Securing internet trust & establishing Digital Human Rights: Juan Benet [Protocol Labs]

thanks everyone uh really excited to be here uh it was extremely extremely excited uh to see the cipher Punk ethos coming back to this industry uh a lot of us got here and started in this industry because we were worried about the internet we were worried about privacy we were worried about security and we saw this industry as a way to build a dramatically better internet infrastructure and I personally am extremely tired of the stupid Casino culture that has been going on for the last few years the entire thing has been uh co-opted by short-termist oriented uh pump and dump type uh Behavior even if it's not an outright pump and dump it's functionally a two to four year pump UND dump um and I personally want to get to get the entire ecosystem back into the roots of where we came from and the the technologies that are critical for the future of the world and the future of our species so this talk is about that um it's about critical problems that we have to solve I'm going to give a view first at web 3 and securing the internet communication stack uh and I'll talk about um preventing our willan states and talk about specific Communications where we need to focus um and then uh if there's time with it uh I know that the event's running a little bit late so I'm going to see if I can try and compress it a little bit to get us back on track um if there's time I want to give a a view into what's coming ahead in the next 10 years meaning um the world's changed a lot in the last 10 years and the next 10 years are going to change even more so the the criticality of the work that we're doing here is enormous and it is way way larger than what I think most people in this industry realize so let's go into web 3 and securing the internet a lot of us got here because we saw web 3 as a dramatic Improvement on the web that was there before we wanted to add verifiability to the transactions to introduce trust into the stack to introduce trust in the transactions that we have and in our Communications a lot of us organize around these kinds of values freedom of speech freedom of assembly users owning and controlling their data uh being able to make all interactions verifiable reader and writer privacy dependable trustless and robust infrastructure selfs server identity and more I'm sure that all of you can imagine a number of rights that you would like to have and you would like to bake into the internet that are not listed here it'd be very useful for the whole ecosystem to coales around a set of rights that we want to establish and connect those explicitly to specific systems that we need to build and specific road maps to get there so that all of us can Orient and have a very direct uh year-over-year check-in with how we're doing as an industry and advancing into this landscape uh you know for the last 10 years I've spent a lot of my time uh focusing on on these kinds of systems now that one of the things that brought me first into this industry is the fact that you can use the existing incentive structure of this kind of technology to make a whole sweeping being upgrade to how the infrastructure emerges meaning you can swap what is normally contracts in terms of service and and corporations and courts and nation state policy for math cryptography and economics and if you can do that you can build a much more robust foundation for digital interactions so think of that as creating a global public International digital utility upon which you can bake in digital human rights directly into the bottom of the stack and so that's in a sense the goal for a lot of us there's a bunch of projects around um all these ecosystems that are working in in these directions but right now we're so uncoordinated that I think there's an enormous amount of waste I was thinking uh in the last few months that probably 90% of what somewhere between 70 and 90% of what all teams do in our industry is duplicative wasteful work across the board because we're not coordinating better and we have we're supposed to have the best coordination Tech in the world so what the hell are we doing we need to dramatically improve the coordination landscape to be able to achieve these kinds of road maps so think of the internet and the superpowers that you have think of the you know the massive supercomputer that you have in your pocket think of all of the all of your life today is primarily mediated by these things and the internet infrastructure that you're connecting to imagine that you lost access to this or that some policy targeted your group of people specifically and that you were in some list that was not allowed um to be able to use certain infrastructure imagine how that how the world would change for you overnight unfortunately that's what's Poss possible now that kind of mass surveillance and rean digital totalitarianism is possible the tech that we've built over the last 20 years around the world has enabled this this hasn't quite happened yet we have lots of examples of where things could go really bad but this kind of extreme totalitarian type of thing has not happened yet but the tech is there for it uh I often look back in 1984 as a very very very tame perception of what the world could be you have a TV that can spy on you with a camera guess what we all of us carry somewhere between four and eight cameras Now everywhere we go where there's cameras everywhere in the ecosystem uh everywhere around like you know I don't know how many cameras right now are in this room pointed at all of us it's trivial to take all of that face wreck and connect it to incentive structures that cause certain compliance and control so the level of power that totalitarian states can have today is completely unprecedented and that's not saying anything of the type of AI systems that are emerging so I've often toy with the idea of writing a 2024 book of like just looking at the technology today and how it could be used in this way maybe that's an infohazard maybe I shouldn't give anybody bad ideas but man is this absolutely absolutely uh worrisome so I'll I'll talk briefly about these modern worlding States how to prevent them and how to secure our Communications against them so just think of you know try to like get out of your day-to-day environment and just think about the number of devices the number of applications the connectivity think of the Telecommunications infrastructure that we've built think of the AI models that we have now think about how you could connect those to certain kinds of incentive structures think of being able to have you know gen General GPS position AV AV connectivity Communications data Health Data all kinds of social media control this is this is a a a drastically bad um uh place to start from we've seen you know in the last uh us election we saw the last one maybe the one before that we saw the rise of Cambridge analytica um and thankfully fall of Cambridge analytica but you can ED that there exists a bunch of these kinds of Institutions going on right now just way less visible and so this stuff is happening in the background uh you can use these kinds of systems with population control loops think of you know systems control theory Game Theory to orient entire groups of people uh in various directions and guess what we now have starting to solve the the bottleneck in software for robotics so we're starting to build robotics fleets so you know we have like the really cute robotic dog awesome uh it'd be terrible if that thing was chasing me down the street um we have things like drones uh tiny little drones that could be used for all kinds of surveillance or um or social control so so the the capability stack that we've built over the last 20 20 years is like the most amazing dream for the dictators of the 20th century just imagine the worst possible dictators that you can think of in history and just imagine them just looking at the technology stack salivating for the level of of power and control they could have so it it we we are not necessarily Beyond this kind of outcome and this is possible so we need to BU do what we can together to prevent the rise of these kinds of systems and make sure that first of all these kind of states do not emerge there's a lot that we can do as a society to prevent the rise of these kind of systems but more specifically we can change and upgrade the infrastructure to prevent that kind of abuse so this breaks down into whole ranges of tracks so think of being able to educate the public being able to establish better policy in government being able to secure the technology uh stack being able to have stronger economies that prevent the rise of this um think of all of the work that we've done over the last few decades on improving policy landscape we you know there was a crypto War at at some point the crypto wars were uh you cryptography was ammunition at some point you couldn't just export cryptography we thankfully we won that thank thanks to a lot of political action by a lot of parties uh but think of the Next Generation version of those kinds of things uh so I'm going to spend most um spend the rest of the orwellian states piece here talking about securing Communications because I think that's the fundamental primitive that we need everything else follows from that so think of securing the routing stack so so few groups here focus on the on uh securing the uh lower lowest layer of the network most blockchains today are perceived to be uncensorable or perceived to be untake downable absolutely not true you can take down any single blockchain today if you're a sophisticated attacker if you know the network and you know how it works it is not that expensive to take down the current networks it's just that today the game theory and the incentives show that you can just make more money with them than to attack them but if a sophisticated attacker wanted to shut these things down they absolutely could it is within our power to get out of that but we need to make very specific types of uh upgrades to the stack think about naming infrastructures decentralized naming we have kind of decentralized naming but we cannot use that in the underlying stack so it's trivial to attack um all of our naming systems and then you can't access you know suddenly all your mobile apps break suddenly all your websites break you're dead in the water think we're still using the The Fairly broken CA system we've we've made a bunch of improvements along the years but we're still using the ca system with the ability to forge all cans of certificates all over the place this we have the technology now we've built that over the last 10 years to improve this stack um this is where we should focus uh we've built a a you know decentralized web uh structure a bunch of us have spent a lot of time building content addressing in a peer-to-peer infrastructure for how to route websites and applications and so on um and there's a whole range of roadmap type um things that we need to do to get it to the point where you can use it on a day-to-day basis um we need to have take that sort of approach to all kinds of things today when you try to use any blockchain you go through a bunch of front ends most of them are mobile applications that are delivered through high centralized control um a few of them are delivered through browsers and a fewer still are delivered through uncensorable Stacks so really shift the entire um direction towards this kind of thing uh browsers today it's great to have a range of other browser Tech that can improve our access to these systems uh but in general these are not widely adopted by most main mainstream people yet and we need to give a very strong push in this direction so that we have a dam dramatically better um underlying browser stack that respects um rights and privacy the big one for me is app stores I was very worried about how are we going to be able to shift the the the structure here to make sure that app stop being this lynchmen of control because you could do all all of what you want on the internet infrastructure stack um but if you don't fix the fix the underlying um apport you cannot change the applications that people get most of our activity now is mediated by smartphones so it's basically two corporations in their Stacks that control the way that most people around the planet connect with these things most govern ments that are disconnected from the US and try to choose different things still use some some of the variants from these things like Android is basically everywhere so the the way in which we structure and operate the app stores and what we force to be Norms in the App Store layer is what defines how the rest of the stock ends up operating in the in Mobile it'd be great to get better more more decentralization in the the hands and manufacturer scale but that's extremely difficult you need a massive cash flow for that and second it would be great to at the very least open up the app stores the good news here is that again through great policy work we got a huge opening here the EU now is forcing Apple and Android to open up the app store so you can download entire new app stor that is a massive win for privacy um and security on the internet we need to extend that kind of structure to the rest of the world so that anybody can build an app store and you can build a much better pathway for other applications to ride ride through that so you can't just get banned because um the abster controller doesn't agree with with how you do things we also need to secure our basic Communications one toone connectivity one to many many to one many to many all of this sort of stuff today is super owned uh it's great to see more people using things like signal it's great to see that that trajectory but in reality most of these systems are fairly easy to to surveil and fairly easy to control and fairly easy to take down uh any sophisticated attacker would be able to shut down a bunch of these systems so two things matter here one is get your adopted by the mainstream so it becomes intractable for groups to attack them and bring them down but even then it's critical to build an infrastructure that is extremely difficult to to circumvent so I think today what the crypto industry and the web three industry should be focusing on is social social network type tech building better connectivity tools better ways of organizing it's crazy that we use we still use um telegram as our as a normal dominant form of communication today it's it's that's not a good life plan uh and and to be clear none of us know the telegram Outlook and it's very likely that they're trying really hard to create a a proper and secure system but because the thing is not open source fully you cannot trust it so for the folks that like really love telegram by the way I'm an avid telegram user for the folks that use telegram there's a very straightforward path to securing the telegram entire communication stack and that's open sourcing the whole stack completely and having alternative servers we need to be able to push the entire telegram stack and the entire signal stack and all of those things to fully open source environments where you can run different alternate systems and you can use formal verification to show that it's not actually owned somewhere and so that's where we need to shift our all our Communications to it' be great to get even better secure Communications Hardware right into the into the into the um yeah the hardware itself uh this is dramatically harder and we need very large cash flows to do it the good news here is that the crypto industry now control somewhere in the the 1 to two trillion scale of capital but we need about an order maged more before we can really start doing this so maybe this becomes possible for us in two to five years and that would be amazing to see uh but this is fairly fairly difficult a better thing uh that might work attractively is to force policy landscape to en ensure certain kinds of connectivity follow certain patterns ultimately so much of the future depends on great research and development build figuring out doing the science to figure out what are the right cryptographic methods what are the right tools and then crucially to translate those different ideas into concrete technologies that can be put into systems so many better secure communication systems have been invented very few of them are in wide use and that's a bottleneck problem we have in an ideas to technology to to products bottle link and so more activity Translating that I think would be uh extremely good I'm a a huge fan of zero knowledge proofs multi party computation and fully homomorphic encryption the scaling laws there are really nice it shows that you know in 5 10 20 years all of this stuff is going to be perfectly tractable to run a lot of our communication stack and so that's really cool uh more of the CK World should be focused on securing the communication stack than just trying to just scale transactions scalability has been a big problem but we've solved a lot of it and it's going to get solved in the next next few years fully um now more of the CK people should be transitioning to fully secure Communications and and I think FH is really the end game there FH is going to give you the ability to commun unate at large um uh with with security and privacy and it's not that far away FHA was 20 years away 15 years ago right so we're actually quite close to being able to deploy large scale FH systems already today we have FH being used in the crypto industry for all kinds of transactions doing that for communications is not that far behind ultimately what's critical about this industry is that it routes the capital that we're harnessing less towards the casino culture and more more towards the fundamental R&D development in this infrastructure we need to get more of the cash flows that we have routing into these R&D processes and we can do that through public goods funding the the getcoin community um all drips um all kinds of Innovations have been built in the last two to three years to Route large scale Capital to public goods think of retrop pgf uh that's funding so much ethereum infrastructure now um we need to weave that kind of stuff into the earlier parts of the R&D pipeline especially oriented towards this kind of security so if we do the road map work and if we talk to all of the networks and all of the Dows to Route pgf funding in this direction we can maybe solve this problem so overall we've made an enormous amount of progress in the last decades we have really great production great infrastructure and software but it can be used for really bad things and we we need to turn the Innovation cycle in our benefit to secure the infrastructure and we have a long way to go to be fully or well improve and a lot of us got into this industry for that reason we want to establish these digital human rights and it's up to us to do this work other people won't do it it's not other people that are magically sitting somewhere that are just going to make the world better for you it's people in this room and people in rooms like this in our industry it's basically up to us so it's up to you whether you we get this outcome or not so now I wanted to give you a glimpse I spent a lot of my time thinking about the future and I want to give you a glimpse of the things that are coming in the next 10 years I already touched on a couple of them but I want you to kind of like zoom out of the normal crypto industry and the and the data to-day applications and just think three five 10 years ahead and again predicting the future is fairly difficult things that seem probable now is a much more narrow uh cone than what's actually probable or plausible and in that large span of possibility uh we want to be able to orient the trajectory of Technology development and product adoption to end up in some preferable landscape and this is how you can get good things I think this is the most important graph for Humanity this plots comput ation complexity with time and we are seeing that in the next 20 years depending on your on your on the granularity of your model you we can have the level of computational capacity required to fully emulate a human brain that's kind of crazy most people you know 10 20 years ago would think that this is centuries away um that's also what they said about AGI and Asi and like that's now around the corner so my perspective on this graph is that AGI and Asi are around the corner uh somewhere between 5 to 15 years maybe 20 years in the in the um outer scale but we effectively have ai systems that will be as SM uh smart as humans in every task once you unlock the uh AI recursive Improvement Loop um that that's really going to put us on a path to ASI very quickly and this also means that if you can simulate an entire human um you can certainly do connectivity to the brains uh very directly so it opens the door for BCI uh we've seen we've seen AI accelerate dramatically as a field we saw a set of results and as soon as we got you know Alex net and a few other um you know the cat faces paper suddenly the entire field understood that this stuff was actually quite more capable and we saw a massive pouring of capital into it and we saw a huge acceleration in the curve so so the curve of AI development was increasing at a certain rate as soon as it was clear that certain successes were possible sooner we reoriented our Capital output and suddenly we got a different uh um Step change in the curve now we're taking the outputs of those systems and embedding them everywhere in in our economies and we're now orienting lots of our systems into um into leveraging these outputs um but we are on a path to being able being able to achieve this kind of AGI outcome and we have no way of reasoning how th those systems are going to interface with our with our with Humanity at large or with our economies and so there's huge questions here robotics around the corner I already talked about that um uh in a sense and and so I I have less than a minute apparently from Zoom so it's going to close in a moment so this I already touched on BCI is very much around the corner we're going to have um we already have a set of cases oh and it's gone uh well catch catch my neurotech talks um there I've given a bunch of this information around neurotech I'll just speak to it briefly without slides um we already have several companies building devices that can connect brains to do basic motor and sensory U repair uh we'll we're on the path to get transformative BCI meaning very large numbers of channels um into humans sometime in the next two to four years two to two to two to five years if you if you see the papers that are that are being published uh now uh and you see the devices that people are like announcing in the market and so that means that you know you just have a set of clinical Tri before that can become much more readily available so 5 years out from now you will have significant adoption of critical neurotech devices one of the most important things that's happening in that space is the uh decreasing of the experimental uh cost there are uh players in the market that are building Technologies to experiment with neurotech bringing the cost down from like a 50 to100 million uh seed round to to develop a technology to now two to five maybe $10 million which means that suddenly can um or play in that space which means that now we finally you know after many decades we're finally going to get um the uh repair and augmentation type uh bcis the the the things after that is as soon as you have BCI of that scale the first thing we're going to do is connect it to our computers connect it to our AI models and connect it to the internet now all of us know how insecure the internet stack is we just talked about a lot of that now imagine what happens when that is directly connected not just to a screen that can control you with incentives or access to a ride sharing platform or tickets on a train but now it's literally connected to your neurons right so first of all um I'm not a deceleration in that perspective I I see the amazing promise of these kinds of Technologies and the benefits for Humanity at large that can come from these kinds of taxs so I definitely want them but I want them to orient towards good outcomes I want to prevent a range of bad outcomes and Orient to um the safety of of of humanity and the safeguarding of our future uh by the way it was very good to hear metallic plug deac day a whole bunch of us are are coming together in a movement around this where we do want the fruits of Science and Technology and we want uh to bring them closer in time so they can benefit more people I personally think the Slowdown of Biotech development has killed hundreds of millions to billions of people and that is a a deep moral failure of our species and and instead we should be accelerating that technology but orienting towards good outcomes so DC is a is a movement to be able to um selectively acceler those kinds of Technologies uh faster and the last one I will I will plug for you is that BCI is only the opening of the aperture the thing that's coming behind that is whole brain emulation I started that uh this with that graph that's not that far away that's somewhere between 10 to 20 years that would be my expectation it could turn out to be 40 or 60 but that's an entire transformation for what it means to be a human and for the fate of our species and so please we need a dramatically better internet underneath the hood to be able to connect it to our brains and connect it to uh digital humans and I know that all of that sounds crazy right now I I gave similar talks to similar similarly incredulous groups when I talked about the AI development 10 15 years ago and so I've seen this these kind of accelerations happen before and I uh uh you you'll see that a lot of this neurotech stuff is going to start happening in two five 10 years so we have a window of time to put in place a drastically better much more secure internet infrastructure and 10 years ago we had no resources to do that with and today we now have a trillion to to trillion dollars worth of capital that we can now Orient exactly towards that and it's up to us to the people in this room and the people in these conferences to do that over the next two to five years so hopefully you'll join in doing that thank you