WORK DONE — CURRENCY PRODUCED — RESEARCH SHARED

We live in the age of big data. No matter from what discipline you hail, if you delve deep into things, chances are you have scores of data that must analysed in order to unearth some principles that govern the construction of that data. There are a few well known ongoing programs that enable unvetted citizen scientists or science minded citizens to participate by lending their resources, both computational and mental, in a distributive effort to solve divide and conquer problems — a class of problems which lends itself well to data processing, so data processing is the most salient use case. Most of these programs are geared toward particular problems where user participation is limited to the offering of resources and there is little feeling of being part of the process. If you take a good look at all these systems a clear superstructure emerges: the spirit of what they are doing in the most general form.

A Computational Democracy is an organization bound together by shared resources in order to compute a common aim where the resources provisioned to the collective by the individual are directly proportional to the progress of the whole.

I want people to feel like their computation matters! I believe this is not only a vain desire but a key psychological and economic mechanic that will not only keep these computational democracies united, but also make them flourish. How do we achieve this? We turn computation into a vote, but not all computations are equal, so a vote in this sense naturally has an associated magnitude. When one comes down this line of reasoning a form of currency — a cousin of cryptocurrency — naturally comes to mind: a kind of decentralized currency that is given value by computations done in computational democracies.

A currency for research

The Vision & View

The world and its people are diverse. Not everyone has the same interests and following priorities. It’s why everyone isn’t trying to cure cancer, but also may be the reason it is cured — because we have learned overtime that big problems require a multidisciplinary approach. Computational democracies (CompD’S) can exist wherever there is a culture of openness and desire for mutual enlightenment. The functional role a computational democracy will serve in any community is the maximizing of coordinated computing efforts or problem solving. There are two types of citizens in a CompD: planning and action. Planning citizens are those who actively submit proposals for usage of resources — kind of like the government or leadership, but with a much nicer bent. Action citizens are those who provide confirmation of the choices set forth by planners by providing resources. ( My heart sings for a universal system for solving all problems, computable and uncomputable, and I see that system as the ultimate successor to this one, but I must limit myself somewhere. )

Due to the diversity of all things human, it’s really hard to say how CompD’s will evolve in the wild. There will inevitably be small groups and extremely large groups, and I’m not sure how well a democracy of five scales to a democracy of millions; however, there must be some consistency or guidelines for all sized communities. The notion of research currency and it’s value based on work done is one such constant. In cryptocurrencies there are programs called miners which solve chunks of cryptographic problems. These cryptographic problems and their hardness serve as a basis for value because they are proportional to the amount of resources required to solve them; thus they serve the function of transforming one value, computation time, into another, magical internet money. In our case, the computations done in solving problems will serve as the basis for research currency — the miners.

Conservation of Value: Value is never created nor destroyed, it is transformed.

It’s best to explain CompD’s by how different users will interact with the democracy. Here’s an outline of how a CompD could work for action citizens:

Put your computer(s) to work. Allocate computer resources to a CompD in order to generate vote currency. Many users will be passive supporters of the democracy.
Find things to vote on. This stage is one that will scale differently across different groups. Some democracies may require intricate systems to help people find projects they are interested in, others will have only a handful of projects on the platform. In the case of larger democracies, I suggest vote currency be used for something like an upvote feature.
Vote with your computations. You can assign your resources to any problem in the democracy and earn currency proportional to your resources offered.
Vote with your currency. Here’s the tricky part. What are we going to do with this research currency generated? If there is an eventual correspondence to other digital currencies like bitcoin, then voting with your currency could literally mean giving money to certain research projects — because not every problem requires only pure computation. That is the ultimate goal here, but in the meantime, I propose we use the currency for the promotion and discovery of projects( more later ).

Then there are people who are simply interested in securing computer time for their projects. Here’s an outline of how a CompD could work for planning citizens:

Design a proposal that can be accomplished distributively. In this type of ecosystem, every proposal has to have a method of distributing the work. The details of how such proposals will actually be structured is a bit technical and would need to be studied in depth.
Submit the proposal and make your case to the people. This stage is like a politician campaigning for votes. Planners will need to convince people that their resources will further the overall goals of the democracy by choosing to afford your project resources.
When finished, publish your results. All results must be open to all members of the democracy. It may be interesting to play with the idea of crediting large contributors, but those details will have to be left to the implementers of these democracies.

What I lay before you is but an idea, a seed, and like all seeds, this must be given time and resources to take root and flourish. In my view, there is a need in this era for systems that marshall shared resources, in different communities, for the greater good of those communities. I limit myself to computing, because it is the most tangible and universal.

Triple Value

Computational democracies triple the value of research. First there is value in the work actually being done: the computations needed to reveal the hidden nugget in the data. Then there is value in the currency being produced by that work — which we abstractly see as serving the same role as a cryptocurrency miner. Then, the most awesome value, is the shared research and newfound wisdom produced.

The Vote and Currency Equivalence

I see a social sharing site similar to reddit being crucial the the success of a computational democracy. Imagine a reddit where instead of having link posts, you have research proposals, and instead an upvote, you can press a button and have your computer automatically start giving that project resources while generating currency. The comment section would be a forum dedicated to that project. You can really let your mind run wild with ideas. Then there’s ideas of different computational democracies run by different groups. Will their currencies be equal? Will there need to be an underlying standard for this concept to even work? Probably, but we can’t solve all the problems in one medium article. This is just a message in a bottle to the world.

If vote currencies emanating from computational democracies do create a new unified digital currency, will it have an equivalence to cryptocurrency? This is a question I’m weary of answering so soon. I don’t think there needs to be an equivalence because we can find inherent uses for the currency within the democracies, but then again, it would lead to very interesting prospects if we have a self-funding means to provide projects with concrete cash as well as computing resources. In any case, we must be careful how we approach the boundary between vote currency, cryptocurrency, and benjamins.

The Future

My aim of this article was to briefly talk about this idea of computational democracies and how I think they could amplify value and be a great force for good. I know this article is wanting much detail, but in all honesty, I’m still trying to imagine what such a institutions would look like. At the root of computational democracies are these main ideas:

Work produces inherent value.
You should be able to choose where your resources are used.
We should benefit from helping each other.

I look forward to hearing your ideas on how to make computational democracies for the betterment of us all.