The reason why I put community sentiment first
Vlad Zamfir triggered a public storm recently when he challenged Nick Szabo in his medium post. First I want to say I've been positively inspired both by Nick Zsabo and by Vlad Zamfir. Positive inspiration is the highest compliment I can give to either of them. I also think we need to have public debates and would at least admit that I would like to see a structured organized debate with both Vlad Zamfir and Nick Szabo as participants.
I think it is important to put all ethical questions up for discussion. Whether it be the balance of privacy vs transparency, or immutability, or any other factors which influence governance. I do not think we should avoid or shy away from the debate but at the same time I realize it's difficult to have a debate because as Ohad Asor said in his most recent interview, the discussions don't scale. Currently we rely on community representatives to have public debates just so we can explore both sides of an ethical question and in medium format where people post blogs back and forth I do not think this is satisfactory nor does it scale long term.
In my view, my personal opinion of what is right or wrong is not enough to determine the right and wrong choice for millions of people. No matter how smart I might think I am, no matter how much I might study an issue, I can never in my opinion make the decision for millions of others who may have different knowledge, values, etc. We rely on satisficing due to the fact that at the end of the day brain power is the bottleneck and limitation. For this reason we don't really have what I would call moral clarity in the community but it is due to not having the tools to have well reasoned debates.
Leaders as Proxies
The concept of legal proxy:
A proxy is a person who is designated by another to represent that individual at a meeting or before a public body. It also refers to the written authorization allowing one person to act on behalf of another.
This is what I consider to be a leader in a public space. In other words this is a public servant who acts on behalf of the community they represent. This is not so different from what a software agent in artificial intelligence is supposed to do. The software agent is supposed to act on behalf of and in furtherance of the will of others. So this concept in my opinion hits at the root of the debate between immutability (fully autonomous software) and semi-autonomous software.
Fully autonomous without human sentiment in the loop would be like the AI which cannot be shut down, which is set, and which just runs, and if the community doesn't agree with the actions it takes morally then it's just too bad. If human sentiment remains in the loop then these software agents would be what I call the extended will or extended mind. In other words, when a human represents you in court, or in some official capacity, or is your political advocate or community advocate, they are a proxy who is fulfilling the obligation of pursuing your will. The human in this position isn't supposed to be in charge, or responsible for the decisions they make on behalf of the community they serve. The programmer simply writes the code on behalf of the community they are supposed to serve, the politician writes the laws on behalf of the community they serve.
Tauchain offers the promise of scaling discussion and of tracking sentiment
In Tauchain we have different options available to the community which are not available for Ethereum or Bitcoin. The unique competitive advantage Tauchain offers is state of the art community governance. We don't have the capacity for governance on Ethereum or Bitcoin because we cannot even discuss certain topics in a debate format. Even if we can discuss the topic, we cannot make progress and it's very hard to receive the input of millions of Ethereum users vs the situation of The DAO when it was just thousands. It becomes a situation where the community resorts to positioning Vitalik as the emperor who decides the disputes but this is centralizing around Vitalik who is just a person himself.
Tauchain does not require centralization around Ohad. This is something which in 2019 probably doesn't make a bit of sense because Tauchain isn't yet built and currently obviously is centered around Ohad. The point is if Tauchain can be built and if it does scale discussion, track sentiment, and do some of what many hope it can do, then Ohad will not remain the center of gravity. The community itself is the center of gravity and Ohad would just be one of the programmers, perhaps the lead programmer, but this does not mean every moral question or decision will be his decision.
In my opinion there is both power and freedom in this mentality. When you're not responsible for making the decisions for millions of people you can avoid a lot of stress, a lot of very difficult decisions which no normal person should have to make. If you can simply tell the community the choice is theirs, and provide them with the necessary tools they'll need to make the best choice they can? Well in this situation each individual owns their own choices, their sentiment would determine the direction of the ship. Tau could allow for avoidance of contradiction, for agreements to be made between millions of people, and for these agreements to be encoded as "contracts" or as "code" or as some combined hybrid. In addition, we will have the capacity for software agents, for bots, which can respond to sentiment, so we would have both a protocol which is self adaptive according to the will of participants and apps which can be adaptive to always changing concepts of right and wrong of an evolving community.
The questions of privacy, of immutability, of how to manage AI safely, are in my opinion too big and too important for one person or a committee of persons to make. In my opinion a community has to make these decisions and right or wrong the community has to accept responsibility both for the benefits and risks. The community which has evolving opinions over time (due to the composition of the community changing over time) in my opinion needs to have the ability to always change or update according to current ethical standards. The programmers who disagree with the current sentiment of the community can simply refuse to write the code. Eventually Tau will have program synthesis so even if the programmers don't write the code the community would still get what it wants by more direct rather than proxy means.
So it comes down to the community, down to the people who must decide what is right and what is wrong. Sentiment analysis and scaled discussion will allow millions of people to participate in questions without having to rely on proxies. It's going to be literally for you to decide what you want Tau to be, how you want Tau to be used, what you think are the red lines to not cross.