I think most sensible people had figured this out already. The people that don't and honestly believe everything will be fixed by a DAO or whatever... they're beyond reason.
Their solutions may not and perhaps probably will not work because it's a hard problem.
The payoff for solving this problem is civilization without single points of failure. No more wheel of rising and falling empires that take all our progress and knowledge with them when they die. No more pretending to bow down to megalomaniacs and ideologues to achieve stability. No more vast centralized moral hazards that attract sociopaths like moths to a lamp.
I've taken to calling the zero-trust decentralization problem "computer science's fusion." It's perpetually N years away, but if we solve it the payoff is immense.
Edit: Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive that the real solution is somewhere nearby.
There will never be a utopia because when you eliminate one set of problems you reveal new ones. The fact that we are even discussing this is because we are not dying of cholera, starving, or being eaten by lions. The goal is to advance one step at a time.
Eliminating civilizational SPOFs would be a fairly large step.
> Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive
It doesn't solve it, and it will never be close. If you ant just one reason, it's easy: enforcement. You smart contracts mean zilch if you can't enter a house some scammer just sold you.
I think part of the problem is that DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is simply a poor way to describe what these new orgs are. Yes they're decentralized, but they are not fully autonomous, as they still require people writing code, making proposals, voting, etc. I think a much better term is "decentralized open organization" DOO. This captures better the fact that this revolution is about a new type of human coordination, not automation, even if a lot is automated. I think it helps to frame this as a social revolution to understand the full power of it.
Advances in the ability to coordinate humans often leads to great advances in society and technology. Now where crypto is immensely useful, is that in the past a decentralized group of people would have still had to be tied to a specific nation for banking. Now with crypto, a group of people from all over the world can run a company that's fully internet native that relies on no single nation for it's banking needs. You may not see it, but to me that is a ridiculously powerful concept.
I think that eventually, anything that can be run by a DAO will be run by a DAO, just like with automation, any process that can be automated will, eventually, be automated.
I think I've given the concept of DAOs a good faith effort, but I cannot understand how anyone thinks they are going to work for anything substantial.
Even if "governance" is "decentralized," there are still going to need to be people in the DAO, day to day, doing the work that no one wants to do, making decisions that no one wants to make.
It seems to me like a DAO is just a college group project but if you add crypto it solves everything?
Organizational behavior and its challenges don't go away because you've issued tokens.
Honest question, what the heck am I missing? It has to be something!
So far this does not seem to be true though. There are a great many processes which we could have automated but have so far not done yet, often in domains where safety is very critical and/or are very human-involved. One particular example is the automation of train and aircraft piloting, where humans are required by law and due to public demand but not actually necessary for the job.
In particular I'm thinking about some of the procedures aboard nuclear submarines where automated systems were tried and eventually rolled back, because the automation would be fine 99.9% of the time but when it failed it would cause disaster at computer speeds instead of just at human speeds. I can definitely imagine a bug in a DAO being completely unacceptable in some domains even if it is more efficient than doing the same job with humans. (For example, in national voting)
Finally even for those cases where automation is desired and could be done by some autonomous entity, I'm not sure why you would specifically need a Distributed AO instead of just regular cronjobs on a server somewhere. Any real-world system is going to need regular updates anyway, so you end up centralizing trust in whoever can update the code for the (D)AO.
It's worthwhile to note that there are currently driverless metro lines in the world. We do seem to be moving in that direction for automation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system... As always, the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.
The thing people generally don't want automated is exactly the the thing money is intended to do: allocate resources.
Very few people want a robot deciding how they spend their time, energy, and assets. Resource allocation will be the last unautomated job on the planet if we make it to post-scarcity. People want everything done for them except deciding what those things that need to be done are.
I think this is right. The inevitable climate change-induced population crash will necessitate more automation, further accelerating an accelerating trend.
*DAO doesn't need to run on Ethereum blockchain, it can also be a sufficiently autonomous collection of ERP systems.
