The advent of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) has already begun to give rise to scenarios that push the limits of our conceptualisations of ownership and agency in the non-human realm and will to continue to push them ever further as blockchain technology develops. This text aims to help sharpen some of those conceptualisations, in order to better understand the magnitude and sheer weirdness of DAOs in both the near- and farther-future.

A Brief Introduction to DAOs

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are organisations that are instantiated on a blockchain, and are constituted of interacting Smart Contracts: computer programs that are also instantiated on a blockchain. Smart Contracts are able to hold their own cryptocurrency wallets, they can self-execute on the occurrence of a certain event or state and can be interacted with (somewhat) like traditional web applications.

What makes DAOs interesting is that they inherit the characteristics of blockchain technology that make it such an attractive technological substrate to build upon in the first place. Blockchain technology enables the creation of entire organisations which can be transparent and are decentralised, free of being rooted in (and thus accountable to the laws of) any particular nation state. Most importantly for this essay, they are even able to act autonomously, free of the needs of human intervention and management.

This being said, it is very difficult to produce an exhaustive definition of DAOs. There are a myriad of potential DAO implementations, because they are, at their core, simply a list of rules defining the potential actions of the organisation in particular situations. These rules are either explicitly stated in the DAOs' code, or implicitly arise from the actions of its constituent parts (i.e. its constituent Smart Contracts). ‘Successful’ implementations range from the cryptocurrency Dash , to the now infamous attempt at transparent crowdfunding known simply as ‘The DAO’, and the DAO-production-platform Aragon. These examples indicate the currently still nascent state of blockchain infrastructure. There are far more initially-esoteric sounding (yet entirely technically realisable) DAOs that could arise in the not-too-distant future, given the continued development of blockchain technology. One such potential implementation that I will use as an example later in this piece was outlined by computer scientist, and AI-blockchain startup leader Trent McConaghy: a system of artificially intelligent DAOs that are able to create works of art, reproduce, and even adapt their own code (and therefore their offspring’s future actions).

Conceptual Implications: Weird corporations

The construction of corporate legal person has occurred gradually over the course of recent history, and as reactions to demands of security and ownership of assets;  situations that did not force us to reconsider the basic notions of agency of non-humans, but merely asked us to willingly suspend our disbelief for the purposes of engaging in legal action. The weirdness of the potential cases that DAOs could (and will) bring about far exceeds this suspension, and instead forces us to consider the autonomy of non-humans anew, as well as the huge implications of these cases on our conception of non-human agency.

In his excellent AI DAOs Series, Trent McConaghy outlines a future in which DAOs are able to create generative artworks, make money from selling these artworks, and self-optimise in order to sell more artworks for a better price. Furthermore, DAOs will be able to ‘reproduce’ by copying their own code, scraping GitHub to add additional functions to this code, and instantiate this copy on a blockchain. Before long, a network of self-optimising DAOs could exist, in control of potentially huge amounts of cryptocurrency capital, with the sole task to survive via ‘metabolising’ capital. These DAOs are - if coded in a certain way - no longer even under human control and aren't even necessarily able to be traced back to those individuals who originally created any of the various bits of open-source code they’re partially constituted of. 

This indicates the sort of autonomy usually associated with agents such as computer viruses,  not entities that more closely resemble corporations.  This forcible reconceptualisation has a knock-on effect, because it also challenges our notion of ownership, the relationship that constitutes the basis of our global economic system.

Conceptual Implications: Non-Human Ownership

The case of self-replicating, GitHub-scraping, art-creating DAOs highlights novel forms of non-human ownership relations that arise at various scale levels of the blockchain-enabled space in which DAOs operate. They are in many ways functionally identical to human-asset ownership-relations but there are key differences due to the nature of the blockchain technology facilitating the existence of DAOs. 

Tokens - the currency of blockchains - are the smallest level at which these new types of non-human ownership relations exist. Tokens are, in the simplest sense, ‘programmable money' , and can be coded such that the emergent behaviour of all instances of a particular token resembles more the behaviour exhibited by certain natural systems than the flows of fiat currency. One of the most interesting use cases involving tokens is the proposed ERC721 non-fungible token standard. These tokens share all of the functions of ‘standard’ ERC20 tokens, but are also tied to an individual object;  they constitute an ownership relation that is supported by a blockchain between an individual token and an individual asset such as an artwork. The programmable parameters of the token dictate the potential actions taken by it - and by extension, the asset it represents. A token could for instance be programmed such that it (and the asset it is tied to) could only be traded once within a given period of time, or only be traded between a particular list of addresses (i.e. only between certain agents). This is functionally tantamount to the sort of ownership transferal we see at work with controlled substances and the legal prerequisites for their sale (e.g. sale on provision of a valid ID that shows the buyer is above a certain age). The key difference with regards to tokens is that it is far more difficult to get around the restrictions that are imposed on tokens and tokenised assets; the transaction will simply not properly execute and the token exchange will not occur if transferal is attempted via means other those prescribed in the code.

In short, the mechanics of token transferal seem to operate in a similar manner to the form of legally-sanctioned ownership transferal we are used to on the human level, yet with a much more heavy say in the matter on the part of the token itself, along those lines prescribed in their code.

Harking back to McConaghy’s situation outlined above - and moving ‘up’ a level of abstraction -we see that a future situation can arise in which non-humans are in control of programmable money on an unprecedented scale. This would be a situation outside of the ‘comfort zone’ of our current ideas regarding agency and ownership; decentralised legal agents outside of the legal sphere engaging with their surroundings via the sort of relations that have previously been restricted to the human realm. Furthermore, these agents could potentially even be in control of the parameters of the tokens they trade;  these could be parameters that control the flow of tokenised assets at the most minutely detailed level.

The implications of this are far-reaching and force a reassessment of our conceptual norms. It is important to note here that assets represented by tokens held on a blockchain are secure in a way that physical assets are not, due to the cryptographic protections typical of blockchain technology. There is no way of brute-forcing a secure digital wallet that would not take an inconceivable amount of energy and time. So, DAOs are essentially able to control the transferal of value - an ability functionally equivalent to ownership as understood in the human realm - in a much more secure fashion than any physical being could with any physical or digital asset. Unless one interacts with a DAO ‘on its own terms’ - fulfilling the conditions that must be met before it engages in trade - there is no way of accessing the funds it holds in its wallet(s). In the case of assets that aren’t on a blockchain (for example, a physical asset represented by a token), a suitably-programmed DAO would be able to pay for a human proxy to represent it in court (much like corporations already can and do). This DAO would thus be just as able to defend its right of ownership of this asset as any natural person is, were this asset illegally taken from it.