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.
