Bot Club Legal Bots: Conceptual Implications for Future Blockchain Infrastructure
Motivations to Take This Seriously
The Indeterminately Near-Future Scenario The speculative (but technically realisable) scenario(s) sketched here, combined with the fact that DAOs are somewhat immune to legislative action after they are instantiated, point towards a future in which decentralised legal persons are not merely in control of vast amounts of assets, but in fact are potentially able to dictate the flows of these assets with greater precision than any agent (legal or natural) that exists today. Furthermore, they will be better secured against theft than the vast majority of digital or physical assets currently in circulation. This is unprecedented; entire industries and smart infrastructures could exist constituted of code that is not the property of a given person or group of people, and act entirely of their own - albeit programmed - volition, controlling assets on a global scale - and the humans who rely on them.
Although actually defining DAOs is not possible beyond their general technical characteristics, it is clear that their existence has (at least) profound philosophical, legal, and (crypto-) economic implications. Of these we only begin to get a glimpse, but they already force us to stretch our home-grown anthropomorphic conceptions of agency and ownership. Given the sorts of situation(s) we could be faced with in the future, further research into their potential is warranted; research that must simultaneously push the boundaries of our current conceptions in order to understand the alien actions of its subject. Hopefully via these future attempts at understanding decentralised non-human agents, we can also begin to understand our own place in the decentralised future that will, to a greater or lesser extent, be less than anthropocentric.
Max Hampshire
Max Hampshire is a programmer and crypto researcher based in Amsterdam. He is one of three project initators of terra0, a company built on the Ethereum network that provides automated resilience systems for forested ecosystems, and is also a Blockchain engineer at BlockLab in Rotterdam, developing proof-of-concepts and MVPs for the blockchain infrastructure of the future. He is a member of the RIAT Institute For Future Cryptoeconomics, engaging in research-through-practice to glimpse the potential interaction possibilities of tomorrow's cryptosphere, and was previously part of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.
Bot Club
Algorithmic culture is a label for the entangled, sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny state of cultural formation that humans have entered by producing algorithms that operate online on such a massive scale and at such a fundamental level of societal organisation that they play a key role in producing culture. In this programme the term ‘bot’ is used in a broad sense to include all algorithmic agents that operate without direct supervision of humans, but that present the results of their functioning to humans. Bot Club takes an amazed and critical look at the world in which bots, algorithmic agents and generative processes do their work, and places them centre stage. A Bot Club consists of two parts: the first is a Thursday Night Live! programme, with human speakers, demonstrations of and performances by bots and algorithmic agents. The evening programme is followed by a workshop day dedicated to putting notions into practice and producing concepts and code for functioning critical algorithmic agents.