For all who are following Tauchain development the latest [blogpost] by Ohad releases his vision for what Agoras in particular will be. The concept of a knowledge economy and knowledge society are defined in that post. In my post I will focus on some ideas I have for what could be built and what I'd like to personally contribute.
The concepts which I'll discuss below are:
- Exocortex
- Mobile sensing network
- Knowledge economy
- Global sentiment collection analysis
- Internet of Languages
The idea of a decentralized exocortex is actually not just compatible with the vision Ohad presented for a decentralized search engine but it is a philosophical framework on which to think about what Tauchain makes possible with a knowledge society. By this I mean the ability of any individual to in essence upload their mind to a network is a long held dream of many. To be particular, those who have followed the philosophical framework of techno-progressive, or techno-libertarian, or Social Futurism, are very aware of the value of mind uploading and similar concepts. In order for a person to even dream about uploading their mind they must first solve the communication problem between the biological thinkers (humans primarily) and the machines.
TML is the attempt to create the foundation allowing for better language development. This is what Ohad Asor calls the Internet of Languages and this Internet of Languages is a critical concept allowing for in the more abstract sense the individual to upload their mind more effectively. Since most people who communicate do so using natural languages, it becomes obvious that having formal languages be the main tool of communication is extremely limiting if people desire to have at least their knowledge to be stored. It is true that under platforms like Tezos or Cardano they have formal languages so in theory people (programmers specifically) can communicate well back to the machines but the rest who do not have this expertise are left in a position where they must trust this new group of centralized entities we call "programmers" which once again puts a middle man between the sentiment of the users of the platform and the evolution of the platform.
Under Tau the programmers are not middlemen, will not have to be trusted, and so it will not necessarily evolve into a technocracy (governance by expert programmers) but can evolve based on the actual sentiment of the users. These users could be the earliest stakeholders or it could be something else but the point here is Tauchain unlike most other networks will belong to the users, not the developers. This is made possible by both TML and by the ability of the Alpha to scale discussions. Because discussions can be scaled (this made possible with the help of the Earley Parser), the true power of Tauchain is that we can track the sentiment and even more importantly alert and disallow contradictions, so that the essence of what people want is more effectively put into specification, then code, and run in a distributed manner.
Basic features of an exocortex enabled by a knowledge economy
One of the most basic functions of an exocortex is the ability to query. This is the ability to at minimum search your own distributed database of knowledge. This could of course scale and using the Agoras token you in theory can request answers from anyone else's database of knowledge. This would of course create markets around valuable knowledge and people who query it for their projects or goals will be able to pay to use this knowledge.
Remember, TML because of how it is designed, and because discussions can scale, it will be a network which can put a value on your sentiment. In other words, today people rely on surveys and polls to determine sentiment. On Tauchain this may be something which the network itself can track using an algorithm so that even polls will be less necessary or done in a different way. In general, if you broadcast your worldview or express your true opinions then and only then can the network adapt and evolve according to that. So the greater the ability to scale discussions the more adaptable the network can be to current public opinion which is extremely powerful.
The mobile sensing network example
Suppose you have Agoras and one of the features is mobile sensing. Let's say for sake of discussion that you can ask the network for a video or photo of any location on earth. So you ask the network and attach Agoras as a reward for this data, and anyone on earth with a mobile phone can take a photo or video of that location to collect the reward. In a sense this is also able to become an Oracle network, where results of some event can be uploaded via the mobile sensing network. Why is this intriguing? Because if all participants of Tauchain have a personalized exocortex functionality then they'll be able to use any of this data as part of their data sets, or samples, or whatever they decide, with the ability to produce knowledge from this which they could then even potentially profit from.
Conclusion
Hopefully this ties some of the pieces together. Decentralized search is really something we can also think of as an ability of any participant to ask a question to any other participant(s). The answer to that question going beyond merely returning a document could be to return useful knowledge as a result of the query which machines can make use of. The ability to ask the crowd would include asking all kinds of participants and could include the benefits of human computation or machine computation in symbiosis. The Internet of Language allows for over time evolving the means of communication between human to machine, machine to machine, or even human to human. The Earley Parser because it can handle all context free grammars is the ideal parser and specifically it can handle natural language which is the language of human beings. The knowledge produced by this network will be monetized in a more direct manner than any other network so far, which means we will all have incentive early on to feed this network our knowledge which in a vicious cycle can increase the utility of the network, increase the amount of knowledge produced, and feed into itself.
References
http://www.idni.org/blog/agoras-to-tml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_wireless_sensor_network
https://github.com/yasuhito/exocortex
https://github.com/huginn/huginn
https://yacy.net/en/index.html
https://github.com/IDNI/tau
For anyone who finds the topic of an exocortex interesting, watch this video below which is an interview with one of the main pioneers of this concept Bryce Lynch:
For anyone interested in Agoras, watch this video below featuring Ohad Asor:
