# Human Tech | Human Keys for Human Flourishing - Shady El Damaty | ETHDam III - 2025 - Speakers: Shady El Damaty - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 15:31 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-m1rdFguCfL4 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1rdFguCfL4 ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Human Tech | Human Keys for Human Flourishing - Shady El Damaty | ETHDam III - 2025 🎀 About the Speaker: Shady El Damaty, Ph.D. is the CEO and co-founder of Holonym Foundation. Previously, Shady was a cognitive neuroscientist and the pioneering visionary behind DeSci. He created the first decentralized science DAO, built a verified identity registry, and worked to archive hundreds of terabytes of critical neuroimaging data on resilient decentralized infrastructure. Today, he is again breaking new ground by building Human.Tech, a framework for hardened individual natural digital rights made immutable with decentralized infrastructure. 𝕏 Follow: https://x.com/hebbianloop https://human.tech/ https://x.com/0xHolonym ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 – Intro & Welcome 0:26 – Shady’s Background 1:38 – Acceleration Increases Risk 2:20 – Differential Acceleration vs Effective Acceleration 4:01 – The World of Bits: Cyber and Info 5:46 – Rollups, Proofs & Social Networks 7:01 – Info Integrity and Content Moderation 8:15 – Designing Digital Rights into Tech 9:00 – Covenant for Human Alignment 12:02 – Self-Custody Through Human Attributes ## Transcript Welcome to EA to E to E to E to E cards and the PO app is a very important part part of that. You're all plugged in. I'm plugged in. Great. Uh going to give you a microphone. Please make sure to hold it in the middle and then you'll be off to the races. Please give it up to Shady. Hi guys. Um my name is Shali. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Hollinim. We're building out open framework called human tech. Um, a little bit about me. I am a frustrated artist and a frustrated scientist. I can make you uh a halfway decent sketch of your of your portraits, but you probably won't pay money for it. I'm also a frustrated scientist. Uh background is in neuro. Uh got really tired of trying to make it work in academia. uh did a little something called DESI a couple years ago uh and really interested in coordination tech. So one thing I think uh that really stuck out to me while thinking about how you know what what we can expect from technology in the future and just the excitement of working in in research as well is that things always seem to be moving faster and faster and faster. uh especially in neuroscience research where as soon as you do an analysis, somebody's already updated that flow and made it more efficient, more uh more predictive, more powerful. But the thing you notice is that as you accelerate technology, you also accelerate the problems that it creates. And the more quickly we accelerate uh the more quickly the risks become more complex. So we've been doing a bunch of workshops as uh over the past couple years kind of in in uh parallel with DAC workshops or differential acceleration workshops and one thing we've noticed is that all of the main risks that people will point out to for society today are all overlapping, right? They're all kind of the same thing. Whether it's infrastructure risks, whether it's political risks, whether it's uh uh social, you know, freedom risks, whether it's uh physical risks like pandemics or conflict. And what's really missing today specifically when it comes to uh thinking about technology and the risks that emerge is a unified framework. So who here has heard of differential acceleration accelerationism or DIAC? Anybody in the crowd? Okay, so like about a about a quarter. Okay, that's great. So I'm going to go a little bit more detail. So DAC is a direct response to the effective accelerationists. So think like the Andre's, the Peter Theals of the world that believe that we should push technology as fast as possible and not worry about the collateral damage that's incurred because it doesn't matter. Once we get to the end point, everything will be keen. Everything will be PG keen. We'll be all good. Uh now that's a bit of a that's that's a perspective you can take right uh that's that's a position you can take and maybe there's some legitimacy to that as well uh but a direct response to that was penned by Vitalic Buterine about a year ago in a pretty delightful essay I highly recommend reading it called my techno uh optimism where he discusses why accelerate technology without any sort of uh foresight or u capacity for mitigating against its risks. So instead of accelerating blindly, why don't we differentially accelerate technology uh that's uh uh that reduces existential risk. And so you can break this schema up into two two rough categories. One is in the world of bits which is what we'll be talking about today and the world of atoms. So briefly world of atoms is going to be anything in the physical world. So for example like uh viruses pandemic preparedness uh say bio security maybe even like defenses against nanotech in the very far future to prevent everything from turning into great goo by accident. Um and the macro so macro would be things like better ways to defend against nuclear holocaust or better ways to defend against um infrastructure collapse. But the really I think exciting bit today and what we can really do a ton with uh with the technologies that are being built in this room is in the world of bits. So that's going to collapse into cyber and info. Cyber is going to be what we're comfortable with you know talking at length with which is going to be like uh cryptography encryption uh zero knowledge proofs privacy being able to make sure that data is actually verifiable that what we intend to execute when we execute actually is what we execute. Uh and then info is a little bit kind of on the other side of things. It's a little more difficult to capture info. When we think about defense and info, we think about how do we actually um as humans when we're interacting with information, how do we actually ensure that we're seeing the information that we intend to and we understand the intent that it comes from. Right? So is it information that we trust can come from a verified source and is actually uh is it shilling us for something or is it trying to influence our behavior in a certain way? What are the intentions behind it? Very difficult problems. Uh in Vital's paper comes up with a couple different examples of uh of how this is being put into practice today or what like an ideal version of this could look like. So, you know, I think we could all agree that one of the most uh I think common important topics in the past 5 to 10 years has been how do we actually communicate online in a way that we can have hyper forums of uh collaboration where we can freely exchange information as quickly as possible to converge on difficult problems to have the debates that need to be had. So, privacy is really important for that, but also uh so is making sure that you're actually interacting with people that have stake in the game, right? Actual real humans. So one potential way we could do this is for example roll up a social network into uh a blockchain that uses uh zero knowledge proofs for one proving personhood for individuals that when they enter the social network that you know they are a real person. Uh and then two you can create a a link of say for example social posts that are uh that can roll up into the other and you can prove that they come from the same person. You can have some uh say like thing like community notes running in the back end that uh effectively uh can govern say for example abuses on the platform right people that are uh say for example um you know uh purposely perpetuating misinformation or perhaps uh per deviating from say a sub community's goals and those can be set into the contracts of that that social contract of that community. So there's a lot that's needed to come together for that. Uh and it's not exactly easy, especially when you start getting into things like and there was a great panel earlier today. I don't know if you guys caught it on wallets and whether we should actually label scams and fishing alerts within the wallet. Like is that who has the power to do that? Who like who should we trust to actually do things like that? And there have been experiments out there, right, where uh once you get up to a certain point where the site is so uh like say there's like some source of information that's just so blatantly obviously uh trying to influence you to do something or clickbait something. Uh I'm sure you guys have seen it before. So, there's some browsers now that actually have these built-in pop-up warnings uh that say, "Hey, like if you're going to this site, just know this has been overwhelmingly suggested by many, many people uh that this is a bad site to go to and it's probably going to get you to do something you don't want to do." So, again, that's also kind of a double-edged sword, right? How do we actually uh coordinate people around these really difficult problems for building these systems at scale where we can provide people access to secure communications uh but also where we can navigate and be able to uh be able to understand exactly which systems are giving us the information we need to coordinate and work together to solve problems around existential risk mitigation. So in the end really with accelerationism the end goal is to make things better for humans because technology apparently will solve everything. Um but if we're not doing that with the humans in the loop seems kind of self-defeating. So one thing we've been working with uh is this is this uh framing or set of principles where we align humans around these problems by actually beginning with digital rights embedded into the tech by design. So, we'll do this with cryptography, right? And there's tons of reasons why. And I think all you guys understand that. Um, and it's not enough to just say that you're going to do these things, right? It's not enough to just say, "Hey, we're going to embed uh cryptography into uh we're going to embed digital rights with cryptography." We need a really specific set of schematics and frameworks. And we need to make this set of schematics open source and uh uh something that can be used to guide uh development across across a feature of different use cases or worlds, right? Not just our little niche or our little hackathon. Um so this is what we call the covenant for human alignment. The covenant you could think of it as this uh kind of like sprawling open framework of somewhat loosely connected artifacts. They could be user documentation. It could be um uh artistic pieces, short stories, etc. that are all linked together by a set of principles that have been iterated upon by a community. The specific goal of hardening digital rights uh for privacy and security. So if you want to take a look at the covenant, you can scan the QR. That's the IPFS CD of the last version that was frozen by the community. Uh the idea here is that it's something that just uh that's just begun but will continue to evolve. A couple of the principles that have bubbled up from the covenant are things like for example universal personhood, right? That your abil your status as an individual with certain uh let's say affordances uh for agency within a digital framework shouldn't be issued by any institution or any like individual. These things should just be inherent and we should have public service protocols that allow people to recognize and signal their personhood. Uh inel inaluable ownership is actually a really critical thing as well and that starts with self-custody. You can't have the two without the other and of course privacy by default. So how do we design systems where opt out is the kind of action the high the activation energy you need right to to interact with with a system and things are just private by default until you decide otherwise. Uh these are just three uh three of the principles that so far have been put together by the community and there's uh still lots of thought and consideration around some of the other ones. I think there is a total of 10 and one thing we've been as a company focusing on is how do we support the framework that's coming together around human aligned technology so that we can accelerate technology um while mitigating existential risks. So part of that is an open framework for keys, wallets and identity to underscore those first three principles. This is rooted with uh a network we call the human network that allows anyone to prove uh personhood while also generating uh a key for self- custody securely. And this is a key that's able to be recovered uh even if you say for example delete the browser session that you're in uh or lose the private key because the key is derived not from random randomness but from human attributes. So what you have, what you know or what you are. So for example, this could be uh a security key that you keep in your pocket or it could be uh a story that you tell your kid at night before you go to sleep uh that only you two know, right? Or it could be for example um some biometric, right? Like uh a thumbrints or uh facial scan or it could be like a PPG, heart rate variability in a piece of jewelry that you wear. And these pieces of data are uh processed on the client side, broken up and passed to this network called the human network which allows you to derive a high entropy key from these low entropy sources. Now the cool thing about this is the key can be made available through a front end that can be embedded anywhere a little iframe. So you can as a developer choose exactly how you want to authenticate your users in a way that's that comes that meets them where they are right whether uh they're okay with signing in with socials or whether they're uh okay with signing in with biometrics if the use case actually requires that you can do those things and once you give these users keys you actually open up a whole world where they can interact in digital spaces while being more conscientious uh of the sort of um afford affordances that come with the rights that you're giving them. Right? So, some things that we can do, for example, is once you give users keys, you can also have them prove facts about themselves, right? Say for example, taking a stateisssued passport if you're lucky or privileged enough to have one uh that has an NFC chip in it and being able to produce a privacy preserving proof uh on your phone that proves that, for example, you're uh reasonably a human with reasonable probability a human that has a passport. um and allows you to prove things like like personhood or or other aspects on on your on your uh residency or cit state membership or citizenship. When we talk about accelerating humanity and putting digital rights into technology, we really see this leading to a place where humanity is truly flourishing and we can unlock all sorts of new use cases that haven't been possible before. Right? So um you know there's been lots of conversation in the past like 60 days or the first 100 days of the new American administration which is you know what can government actually do and what's actually worthwhile for putting money into you know why should people actually why should governments even care? Well, in the end, humans should always care whether it's governments or people that come together for a certain reason. And the crypto rails that we're building on allow us to do things like direct aid uh without permission from an individual without middlemen, right? Extracting or getting their pound of flesh uh so that you can res move capital from point A to point B to have some observed impact. And this is something we're working closely on uh with uh a couple different organizations that are aligned on these things. So these are just a couple illustrations of how we're thinking about accelerating humanity for a future where humanity is flourishing. That's based on this covenant which is this uh basically set of artifacts that bring align technology together into a framework. Now the covenant is something that anybody can contribute to. Uh you can fork it, you can uh add additional things to it, you could submit illustrations of the different principles. Um, and it's intended to change and not stay the same. So, here's a QR code if you are interested in reading more about this or diving in deeper. It'll take you to a page with a bunch of places where you can uh where you can, you know, see what's being built out and and and even add your couple two cents. Uh, so yeah, thanks guys. I really appreciate you uh taking taking this lunch time to listen and I'll be around for questions or are we doing the thing with the questions on the screen? Uh there aren't any questions right now, but if you do have any questions now, put your hand up if you have a question, then there are no questions right now. I think you did a pretty good job. Uh this is really cool. Thanks a lot for sharing and um yeah, if there are you'll be around, right, for the rest of Yeah. Perfect. Cool. Well, thank you so much. Thank you.