Growing Towards Thriving Together: Democracy and P2P Decentralized AI
In our continued exploration of the international collective exploring P2P decentralized AI and quantum computing, I spoke with David Bray, PhD, the Distinguished Chair of the Accelerator at the Loomis Council at the nonpartisan Stimson Center. David and I have worked together advising the LightRoot project, and more recently he has supported what we hope to be the new White House effort, RISE: Research and Innovation at the Scientific Edge by connecting up some of the RISE advocates.
We boldly discuss democracy, P2P decentralized AI, policy in general, and how to save humanity from ourselves — with ourselves. Below is an edited and streamlined version of our conversation, which you can enjoy in its goofy and joyful entirety via video.
Julia: Good morning! I’ve been doing this interview/discussion/dialogue series about LACE. I think you know what the acronym stands for because you made it up! Lightweight AI Computing Ecosystem.
David: I’m guilty as charged.
Julia: Yeah. I love it because it’s so visual, right? it brings out exactly what it is. all these AI nodes laced together. It’s a hodgepodge of people from for-profits, non-profits, not just the group where we met (LightRoot), but also around the world — there’s many organizations who are working on this.
We’re talking about the big questions, the policy questions, which I think is where your background really shines. But also the emotional-social questions, where your background shines as well. I want to talk about all of them. And then there’s the “WORLD” piece. In the initial essay, I talked about WORLD: Wisdom, Openness, Resilience, Love, and Diversity as virtues we hope to instill in LACE.
By the end of the interview or dialogue, I would love to figure out which one of those most resonates with you as something you want to weave into LACE — what you think is most necessary. Where do you want to begin?
David: I think you gave a really great framework, which is this is something that involves not just different technologies, including the different flavors and methodologies of AI and the different phenomenologies that we’re discovering around quantum computing.
There’s also then the second realm of the policy questions, for which I appreciate you gave me a hat tip. I always find fascinating that people say I do policy when I’m intentionally nonpartisan and nonpolitical, which I find like a paradox.
Julia: Oh, I think of policy as nonpolitical.
David: Oh, I agree. I’m with you 100% — we need more nonpartisan policy making. I find that we’ve gone almost too far in the other direction where everything is political nowadays. And I’m like, no, if anyone could be born at the wrong time, I guess I was born at the wrong time because I don’t do politics!
Anyway, I raise that because I guess I feel sometimes like I’m swimming upstream and the current is pushing me back. And then the last thing you mentioned was that we need to think about what’s needed for communities that are pluralistic and have different needs. How do we approach them with empathy and understanding?
And again, this is one area where you’ve done a lot, Julia. I know several other folks have, too. I consider myself fortunate to have worked with the People Centered Internet Coalition, and other activities as well. It does seem, again, we’re in a world in which at least in the United States (I don’t want to speak for other nations, but I think some other nations are trending this way) we’ve become so hyper-individualistic that we’ve forgotten the connectedness that we have both within our local regions and within our country, but also across countries. So that’s another area where I think both you and I are swimming.
I think if we tackle those three issues, I think that’ll give people a nice framing of what we’re trying to do.
Julia: Okay, so do you want to start with how everything’s become political?
David: Maybe I’ll do the technology first, because that’s easier. And then we can get to the second question. It was interesting because I was actually with some of the folks that are part of this group this morning.
It was interesting because there’s a very real risk that quantum becomes the buzzword du jour next year for Europe. And, we’ve seen, there was blockchain and I never got on the blockchain train, but there was that.
Now it’s AI, even though AI has been around for a while. And when people say AI, they’re really meaning generative AI, the current flavor. And so it’s just unpacking that. Now quantum seems to be coming. And I think, if there’s anything you and I strive for together, it’s about more pragmatic approaches that are not too hype-y, but also not too laissez-faire or doomsdayism because there’s also that!
The good news is: people are becoming more familiar with quantum phenomenologies is probably the best way to put it. Because quantum computing is just one type of quantum tech. There’s also quantum sensors. There’s other things like quantum key distribution, things like that.
I think the challenge we have that unlike things that humans thought they had a good grasp of and then they started to build it, for example computers and nanotubes, with quantum we’re still trying to understand the phenomenology as we’re trying to also employ it.
Julia: In fact, the phenomenology itself is going to teach us things. It’s a little different from building a computer where you’re like: I know what this resistor will do, I know what this capacitor will do.
David: It reminds of the days of Charles Babbage and his difference engine. They were trying to use mechanical gears for what eventually would be replaced with vacuum tubes and followed by actual electrical resistors.
In some respects, when people talk about what quantum computing will be able to do, I always tell them: take a pause. We may discover other things along the way that completely short circuit what we know now. What I would recommend for folks is if you meet anyone who’s absolutely certain that quantum is going to do X, Y, Z — be a little guarded.
Honestly, I think that applies to any technology. You know, probably the best equivalent to this is also what’s possible in the realm of bio and personalized medicine. The amount of stuff that we don’t know about bio outsizes the amount of things we do know.
We do know a lot of things and we’re increasingly getting increasingly intelligent about it, but a little bit of humility will go a long way. Same thing for quantum. Anyone who tells you that the quantum future is going to be this in 10 years? Maybe. And one of the things I was recommending this morning when I was having a different conversation is to outline possible contours of what’s possible, but recognize they are simply contours.
We don’t have enough information to be able to fill in the spaces. However, what I celebrate about what’s happening with LACE is thinking about what can be said openly, not tied to a specific ideology.
Now, I think you and I are on the side of we value individual freedoms, individual choice, that we value human lives — pro democracy and pro freedom.
We have that slant, and we need to be mindful that there are actors that may not. I don’t fault them that they may not necessarily have the same value set, but we don’t necessarily resonate with that or they’re actors that are completely selfish that are hyper-individualistic to the point of — it’s criminal syndicates or things like that, where they don’t feel the same emotional response you and I might have to misuse, abuse or harming people.
Julia: It reminds me of, back to the importance of contours, finding the edges. The reason why I like to call the sort of more controversial leading-edge science “edge science” is that it’s about finding what the contours are of the space.
The contours actually end up defining the space, so it’s not extra. It’s actually definitory, right? So figuring out what the contours are actually tells you a lot about something. Like when you use the word phenomenology a lot when you’re talking about quantum computing. What’s interesting to me about that, I get it, you’re using it at the, in the understanding of this phenomenon.
But in the world of psychology and consciousness research, phenomenology means subjective experience. And in fact, it is the biggest mystery in consciousness. How do we have subjective experience at all?
There’s the hard problem. How does the brain turn into the mind? Or vice versa, or maybe they both emerge from something, who knows? But one of the big questions for me about the contours of quantum computing is this very question. Will it create something that has an inner experience, that has phenomenology in the psychological sense, in the subjective sense? And the reason why that matters to me and why I think that should matter to everyone is the same reason why I think that matters when you build something like an emergent mind like LACE.
LACE is really a bunch of AIs talking to each other. Imagine that they’re like neurons –imagine a mind emerging from that. So here are these two technologies that might create some kind of an emergent mind. And it could potentially have subjective experience, because we don’t understand subjective experience.
Do we think of it as an individual? In the conversation about individuality versus self-transcendence, I think that people can get stuck at this idea that self-transcendence is always better, and I myself preach self-transcendence a lot.
But without acknowledgement of the importance of the individual, you could easily just create slaves of humans and potentially of minds that aren’t human minds. So anyway, that’s where my mind goes with this. What do you think of that boundary?
David: So let me tie together what you said with three quick points.
First, I love that you use the word “edge” and you talked about what “edge” means in the psychology sense, because there’s a lot of empirical understanding that the way the brain does visual processing is it starts with the edges. And in infants — not just infant humans, but infant mammals — if they come to an edge, they generally stop. And that’s probably because those ancestors who didn’t stop, unfortunately probably passed away because they went over the edge and it was harmful. So edge detection is, in some respects, almost primal to our existence because it sets conditions for something that might be dangerous or might be harmful. It might be an opportunity too, but it’s a stopping point.
So edges are useful. Then you raise the question about, as we begin to understand the actual quantum phenomenology, will that change our phenomenology and our understanding of the subjective experiences — how we make sense of the world. And again, I’m a very empirical scientist, for better or for worse.
I’m also a post-positivist, so I believe that you can never get to absolute truths, but you can do enough scientific experiments to begin to understand and begin to correlate. And there’s some recent research that there may actually be, it’s not definitive, but there’s indications that there may actually be some quantum processes happening in the human brain.
And of course, if that happens, a whole lot of things change. One, this whole belief that we have to have things really cold for quantum computation — the brain temperature is completely wrong. And that’s why I tell people, be ready for quantum computing to be rethought if we discover that it is actually happening in a warm, messy, chaotic environment.
Julia: It’s happening in photosynthesis already. So it doesn’t even need to happen in human brain.
David: I remember when people said, “We already understand photosynthesis.” Maybe not! And there’s actually some birds that navigate using quantum mechanisms, it’s not just magnetic fields.
Yeah. So again, I think approaching things with a humbleness that there’s things we don’t know yet is very helpful here. However, if there are quantum processes happening in the brain, then everyone who thinks that AGI is just around the corner (I’m not one of them) will have to rethink things because they’re assuming mechanistic things going on with the neurons at classical levels as opposed to quantum. Quantum then adds a whole level of complexity. I don’t think AGI is going to show up in six months. I could be completely wrong and I will own that.
Julia: It would be like adding multiple dimensions to the analysis that weren’t even considered before.
David: 100%. That gets very interesting. And then the last thing I would say is you asked a very good question about the tension between “I” versus “we.” That’s the way I’ll phrase it. And it’s worth noting our bodies are more than 50% not “us.” They’re microbes and things like that.
And that’s just our bodies! So who am I? Am I David, the cells whose DNA is David and everything else is not me? No, I don’t think I could operate without everything else there. But then if you think about the planet, not only are there 8.1 billion (give or take) human beings on the planet, but there are way more plants, microbes, and insects than there are of us. So I do think that lens of “I” and “we” is an interesting lens to have.
We need to think about the broader whole. I can remember being 10 or 11, just being amazed at how so many events were probably happening simultaneously on the planet and just feeling that right now, any possible experience one could have, multiple people are probably having right now.
Julia: Yeah, more than one.
David: Yeah, exactly. At the same time, I think the value of at least having some sense of what is in your scope not only helps prevent loss of freedom and slavery, there’s also increasingly an epidemic of learned helplessness. That’s the moment where people are like, “That’s too big. I can’t possibly tackle it. I can’t do anything. I’m going to leave that for either the government or business.”
Julia: Or they say it’ll never change. That people will always be like that. And that’s always my red flag. Really? Always?
David: Yeah, exactly. One, when anyone does anything absolutist, I’m like, these things aren’t really absolute. And then two, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You may only be a few steps on that collective journey, but others will be on that journey as well. And I think we do need to find a balance. I’m leaping ahead to the third point, but we’ll circle back to the hard one about how too many things have gotten political nowadays.
But the third point about the need for community-centered activities with LACE around quantum, around emerging technologies, is because a future that is solely individualistic is in some respects inhuman. We humans are a combination of individual creatures, but also collective creatures. We are social creatures.
And so I think the question is — I celebrate that we are 8.1 billion people on the planet, but how do we continue that in terms of a healthy coexistence and most importantly, coexistence at all? And to me that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. To not be able to help contribute to that, we may end up with a very dystopian future in 10 to 15 years.
Julia: For anyone to not be able to contribute, for anyone who’s left out [this can lead to dystopia]. So we have antipathies between different countries and different sectors and different humans, right? And even some antipathy towards certain animals! I don’t really like mosquitoes for instance.
David: They’re not my favorite creatures. I don’t know if I want to be too close and cuddle one, just saying.
Julia: Exactly. And so those antipathies are real and very human. And I think we’re entering a time, I believe we’re entering a time when the key task is to learn how to notice the antipathy and to manage it.
Instead of falling for it, like it’s the truth, acknowledging it like this is a human behavior — like almost like you would with a kid. Of course the kid doesn’t want to share their new toy, right? And so how do you manage that?
David: So now you’ve got me thinking, this is where the preacher’s kid part of me.
Julia: Preach, David, preach!
David: What I saw was through a glass darkly, the quote that said basically, “I used to see things as a child and now I put childish things away.” That maybe that’s what humanity is always struggling with is in some respects, we have tendencies, both genetic, memetic, cultural, and the like, to revert back to individual tribalistic manners.
I jokingly say (but it’s only half-jokingly) that the seven deadly sins were evolutionary advantages for individuals 10,000 years ago. Now, I’m not advocating one pursue the seven deadly sins, but yeah, there’s a reason why we no longer consider those things conducive to coexistence within a peaceful society.
We have to find ways of updating the operating system, that is, through narratives, through memes and things like that. It’s not perfect and you know organized religion can be misused just as any type of organized structure. And that gets to that second point we were talking about.
Julia: We have to take a breath because all of these things are very near and dear to both of our hearts. As you’re the preacher’s child, I’ll be the wannabe rabbi.
David: Nice. Now we can be intersecular– interfaith.
Julia: Oh, intersexual also maybe!
David: Inter*secular*. Freudian, what?
Julia: Yeah! But as the wannabe rabbi, there’s this idea that we’re all trying our best, and we’re all always going to be flawed, and we still always have to try, and we’re never going to get to the land of milk and honey.
We’re always going to be able to see it from the hill and be like, ah, look, it’s down there. There’s milk and honey, and everyone’s gonna get a fig tree. But we’re never going to get there. And some people find that depressing, and it’s funny because you and I were just talking about how we don’t like absolutism.
But if that is perfect, then I think that is really true. That’s another absolutism. I don’t think that perfection is real. Perfection is like a snapshot. And reality is temporal, right? Our experience of reality is temporal, dynamic. And that’s part of being alive.
Anyway, so that was my little rabbi wannabe statement. Okay. Let’s go politics.
David: I agree with you wholeheartedly that thinking things have to be perfect is itself another source of absolutism that can be a source of tyranny.
And I would actually say the friends that I consider my deepest friends, and I celebrate getting to know you too, Julia — are the friends that have recognized that life is not a straight line.
Julia: Yeah.
David: I can remember early on, in high school and college and then even after college, there were people who knew they were going to do A, B, C and D.
And I was like “be of service.” I’m going to help where I can, and I even had a college advisor. He said, “You need to have a plan.” I’m like, “I’m going to aim for that star for the next two or three years and then I’m going to adapt and I’m okay with that, I know what I generally want to have as my legacy when I pass away, which is — ‘he strived to help where he could with his abilities and tried to find those places.’”
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. You can have some intentionality, but the universe is going to sure show you that you are part of a Brownian system.
Julia: Yeah, I love that. When I run into especially young people who are like, “This is my plan!” I’m like, “That’s great. Let’s see what happens!”
David: Exactly. Let’s see what happens. It’s like a quantum experiment.
Julia: So now tackling number two. We talked about tech, we talked about the need to balance “I” and “we,” communities, individual freedoms, etc. I would say there’s two possible reasons for things getting so political.
One, there hasn’t been a large enough experience in the world of recent memory that brought people together in a way that said, look, we may have differences on how we see the world, how we want to interact with the world, our own belief systems, but we don’t want another one of those things to happen. The most recent being probably World War II.
Sadly, the people that were veterans from World War II, both actually serving in military and in the auxiliary women’s auxiliary and things like that, are passing away. Their memories are being lost. And you can see this is not just a US phenomenon.
It’s actually a lot of Western nations: New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, UK. Not only is there increasingly a decline in trust so that younger generations have less trust in society and less trust in the current system, but it’s also that the responses of political figures have been to become almost hyper-political and hyper-extreme.
It’s almost like they feel like the ground is being lost underneath their feet, so their response is to become even more political. I saw this when was involved in response to 9/11, but then also when the anthrax events happened less than three-and-a-half weeks after 9/11. I saw some senior leaders’ response was to clamp down with control and go to people whom they knew as opposed to people that had practiced and had built relationships to respond to bad days like this.
That’s what motivated me to get my PhD, which was about how top-down approaches fail in an increasingly turbulent environment. Now, I’m not saying we don’t need any form of governance, because I also believe without governance, sadly, humans tend to fall to some form of “might makes right,” and that’s not always the case.
But I am thinking that we need to find a balance between these things. Yes, we still need to elect our leaders, we still need to have representative society, but there should be some places where things can be moved forward on the basis of (in our case) the country’s constitution as opposed to the country’s current political party in charge.
But I’m crazy like that. And I get flack thrown at me. Sometimes they call on me, and sometimes they kick me out the window.
Julia: But that’s okay. That should be expected. If the dominant position is you have to choose sides and you don’t choose sides, but you have something of value to offer, you will have exactly the experience you’re having.
David: And I have to be okay with that. Exactly. It’s I got what I deserve.
Julia: Yeah, it’s like what the deal is. That brings us exactly to this question about LACE and the WORLD values.
We’re talking about all these issues because the fact is that by thinking about peer-to-peer (P2P) decentralized intelligences, we’re thinking about human interaction.
So how could we imitate democracy in a P2P decentralized network? Which of those five values: Wisdom, Openness, Resilience, Love, and Diversity — or something else — do you think is most essential?
David: So if I had to pick of those, the one I would value the most is diversity — diversity of thought, diversity of perspective. And I think that historians will look back at this moment, the 2020s (and even the things leading up to the 2020s and beyond), the question for the future is can humans overcome some of our initial resistance to folks who think differently than us.
In a rapidly changing world in which technology is super empowering individuals and groups to do certain things, can we continue to coexist with the diversity of human belief systems? I hope Yes. If that’s a side, that’s the side I’m on. However, that is an open-ended question.
And if anything, it’s an always-ongoing experiment. There have been times in human history where at least at the regional level, diversity perspectives did not win out. And people were subjugated and things like that. And we still have some injustices that we need to correct about our present as well.
However, I think if the ongoing push is the side that says civilization is when you don’t automatically kill the newcomer or the new idea. So I would argue that civilization rests on the bedrock of — you cannot be dictatorial. You cannot be absolutist. You cannot be insisting on my ideology versus someone else’s ideology.
Because Plato wrote this in The Republic, even a benevolent philosopher King would probably be killed when he or she tried to tell tried to tell everyone what to do. So I think with going back to LACE and why diversity is so important, it’s recognizing we’re going into a world where there’s going to be a combination of advances in AI technologies, quantum technologies, and even in the internet of things and sensor technologies, understanding with ubiquitous computing, what’s going on. There will be things that are completely foreign to our human evolutionary experience. Yet we still want to value both the human as an individual choice actor and human communities as choice actors.
And how do we put in place protocols in which machines can interact with machines, can interact with people, can interact with other people and groups and machines in a way that is net uplifting?
Again, recognizing there may be some humans for whatever reason want to use it to misuse, abuse, or harm society — ideally not amplifying that. Even human speech, and one might even argue human speech is a protocol, as in you say something, I say something, we talk.
Julia: It’s both a choice and a protocol.
David: 100%. Human speech can be used for harmful purposes. In fact, even in representative democracies, representative republics like our own, the government cannot limit your speech, but if you start doing hateful speech or harmful speech or things like that, private entities can respond.
So it’s a delicate balance between, yes, we want to celebrate our freedoms. And at the same time, we’re trying to do net uplifting of civilization and societies as a whole.
Julia: Yes! So you think that you need diversity of thought and experience. And because of that diversity, you need an array of choices that are localized to the actual diverse agents.
David: Yes.
Julia: And that by localizing those choices, so you’re not outsourcing them to some sort of larger entity, by localizing those choices, you’re actually strengthening the system.
David: Again, I want to make it very clear that when I talk about choices and choice architectures, I am definitely not in the camp of economic nudges and economic paternalism. I don’t like that stuff at all.
I want to call that out because I want to be very intentional. I am not assuming I know what’s best for people. I want to give them an array of choices, consistent with, if anything, John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.” Like, before I’m born I don’t know who I’m gonna be. I don’t know if I’m gonna be born within the United States or outside the United States.
I don’t know if I’m gonna be in a family that’s well off or not well off, right? I don’t know if I’m gonna have all my limbs or not. What would be the array of choices that I think would be just, not knowing who I’m gonna be yet. Because I would argue that the moment you know who you are, people, if they’re not careful, if they don’t step outside of themselves, start organizing the world in ways that benefit them and disadvantage others.
Julia: Not just sometimes. I mean, it’s very common. Because we’re not yet to the point we are understanding how to think. So now I’m thinking about with that comment, I just was wondering if we could talk about how to help a new generation of people as they’re coming up, learn about how complexity works, how complex adaptive systems work. Could we create a video game that’s really compelling, where you don’t know where you’re going to be born, so at a moment in the game you’re born, but you have a bunch of levels to get to while you’re arranging the world for the “being born” part, and then you have the experience.
David: Okay, I haven’t ever told anyone this but I’m going to disclose it to you. Yeah. I’m not one of those people that falls asleep quickly. It takes a while for me to turn off my brain for some reason. But one of the things that I tell myself or talk in my head about when I’m trying to fall asleep is if I knew the right people and I could work with them, I’d like to make a video game where the very beginning is you have passed away from this world, and you’re being born into another world, but you don’t know who you’re going to be yet.
Julia: Yes. So cool!
David: And then on top of it, as through the game, not only are you that character, but you will also be other characters in this world. At some point in time, a phase jump will happen, and you’ll now be on the other side.
Julia: But you’re also like informing the construction of this world that you’re going to be born in.
David: 100%!
Julia: Yeah. This is just what I was thinking. I don’t know why. It must have just popped into my head.
David: This is crazy. But I just imagine what kind of game it would be like. I know Metaverse VR technologies have been hyped to a degree, but we now may actually be at a point where it may not be a perfect fidelity to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, but you could. I definitely would want to have it be not only your perspective as you build a world, but then you don’t know at a moment’s notice that you might actually be on the other side of the equation.
Singapore apparently does this where they have their executive branch equivalent leaders. They are intentionally rotating them every two or three years. So you have less turf building because you never know if on the other side, you might be there in two to three years from now.
Julia: I was just thinking the other day about a structure in which a community would just have king for a day, queen for a day. And where everyone gets a chance to be king or queen for a day, they have, they can make edicts, et cetera. But there’s a long period of time building up to that where we say, okay, starting in two years, we’re going to do this. And so that people start to imagine what would they do? And then the next day, what would the impact be?
David: The Greeks actually had a debate about how to govern, and there was a school of thought with the Greeks that just wanted to do random ballot for positions, like you said.
And so imagine if, and maybe this is a way we could actually get back to nonpartisan civil service. For certain roles, you first have to indicate you’re willing to do it, so it’s not just forced upon you. You put your name in a hat. Maybe we even say you have to demonstrate some knowledge of how to do trade or foreign affairs or whatever, but then you put your name in a hat and get to sit. It’s like, “Congrats! You’re this person for the next 18 months!”
And the nice thing is, you don’t get career politicians, because, you’re only going to do it for a few months. But it also changes the narrative from, “Oh that’s them. That’s the bureaucrats or that’s the politicians. And we’re separate.
Julia: Because it’s you.
David: It’s all of us.
Julia: We have similar falling-asleep thoughts. But speaking to LACE, I think that thinking about building LACE is good for humanity because it addresses the problems that get in the way of us having democracy with humans.
David: Right. If I was to summarize if someone says “Why LACE?” I’d say again that civilization is where you don’t automatically kill the newcomer or a new idea — [the building of] LACE is where you actually can recognize newcomers may have value and different perspectives. And that’s useful. The other thing I would say, though, is how can we put in place now decentralized technology protocols that uplift the human spirit?
Julia: Yes. So that’s the question. And we’ll see, but that’s the question.
David: We’ll make sense of it together, and diversity of ideas is welcomed. And hopefully this will maybe attract others to our cause together.
Julia: That’s right. Join us and see what happens!
David: That’s our goal, and thank you for being you, thanks for everything you do — onwards and upwards. Thank you.
