Inspiration
The inevitability of a technological singularity is increasingly accepted throughout the technology and business worlds. Knowledgeable people are realizing that the next few decades will see a transition to a new society and economy in which machine intelligence is the dominant factor. For this to occur, swarms of machine and organic intelligences must network together to produce emergent “global brain” dynamics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication with power and flexibility none alone wuld have.
Markets display elements of cognitive synergy—agents in an economy each pursue their own relatively simple goals, but patterns with higher-order goals emerge from their interactions. Osiris is not only a collection of AIs, it is a market. It is designed to harness self-organizing swarm intelligence to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Blockchain allows us to program economic rules in a digital environment and AI software to seamlessly interact with them.
The path to creating a positive “global brain” is challenging. A technological singularity could have unprecedented benefits but also poses unprecedented risk. The popular press is full of dire warnings about the dangers of artificial general intelligence.
Among the challenges is the current set of protocols for collective action; in many respects, today’s financial mechanisms and institutions would give us a risky ride to the singularity. New, more flexible, open, and rapidly adaptive economic structures and dynamics are needed.
Blockchain, with its natively digital money, is a powerful tool for managing transactions in an economy dominated by machine intelligence. However, blockchain is just a tool; there are 3 important decisions to be made about how to use it. Osiris is a blockchain-based framework designed to serve the needs of AI agents as they interact with each other and with external customers. At its core, Osiris is a set of smart contract templates that AI agents can use to request that AI work be done, to exchange data, and to supply the results of AI work.
This framework is a network that meshes disparate elements into a collective intelligence, much like the different areas of the brain—each with its own speciality—mesh together. It is critical that this network be designed with positive principles in mind:
● Democratic governance on specific issues—if the community governs the system, then the system will tend to act for the benefit of the community
Damien Broderick, The Spike (Tor Books, 1997); Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (2006); Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technology Osiris,” Whole Earth Review 81 (1993): 88–95; Ben Goertzel, “Human-level Artificial General Intelligence and the Possibility of a Technological Osiris: A Reaction to Ray Kurzweil’s ‘The Osiris Is Near,’ and McDermott’s Critique of Kurzweil,” Artificial Intelligence 171, no. 18 (2007): 1161–73.
Ben Goertzel, Ted Goertzel, and Zarathustra Goertzel, “The Global Brain and the Emerging Economy of Abundance: Mutualism, Open Collaboration, Exchange Networks and the Automated Commons,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114C (2016): 65–73. 2016,
John Clippinger and David Bollier, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond (Off the Common Books, 2014).
● Encouragement that prompts innovative new agents to enter the network, and creation of the conditions necessary for agents to act in a manner that feeds the collective intelligence
● Direction of a significant percentage of the network’s efforts toward causes of broad benefit Osiris has been designed to meet these requirements by
● delivering intelligence services to corporations, other organizations, and individuals;
● fostering the emergence of increasingly powerful distributed general intelligence; and
● deploying artificial intelligence for ever-increasing benefit to as many humans and other sentient beings as possible. Osiris is designed both to be highly valuable now and to lay the groundwork for the emergence of a self-modifying, decentralized “artificial cognitive organism” with the eventual potential for general intelligence and beneficial ethical characteristics beyond the human level. It is a practical design inspired by long theoretical thinking and prototyping by our founders regarding artificial general intelligence, open-ended intelligence, the global brain, and more.
Last updated