which we would call the evaluators. Evaluators are players

the evaluators. Evaluators are players in the ecosystem that actually know a lot about which are the the good projects. And this could be experts,

projects. And this could be experts, this could be the community because if there's a regenerative land project in a small town, who knows if this is a good project? It's actually the people in the

project? It's actually the people in the town. They know already if it's good or

town. They know already if it's good or not. Can we surface that information to

not. Can we surface that information to the people making the decisions? But

then also it could be technical. It

could be satellite imagery. It could be by acoustics in the case of the land projects or it could be an analysis of how many people use open source software. So those aspects can be

software. So those aspects can be surfaced and they can be surfaced not only to a single funer but in the network so that many people use this

data and we increase kind of the efficiency of the of the whole system.

One of the important aspects is that what we need to do or like a risk is that we build now decision-m processes that are intransparent and that nobody

actually knows what happens and it's like we're losing control of this the the system. That is why hyperserts as an

the system. That is why hyperserts as an AI native data layer is important because we can observe what different AI

agents do, how they argue, how they make decisions and we can intervene in any moment because the results will be played back to us and we can still decide is that something that we really

want to implement or not. So it is important that we create the transparency and not give up control of how it is implemented. So like humans should still be in the loop. We should

still have the ultimate decision power that is important to create actually a system that works for us which is kind of the ultimate goal. It's the political scientist's dream because there are so

many things that in theory should work but then you go out and interact with real people and they don't have time to get informed. They don't have like the

get informed. They don't have like the nerves to really interact with somebody they like fully disagree with. And now

we have the situation where all of that happens. And all of that happens like in

happens. And all of that happens like in an arbitrary large discussion where everybody listens carefully to everybody else who says something and we have all

the data to analyze that and to improve the system over time.