# Conditional Recall | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 25:14
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-rO1amHaKH2U
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO1amHaKH2U

## Description

In the neon-lit nights of 2025, Johnson & Johnson unveiled X. A pill, not larger than a snowflake, but it promised a tempest of change. This miraculous drug didn't just allow people to cherry-pick memories to erase from their minds, it also can credibly leave a reminder in people's minds that those memories has been vanished, forever.
We explore the game theoretic implications of a technology (such as TEEs) that allows players to commit to forget information and discuss several applications.

Speaker(s): Christoph Schlegel, sxysun
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Cryptoeconomics
Keywords: Mechanism design, Game Theory, Economics, commitment

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] hello I didn't know that I was famous I doubt that very much um chin is famous okay yes so we will talk first about X here's the story Anon so in the neon lit nights of 2025 Johnson and Johnson unveiled x a pill not larger than a snowflake but it promised a tempest of change the miraculous trug didn't just allow people to Sherry pick memories to erase from their minds it also can credibly leave a reminder in people's mind that those memories has been vanished forever and it's the iconic red brick walls of Harvard Law School you with books in one hand and dreams in the other are on a mission you're not just another student you carry the hope of revolutionizing the aaric chambers of the legal World each night as you pour over the terms of law you wonder what greatness Society could have achieved on a cold evening your phone buzzers it's DXs your old college friend turned underground dealer this message is simple got X special prize for you the Temptation SW around you would you trade the lessons of the past for clearer yet incomplete future the decision rests in your hands and on okay what is conditional recall first let me tell you about perfect recall so perfect recall is the assumption that we usually make in human cognition and Game Theory and all kind of strategic interactions right we assume that we remember what we have experienced and we cannot uh choose what we remember or what we don't remember so we assume that humans just remember or at least don't have control what to remember all of that will change in 2025 but then you have a technology that allows you to conditionally recall information and in particular to credibly forget and that is the exploration we do in this project which will be a paper soon um we want to understand what are the Strategic implications or social implications of a technology that would allow you to credibly forget information and you can do that in such a way that you forget information you commit to forgetting information if certain kind of conditions are met in the en environment so Johnson Johnson xill will be 2025 before that we already have artificial agents who have access to to conditional recall so we are very bullish on tees um sort of as a commitment device because that is a technology where you can use an artificial agent put it inside of a te and then you can generate um attestations or proofs that that agent has erased a certain kind of memory or has um send some some um um send a request to to remove move memory from an external um storage device okay and so if you have these artificial agents having access to conditionally recall information then we can do magical things with it and we want to present some magical things that you can do with that um I talk about more more about philosophical ideas but in all of them I think there is the potential for an actual application in them and then Shin will talk about already existing applications that um um that use the power of conditionally forgetting information okay first application that's a classical problem from this guy is canero and he um described for the first time this very famous eror information Paradox which a very very basic but fundamental idea so you want to sell a piece of intellectual property you have an idea you want to sell it to somebody but in order to sell it to somebody you need to convince that some somebody that that is actually a good idea and so if you start telling that person to about the idea more and more and more and more and more and more at some point that other party has learned the idea right and then Contracting breaks down because he already knows the idea and then he doesn't need to pay you for it okay conventional work arounds for this Contracting problem usually is IP law like um you hire some lawyers and they protect your inter intellectual property you have patent law and um you need to rely on the legal system or you can do like the classical Contracting stuff right you can contract only on the outputs of the technology but not actually on the actual out um technology right and then you have all the problems of Astic information and Contracting so that's no good but if you have X then you can conditionally recall information right you can solve this transacting problem you commit before the actual selling of the idea that if you don't like it as a buyer you commit to forgetting the content of that idea right and then the only thing that after the negotiation you remember in case you don't buy the information is that you didn't like it but nothing else here's another class of broad class of um ideas that you can do with this technology onetime use of information so previously I was telling about selling information now we can also think about um renting out information using it only once or twice or conditionally or uh five times six times and shin has beautiful examples of that as well another quote I don't believe that this story is true but I would like it to be true so one of my favorite writers J bores wrote this about a 15th century Italian Warfare so in 15th century Italy he claims War has reached a Perfection that many would call ridiculous once the armies were assembled the generals compared the numbers strengths and position of the troops and decided who among them must suffer defeat um they decided on on the outcome of that um that um that war chance and bloodshed were eliminated okay that is an instance of the power of reducing asymmetric information in bargaining if we are perfectly informed about each other's capabilities in the bargaining situation we can improve um efficiency we can avoid war going to war because we can just decide who has the better Army right without actually conducting the war okay this illustrates a powerful idea of this symmetric information and bargaining and for better negoti outcomes and we have a lot of social institutions around right right ndas and these kind of things are a way of making sure that some information only remains in a particular bargaining in a situation where it can help improve efficiency so that is the conventional work around ndas and lawyers sharing information for a particular situation so that it is not used outside of that situation but with conditional recall we can just use the information put it in a let the Bots negotiate and they achieve a good outcome and after that we forget what they did okay another example of onetime use of information this was constraining the other party to rock you you can also constrain yourself for commitment you can forget and being for forgetful can be a very useful commitment device how so this is a forget um monopolist example shout out to we D who put it on his website so suppose you are a a vendor of some good for example you sell xils to the local market right so you run the local pharmacy and you have a large supply of those experts and each day same customer enters your store and you're wondering okay how much is his willingness to to pay for this technology you're not sure about that if the price is too high he will not buy and if the price is too low then he could have charged more extracted more Monopoly rents right repetition makes it even more interesting why because if you sell today you can take that as that gives you information about the willingness to to uh to to to to pay off of the buyer right so if he buys today under the current price you know a lower bound on his value okay now here's the Strategic interaction if the customer actually knows this he might not buy today because he doesn't want to get rent extracted tomorrow right so in this case you harm yourself by remembering that the guy was uh uh willing to buy today okay this Dynamic can be broken by a forgetful monopolist so forgetful monopolist can extract more rents than a monopolist that remembers okay quick one on reput I witnessed recently two days ago my colleague Tessa negotiating um price of a taxi of a Tuk Tok of a Tuk Tok so here's the story about these tukk negotiations he did it she did it the right way so she stubbornly stubbornly stuck to her price she was always saying 200 the guy said 400 she was saying 200 400 200 400 that's exactly the the correct thing uh to to do this because if you appear very stubborn in this situation at some point the opponent will give in okay because you have a reputation of being a very stubborn maybe even irrational person okay a great substitute for uh or that that's that's that's on um on a on a um that's on a reputational level so Tessa built a reputation of being stubborn but here's a Twist on reputation it doesn't work on the forgetful so if the Tuk Tok driver wouldn't remember how long they were negotiating for an hour 2 hours 3 hours if he can credibly commit to forgetting how long this negotiation has happened and how many times they already went back and forth he's in a strategically better situation okay now I pass on the floor to shinan yeah thanks okay so we've just seen a lot of like I I would say like fables and and like I'm mean Game Theory are fa and then um uh yeah those stories kind of help us to build some of the intuition but then now I got the diving diving into some of the like actual games and social games that we play in reality together with some examples right so like I think wait how how does this work oh I I click okay great okay yeah so um first of all I guess like Christof went through a bunch of like economics examples but there are also some cryptography examples so um uh I would say like one of the biggest applications uh you can see is this from 2008 paper called like onetime programs so in this paper you can see uh they specifically listed some some of the real games that we play right oh like you want to go on a vacation and then you would like to give your assistant or your or a friend the power to decrypt and sign emails on on your behalf so this is like very realistic I think um yeah a lot of creators have this problem uh a lot of uh just uh uh people who I guess run companies also have this problem like I've heard contest times from uh from uh def5 Founders how they're uh how every day they wake up they have like a thousand plus notifications on their telegram groups um so obviously like using onetime programs that allows the other person to uh reply messages on beh have under some condition is uh a classic game for this um yeah and then next I I would say for but to to implement this we can see there's a uh um the there's like this conditional recall uh mapping into onetime programs and then you can see sometimes conditional recall apps are actually so powerful such that it's against the AI safety policy to even discuss it this happens at one time when I wanted to make the email recall game um together in with cloud uh okay and then some real social games I think the first one is uh uh Social Capital right so social capital in today's world is really tied into reputation which is a form of I would say like sticky uh Reco game because you know us as humans when we play social games we don't have the ability to do conditional recall which is why reputations are very scky and which is why social capitals kind of accumulate however with the ability to do condition in recall we can do something more interesting right so we uh we know we all know like Ral is kind of obsessed with this uh microeconomics analysis right like oh social commitment is St depth is credit and credit is money um and of course you know R alio has a lot of uh those quotes So we see like those kind of social Catal social games are very um prevalent Mo but so that means today most of the social capital is locked up in um let's say accounts for example in Twitter right you um a lot of people right like grow Their audience and engagement um so a lot of social capital is locked up in one account in one repap two platform where you have both like a liquidity problem and interest rate problem interest rate meaning that once you already have a following it's easier for you to grow and then liquidity meaning that you cannot really exchange your social capital or transfer it to another person right it's kind of like a a a so bound token is thing um yeah and you cannot also move them because well the account has secret information which is your uh like your identity is actually tied to the account and the account's posting rights is tied to this password that you have which uh goes back to the previous I think example of uh yeah of onetime programs that when you go on a vacation you do not wish your friend to just take your account and then go with it you want to put some constraints um so then you know using the a example you can just force your friend to submit you with a proof of oh taking a selfie that I have taken X today after posting on your account U but of course a more realistic way to do this is uh uh using using something like tees so we have done this like I would say like a research experiment of uh uh implementing uh an app like this so you can see over here you could uh for for example you could put your Twitter account inside of te and then the mint F that represents the ownership to post once from your account According to some kind of AI filter so in this way uh you can Implement all of the uh conditional recall examples and one time program examples from the 2008 example so uh you can see over here you know uh maybe I want to lend my account to somebody who wants to talk a joke about te right because uh I'm a b but then you would like somebody to increase the diversity of voices in your community yeah so you can see over here you could like actually redeem the nft and then therefore you have the uh um entire flow um yeah so here is an example uh of uh how many people have actually um joined and then used the tees to decentralize their voice um and uh yeah I I think I want to touch so Kristoff had a lot of examples about like um I think arrows information Paradox right and then like all kinds of social interactions but in reality we also see a lot of those um that just happen very casually like for example when you are watching football together with your friends sometimes you want to roast other people but you don't really have a good way of implementing this uh easy social game however with like you know conditional recall as guaranteed by um tees you could do something oh like when you mean then after you do a lot of post that roast my football knowledge if Germany wins against Spain in the Euro Cup uh a lot of posting if I'm fat and that if that don't exercise in the past seven days um a lot Post in qcast a lot posts that about uh a lot of posts that talk about ethereum Foundation if nft Redeemer submits email proof that they own ethereum email right so in this way you can kind of implement blind natively on Twitter um yeah so those social games couldn't actually be played before due due to that you have to take over the other person's phone and send it right um or trusting the other person to actually keep up the promise despite some incentive problem uh another quick example is that this terminal of truth I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen is that like it's an a Mark Andre and tip I think one Bitcoin into it um but then the problem with AOS uh is that despite they very interesting just social games right like you can see them as M massive PVP version of Turkish carpet salesman game um the AI essentially acts as like a coordination or correlation device for Twitter discussions for reply guys uh and this game is only playable if the mechanism is credible and not rigged like if the human player is a uh if the human owner of the account is able to wreak the as replies then uh you know the game suddenly becomes uninteresting um so then the using the same technology we could Implement uh a conditional recall agent essentially you have the same terminal true spot however you uh give it yeah essentially uh you make it such that the human developer cannot do uh conditional recall to credibly relinquish the control yeah so then we implemented some of those as an example um and uh uh you can interact with at okay see you and uh let's have some questions I think who had [Applause] time yeah Kristoff if you want famous before you're certainly famous now after this amazing talk um you can scan the the QR code and submit questions we already have two of them one is more of a fous comment but still funny um any chance of collectively forgetting that Trump was ever elected um which is more like um is there a difference between like group forgetting and individual forgetting in the yes ABS great question so two two takes on that um I didn't put it in the talk but because I thought it was too spicy but there was a forgetful negotiator example and so we were very bullish byen 2024 but yeah didn't work out um on the collective forgetting we have a beautiful example in in um in in the paper where basically collectively forgetting about something is sometimes helps uh helps the collective for example in reputation games so uh the example is somehow um example of extortion Mafia wants to extort resources from a community and so if we credibly commit to forgetting that the mafia is sort of Reckless and we collectively act not fearfully then uh Mafia will actually not extract um rents from from our community so there are examples in the paper that very much go in that direction um the the other question is also a distinction that is there a difference between committing to forget a piece of information and committing not to use user piece of information um my take on it maybe shin has a different take um I think a committing to forget information is in some sense more robust right so it's cannot be broken that easily but there is in principle a general equivalence right if you never use a piece of information make that credible that would be the same s not like not on a psychological level for yourself but behaviorally it would be uh equivalent do you have a different answer uh Alo it's more yeah it's becoming more equivalent if you move into the future right like one Trend we have seen is that like in the past property is defined by what you can Define what you can defend yourself physically so like in the stone ages it's like you know oh what I can beat the others up and you know if I take the other the other person's Rock then that's my own property um but then as you know Society progress it's more like a law kind of be became this way of like you defending yourself and and like that that some kind of piece of paper defines what your property is and then in the information age it's more like oh like my password actually like my Twitter account is my property so then like oh the password is just a piece of information right so then like if I commit to forgetting that information uh would be more equivalent to committing to never use it right because in the past we can only commit him to not use it and none of those things are information related um yeah so I guess my answer would be like um it it it's becoming more and more equivalent in the future um we can maybe combine two question so one is how do we know a Twitter account is actually controlled by an AI agent in a in a t and not another schmu just claiming to be an AI agent but it's actually some dude TR extract oh yeah uh absolutely you can do you uh so you should do some kind of uh you know always trust by verify right so you should uh download So how T is work is remote remote at station and then how uh currently um in the example that we implemented is that you should go to the GitHub and then you um you know you you you produce the code hash yourself and then you compare it with remote adapation hash that you got from the remote adapation service which is essentially kind of like oh like this is currently the memory and data running uh and code sorry running inside the sgx and the Intel kind of Science and you can um that oh they are indeed the same you can of course do more fancy stuff which is like um oh you post remote ization on chain such that anybody can slash something if um because uh somebody proved that Intel at this uh at at this time signed like um a statement essentially saying oh this is a code running inside the te and you know once you can prove the code you don't you know that it is not a human developer I think yeah you answered the second question also here so we have one last question which is just more fun application ideas use a source of fun yeah yeah yeah there's a lot I mean um uh for example like we see a lot of like anal accounts so you can do like essentially a group owned anal account that that part I think is interesting especially like in um today's world I think like a lot of information sources are very fragmented so you can do like oh like um whenever this message gets I don't know like eight eight emojis on it then it get Auto sent from the group uh group own account another one I think is uh just combining this idea of um you know the current mem coin meta together with t and conditional recall So like um what if like for somebody to trade the meme coin they must let's say oh take take an IQ test and then like post something on their Twitter once so then in this way you like you know you you you feel more com able doing the PVP meta on ethereum great let me quickly also show the paper if you want a preprint um con connect with us and it will be out soon very soon thanks that's a great talk