00:00Welcome, welcome my children, welcome to the mass of minds that we are here to aggregate into a singular vision of truth. Does that make any sense? It does not need to. Have you spoken your truth? You should speak your truth. So I want to talk a little bit more about social proof of work because I think it's a really important idea, and I've thought of a few more ways to explain it. And the main question I want to explore is: when is wealth created? Governments print money whenever they want, they try not to create too much inflation, but inherently there's nothing restricting when a government prints money. So recently there's been this new invention of cryptocurrency that attempts to solve this problem. Instead, cryptocurrencies create currency at the point of solving a hash function. But neither of these approaches seem particularly restrained or useful to me.
00:48I understand why, to many, the energy usage of the Bitcoin blockchain seems like a major problem, because it is an incredible amount of energy that is being burned to secure this chain. And in a sense, performing calculations solely to secure an imaginary token that represents value seems wasteful, because what you're saying is that you're literally burning energy to create belief. That's what solving a hash function does, it converts electricity into belief and trust in that currency. Literally the only thing that solving the hash function does is protect the existence of the blockchain it is part of. Now I also understand why solving the problem of the inflation created by governments printing money whenever they want is important.
01:36But I honestly think those calculations could both secure the chain and perform another task simultaneously. So if you can create currency, essentially create wealth, by solving a hash function, you're already establishing that you can create wealth at any moment as long as there's a mechanism that causes people to believe that new wealth has value. And this again makes me consider the notion that if there are things that people want to see be done and an individual that is willing to do those tasks, why can't currency be created at that moment to reward that person willing to do that task? Why is it that the government can print money at any point but if there are things everyone wants to see be done they can't be done because there's no individual willing to pay them directly to perform that task?
02:24If there is an individual willing to do a task in a collective of people that want to see that task performed, why shouldn't wealth be created in that moment to reward them? Money could and probably would still exist, but the point is, suddenly you would be able to engage in a transaction with society as a whole and essentially earn influence from performing tasks viewed as socially beneficial. Forget these fake contracts with the people that some politicians campaign on, you would have a real contract with the people with real consequences. $27, donate me $27 and I'll solve all your problems. Oh, I'll solve all your problems if you just give me $27, $27, I'll solve all your problems. It just seems kind of stupid to create wealth arbitrarily.
03:14Why not create money at the moment it is needed? Now of course I don't view this reward as an exchange token like money, and in general I view it as behaving fairly different from money, but I think the point on when money is created is valid. And the main challenge in creating a new system is just establishing when an action performed by an individual merits a reward by the collective. The other thing I want to talk about is connecting a few of my past videos to social proof of work. My video on superforecasters was the least viewed of this series, but in actuality it is the same concept in different words. In one I'm framing it as predictions, but what I'm talking about is desired futures. When I say what the collective wants to see be done, what I'm talking about is potential futures, even if they take very little effort and are very near in the future like picking up some trash, but larger and more fundamental actions could be filtered through the system as well.
04:03The thing is, you need a way to quantify all those collective desires, and it comes down to the relationship between predictions about what future we wish to see, actions taken in the present, and reflections on the past and whether those actions played out as expected and fulfilled those desired futures. Also the video on quantifiable utopia, where I refer to the balance between collective truth and collective good, is directly connected to this, because what that video is all about is quantifying social good and collective belief and whether one lives in a good society. When I say that we need to move into the direction that balances truth and good, in that video I'm actually talking about social proof of work. And when I'm talking about a direction in time, I'm talking about the future.
04:52So I'm talking about predictors in superforecasters, it's all the same thing but I'm saying different words. Which then connects to my video on words, they're incomplete representations of truth. Which then connects to my video on the OpenAI text generator as being a form of hyper democracy. Which also connects to my name, Speaker John Ash. Which also connects to my last video, Far From The Shore, which features a rotating speaker cone. And then in turn all this connects to my video on how money is created and how we place value in it. It all connects. It's all connected. It's all connected, I have the answers, let me solve it for you my friends, let me solve it, let me sell all of it.
05:42So an answer to what calculation should be performed other than solving a hash function. I think the answer is that miners should be optimizing parameters in a giant distributed machine learning model that encodes collective belief of social good, and rewards those who most contribute to it. You get a car, and you get a car. That's not exactly something I could put on a bumper sticker, but I think it's something that would have dramatic cascading system level effects on society. I feel like it's the only thing that could realistically prevent things like climate change and avoid unwanted futures. People act individually, but they act relative to a reward system, and the system level effects of that reward system are fairly predictable. So if you really want to change how individuals behave, there needs to be a reward for pro-social behavior.
06:31And that's what social proof of work is. It's the codification of what the collective wants to see be done in real time, and the reward of those who take actions that most contribute to the futures that benefit the most individuals. And when you have a reward system that has consequences for taking actions that affect collective well-being in the future, that lone voice, the lone scientist in the disaster movie that's warning everyone, suddenly has a real means to have what they're saying be amplified. Amplifying, like a speaker would do. Amplifying their words. Let the speech be amplified through a speaker. Speaker John Ash. Speaker, speaker, speaker, speaker, all connects, connect the speaker to the entertainment system.
07:21Oh, that connects to what now. As of now I feel like that lone scientist, I'm warning about what will happen in the future and offering a solution before it happens, but as of now there is no real way to amplify my voice. I have to go through this system of likes and followers and money and markets, and honestly my view of the future is darkening. And speaking of prediction, speaking, I think I can make a reasonable set of predictions about what will happen with this video. People have a high watch time, like a lot of my videos do, I will also have a good click-through rate like a lot of my videos do, but it will only be distributed to a few hundred people, and of those few hundred people maybe one or two will share it.
08:09But that will not be enough to indicate to the algorithms that this is worthy of distribution. You must be worthy, have your content distributed unto the masses, come have mass with me brother and share into that eternal attention, praise the algorithms for they decide who gets to be heard and who gets not to be heard, who is silent and whose voice is amplified to the mass. Like a speaker, like a speakerphone, like a speaker cone, like a concentric wave, a concentric wave emanating from the center of a speaker cone, like my last video, connects, it all connects. So this video will level off below 200 views. Oh dear God, I can predict the future.
09:02I saw the future and it came true. As such, I was so brilliant in my prediction. Amen, amen, amen. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. So if you want to see these eddies propagate, the only thing that I can say is the same that every youtuber says at the end of their videos: like, subscribe, and press that notification babble, because until the algorithms view my content as something worthy of distributing, these ideas will remain in a little network bubble network. And the only way the algorithms will view me as worthy of distribution is if you like, share, comment, and subscribe.
09:55Thank you for watching, my friends, and remember, your ability to speak is the most powerful tool that you have. Good, before I go, I want to take a moment to thank a few cool people who have helped me out. First, Carl Kalagorgevich for letting me borrow his camera for so long, with which I wouldn't be able to make these videos. He has a YouTube channel with his brother called Asami Arrow Productions, he helped me produce a few of the music videos I've posted. Second, Turil Cronberg drew me this fluffy lovely drawing inspired by my song Snail on Strange Hymns, and she's been very supportive in these videos early on and her enthusiasm keeps me going.
10:43Her twitter handle is @thewiseturtle. Also Jason Snyder, I'd almost given up in trying to reach anyone when he recommended my Twitter account and connected me to a ton of cool people, his Twitter handle is @cognizantcast. With Jared Janes called both/and which I think is super cool, and his twitter handle is @JaredJanes. A few other people I just think are neat, it's not everybody, a small list: Emily @cosomia_, Hunter Bergsma at @HunterBergsma has been fun to talk to lately, Anton Wilson @AntonJW has cool thoughts, Josh @SkyGazerWithThreeWise.
11:34Malcolm Ocean @MalcolmOcean, and there's a lot of other people that I'm not mentioning but probably will in a future video. Thank you again, thank you. [Music]