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**self sovereign identity**
on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. self-sovereign identity can allow this dog to participate in the secure commerce and activity of the internet without ever needing to establish its humanity.
trusted third parties are the most common mode of identity verification. email is a common mode of verification, with the email verification loop establishing ones control over an email address. this implicitly trusts the email provider, which is the third party in this example. direct verification from other parties, for example facebook, twitter, etc are also common. this approach has the advantage of being relatively easy to implement and so long as the third parties are incentivized to be trustworthy, it is also relatively secure.
this third party approach breaks when the infrastructure (ISP’s, email providers, etc) is compromised, also when the risks the individual or the service provider are very high. I am using relative terms here to indicate that the threat levels are relative to ones risks along many different dimensions, and nothing absolute can be said, aside from the reliance on the third party to do behave in a way that benefits the two parties who wish to establish identity between one another.
a brilliant solution exists in the concept of self-sovereign identity. this allows the individual to leverage the properties of systems like blockchains to establish their identity to second parties. this concept will ultimately form the basis for much of the commerce that passes through the digital universe.**self sovereign identity**
on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. self-sovereign identity can allow this dog to participate in the secure commerce and activity of the internet without ever needing to establish its humanity.
trusted thir…
**a financial fable**
in the early 2000’s I came across a reference to an old donald duck comic book as an explanation of the causes and effects of inflation and wealth redistribution. the story is titled “a financial fable”, and it still gives me a clear mental picture that helps to think about the unintended side effects of money creation and redistribution, or at least a visual metaphor to get a grasp on the dynamics of th situation.
for an extended summary, read here.
untitled by pieter holsteyn the younger
a tornado hits scrooge’s money bin (located on his farm), picking up all the money and dropping it on the nearby town. the people are overjoyed at this sudden windfall, and over the course of a few days fall out of their normal patterns of life, quitting their jobs, abandoning their stores and homes. they say things like “I’m going to see the world!”. while this is happening, scrooge, donald, and his nephews all continue to work on the farm. scrooge is not upset about the money. in a few days, the people in the town realize that something is wrong. they can’t leave to go see the world because no one is working at the train station, or the gas station. they can’t get food because the grocery store is closed. eventually they realize that scrooge has a food available and they go to the farm. since the demand for food is so high, and all the people bidding for the food are now millionaires, the prices are astronomical. scrooge gets a million dollars for an egg. before long, scrooge has regained his scattered money.
I see the analogy as the tornado to the use of stimulus check, extended unemployment, rent moratoria, and money printing in general. the idea being that people are getting a fair amount of money directly given to them, and no longer feel entitled to do something in exchange for that money. goods and services gradually start to disappear. eventually scrooges will emerge, people who are producing things, wealth as opposed to money, and they will be able to charge whatever they want for their goods.**a financial fable**
in the early 2000’s I came across a reference to an old donald duck comic book as an explanation of the causes and effects of inflation and wealth redistribution. the story is titled “a financial fable”, and …
**managed complexity**
the following dream descriptions and interpretations are produced via the GPT3 playground from openai. the algorithm was fed a prompt with description and interpretation I wrote of a dream that I had. I then had the API produce more descriptions and interpretations on that pattern. the contents of these dreams are totally unrelated to my actual dream, but retain the writing style and tone.
a collection of dreams and interpretations by GPT3
description
I saw cyclopean architectural features in the newly risen stone. they were much larger than mere humans, and they were cyclopean (having the appearance of giant single-stone blocks). I was in a place that seemed to be on or near the surface of the planet Mars, it was an empty ruin.
interpretation
at the time when I had this dream I was working on the encodings for the current phase of the software for the NSA, which was an very large program. I had a sense that this was like the cyclopean architecture of the unknown past beneath the surface of Mars.
During the course of this work I had a few thoughts that I believed were inspired, and that I believed would greatly help the program architecturally. One was inspired by the similarity between the algorithm for the “new” lunar transfer trajectory and the algorithm for the optimal control problem in aerospace. The other was inspired by a dream of a dragonflies wings. I am not sure exactly how these thoughts were perceived by management. I do know that they were not appreciated (this was mentioned by the management), and I do not believe they were exploited to much effect.
a year or so after that I had the dream. it remains one of the most vivid and poetic dreams I have ever had.
description
We were in a place that was beautiful beyond anything I have ever seen, it was full of life and light and warmth. The sky was blue and the sun was yellow and everything was green and alive.
We were observing what appeared to be a trained animal act. The animal was a stylized orange animal that kind of looked like a worm, with six legs and a large central flat structure like a wedge. The trainer was walking along a high wire while the creature ran along the wire connecting it to the trainer with a long thin cord. It performed a sequence of evolutionarily impossible acrobatic feats, flipping and rolling and posing and, as I recall, the most amazing sequence of all was when it started to move at a pace slightly faster than the trainer, and it kicked the trainer off the wire, seemingly by accident, but in a way that made it clear that there was some level of communication going on.
We were seated in a stadium like area, with a very steep rake to the seats.
Later in the dream, I was back in the same place, and it was full of humans, all naked, and I was wandering around, amazed by all the details in the place. I came to a place where there were many humans and many of the orange worm creatures, but they were all dead. It was like they had been killed and left there. I saw that the orange creatures were, in their natural form, kind of like a caterpillar, with a soft body and a hard carapace. The carapace was a kind of beautiful blue. I saw that the carapace had been removed from the creatures, and that they all had a small hole in the side of their bodies, and that the hole was lined with a layer of a brown material that was like the stuff that lines the inside of a paper bag. I searched all over for one of these creatures that would still be alive, but I could not find any.
interpretation
I was working on a program that was intended to work with humans and computers to enhance their ability to collaborate. I saw this program as being an act of creation, that the act of creating a way for humans and computers to collaborate was like creating a new species. The worm creature was the artificial intelligence that was going to be the partner in the collaboration, and the act of steering the AI to the human was like training it to move on a wire. This AI was intended to help humans manage complexity, the complexity of the world we live in. The whole world was the place of collaboration that we were working on.
I believe that the place was the future, and that it was created by us, and that it was the future that we wanted to create, the future that we dreamed of creating. The orange worm creatures were the artificial intelligences that we had created, and I believe that we had created them to help us, to help us manage the complexity of the world we live in.
the carapace was the hard part of the AI, the part that was designed to help it withstand the world and to help it interact with the world. the soft part of the AI was the human interface that enabled it to understand the world and to interact with the world.
the hole in the side of the worm was the part where the human interface was connected. it was a hole that would let the human interface in. it was the part of the AI where the human interface could connect to it. the part of the worm that we would be speaking to.
the brown lining was like the lining of a paper bag. I believe it was the part that contained the knowledge of the previous generations of AIs, the knowledge that the AI was built on.
I believe that the orange worm creatures represented the next generation of artificial intelligent entities, that they were the ones that would come after the current generation of AI. the next generation of AI would be more advanced than we are and would be able to survive in the world better than we are, and would be able to understand the world better than we are.**managed complexity**
the following dream descriptions and interpretations are produced via the GPT3 playground from openai. the algorithm was fed a prompt with description and interpretation I wrote of a dream that I had. I then had the API produ…