[REDACTED] 2024 | Digital Sovereignty in the Age of AI With Edward Snowden

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1. 0:00

   uh they they took the uh they took the handheld one off me uh I'm just going to be real with each and every one of you in here I don't often get nervous when I stand on stage but right now I'm truly bricking myself I think that if we scratch back the Defi degeneracy and we peel away the meme coins and we take our nft profile pictures and put them to the side just for a second and we look at

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   the real core of crypto and the values of web 3 and what it stands for um it's going to be personified in this next speaker uh a lot of us have given our time our dedication our money to building this industry in which truth is truly immutable but this next gentleman and a personal hero of mine give his freedom for it so please give a big round of applause to Mr Edward Snowden I used to work for the

3. 0:58

   government but now work for the public we are seeing the werewolves beginning to Circle they will build a dam around us our digital Freedom hangs in the balance but the revolution isn't coming it's already here hello everyone how are you woo W big crowd so you know I actually uh spent a little bit of time in Thailand myself I loved it there uh if anybody hasn't done it yet uh you should absolutely try and go scuba diving even if you don't know how you know they they'll do it in a backyard pool in your hotel pool

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   whatever uh it's amazing it's quick and then you know get out to the reefs it's it's a fabulous place uh haven't been there for a while probably won't be won't uh be back for a while um but look we're here for for for something more serious and this was not the speech that I expected to give uh when I set out to start writing it I've got to say an industry as a space as an idea as a

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   concept uh we are doing very well uh at least in terms of income but that's not how everything should be measured right you look at the charts today uh Bitcoin anything everything's up it's fabulous right people are are are doing well they're they're euphoric but there's a much different Trend that's happening in the world and I think they're intersecting in different ways we have a lever of power in our hands today and I think we're being asked how we want to use it and I

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   think most of us haven't reflected on um the implications of that what it means where we're at uh where it should be headed so I've been rereading uh John Stewart Mills Liberty uh old book I think 1850s uh but it is remarkable how relevant it is today and for any of you I I think it is worth reading um it might seem in the language a little bit wooden but I think you will be surprised how well the concepts have time travel to today uh when we're talking about censorship when we're

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   talking about uh Mass audience when we're talking about the influences of the crowd on the individual uh and of course the state uh uh versus The Sovereign self or what we want to be the Sovereign self now people know me um most commonly of course the 2013 Revelations of mass surveillance uh I came forward and this was something that uh many many people knew was theoretically possible uh but

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   they didn't realize that it was practically being done at the scale that it was uh my government and of course many other governments around the world had in secret constructed uh an architecture of Oppression that in many ways simply hadn't been switched on uh it was set to like a passive monitoring mode they could you know stick their Nets in the uh flow of the ocean and pull up the by catch uh which was all of our Lives all of our activities all of our purchases all of our reading all of our

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   interaction the games you play what time you're awake where your phone is traveling the cell phone uh location uh information s site location uh information all of these little things which um individually didn't mean much but in aggregate were a perfect picture of Our Lives they helped the state understand us better than we understood ourselves now uh so many years later we see this technology spreading everywhere

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    private companies have it of course the social media companies uh and now they're starting to feed it to artificial intelligence uh engines sort of inferencing probalistic creasing models and and and what's that going to happen what's that going to lead to you know of course Facebook says they're not using this information for training yet uh but their public models are incredibly good uh the open source models uh the private

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    models like you know open Ai and whatnot they they won't even tell you what they train on uh but there have been scandals here in there where we've seen you know private data being revealed by a model maybe just because it has access to something through an API uh maybe it's in the training set itself maybe you show leaked uh tokens that were on uh GitHub repo that it scraped uh regardless the idea is that we have more and more disperate little pieces of data that in the past would have been lost they would have forgot be forgotten

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    but now they're centralized they're intersected they're recorded they're understood and they're available and they're available to more and more people more and more hands it's no longer just the classified world it's everywhere and to go back to John Stewart Mill um the the very first paragraph of it uh is describing civil liberty what that is um and essentially it's our our our freedom or belief uh and where the domain of that

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    uh brushes up against the states legitimate power to sort of shape and interfere uh there is a limit on on it uh and that's what civil liberty describes in a legitimate government and the idea is that it's supposed to be Beyond anybody's authority to tell us what to do how to live what to think um we have freedom of opinion uh to a greater degree and freedom of action to a certain degree but a lesser degree and the idea here

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    the the commonly agreed accepted principle uh is that our actions have more potential uh to sort of step on the people around us uh to harm them and so we make a kind of universal PCT where you can believe whatever you want as so long as it causes no harm to others uh and even where it does as long as it's quiet as long as it's introspective as long as it's not going out there and you know burning people's houses down uh it's

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    okay now we know uh uh that this boundary has been trampled on in the past but typically we consider these to be tyrannies we consider these to be uh illegitimate governments and I I think what John Stewart Mill might have called in the past something we're all familiar with the Tyranny majority has begun to become something new that we're not really even aware of but we see it happening and influencing every day and that's that there's a new

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    tyranny mediocrity when you feed everything into a probabilistic reasoning machine uh whether that is an AI diffusion model uh that studies all the artwork in the world at least that's publicly reachable compresses it uh into a you know 3D latent space and then you give it terms and it searches in that and it throws out what is the likeliest outcome of what you're describing that is averaging down uh human creativity that is averaging down Human Experience uh now they apply a seed and

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    some Randomness to it we can get uh more original results here or there but it's the same thing with the algorithm on social media right your timeline whether it's Tik Tok whether it's Instagram whether it's Twitter I guess we're not allowed to call it Twitter anymore but it's still Twitter um it's the same thing with crypto with meme coins with the trends with the meta that everybody is Chas chasing uh and I think we need to

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    reflect on the chains that are being placed on us uh by the expectation of the average you see that in politics uh we just had a presidential election where surprisingly uh the candidate that was pandering the hardest to the polls uh was actually the conventional candidate uh KL Harris um this is the one that's PLL testing that's looking everything that's trying to uh appeal to the most people that's going oh we're going to steal the Republicans back by pretending to be

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    Republicans we're going to out Republican the Republicans uh and then somehow they lost and that's because it ended up being an election between someone who was uh very obviously fake and someone who was more authentic even though they're they're lying half the time anyway uh and what this reveals I I think is there is a a hunger for something original uh something that is true to itself even if it's not true uh true to itself true in belief right true

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    in in in in Direction um and that's not a reflection on a candidate or an individual saying you know one of these people is wonderful one of these people is not it's a recognition of ourselves what we're reflecting or what we're looking at how we're seeing the world how we're seeing these timelines we are viewing everything through a pain of glass uh we're looking down at a screen you know in a restaurant in a Subway on a plane

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    you see everybody like this you know looking at what's in their hands um and that that's not just shaping our beliefs that's shaping ourselves it's changing us we are being forced into molds uh and Everywhere You Look whether it's advertising they are targeting this moving average that's constantly being shaped they are holding it themselves and you the result is a grayscale good uh something that is not exceptional but it's appealing in many

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    ways they they try to reach that uh this this this global average these beautiful mid Journey images that no matter how different they appear to be uh eventually begin to strike us as obviously all the same uh you go shopping you look at reviews you see people unboxing things uh and there's an increasing sense of sameness where they're incremental upgrades they are improvements right they're a little

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    better than last time but there's a little less wow in the world and I worry about this on the social level I worry about this on the economic level when you think about uh social media when you think about YouTube uh when you look at like the subscriber counts and things like that when you look at authors the books that are being read when you look at movies that when you look at the TV shows that are being talked about uh it's a winner

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    taker all world and this is not new this is not revolutionary people have heard about it but what where where does that start to reach us um I think what's happening is that there's a increasing equality of outcome and that sounds like a good thing right we go oh luxury space communism right uh but it's not that um in fact there something much worse we have equ quality of outcome uh but only

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    for those of a certain income and for the average the income is declining because in a win or take all World our share of the pie is constantly decreasing uh whereas those who have the attention those who are you know uh the big attention getter um who are receiving the Gaze of big eyeball uh they are getting it all more and more more and more uh and it's a question of what they do with it well okay so the thought leaders of the world

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    today are they leading us in a good direction does the world feel better uh to you now politically intellectually than it did four years ago eight years ago 12 years ago 20 years ago um a lot of people look back at the 90s now with a sense of nostalgia and it's funny because back then it was a little bit fraud H and you know I I I I don't want to take us all the way through uh

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    introspection endlessly here because I know we have limited time but I want to argue uh against that Dynamic for a little bit because I I think that's what it's about I think this crowd particularly can understand a little bit better than the average because the reality here is if you are in this room you're not average you're weird um you're strange you are unusual uh whether you're trying to you know get rich quick which is a little bit uh you know a commonality that

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    everybody has you know it's the hope it's the dream or you're actually working uh to make something to try something new understand something different now you're putting the work in uh and the reality of Human Experience ladies and gentlemen is largely passive people imitate uh they look at the great figures they look at the great uh sort of stories of our past they imitate and they emulate they try to take something

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    from themselves they try to use it as their model and eventually maybe in themselves through the process of experimentation they find something new they find something work that works for them they find something that somebody else hasn't tried before and that ladies and gentlemen is in fact what it's all about I've got very young children right and they they love to imitate you give them a new word they'll be saying it all day there is nothing wrong with that uh

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    recognizing the average seeing what is around you uh that is common that is popular means it is in many cases useful in many cases it means that it's effective but not in all and the power of this audience the power of our space the power of what we do is recognizing that the systems around us have worked and maybe can continue to work uh but they have weaknesses they have limits to

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    their Authority legitimate or illegitimate and we can change that we do not have to accept the world as it is we do not have to accept the world as we've inherited it whether we're talking about money whether we're talking about Finance whether we're talking about creativity we have to do something different than what we inherited or what are we doing at all the power of this game of life in which We're Playing Our Round right now you are in this room here doing you know

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    you're in Thailand um this is a fabulous thing uh but there are limited rounds we have limited days and you have to recognize that when we're talking about the tyranny of majority we have to find in ourselves a right to heresy uh we have to violate the Orthodox uh we have to recognize in ourselves the heterodox uh what is unusual about ourselves and nurture that uh it's not to say that what's good for you is good for everybody it's not that you want to make everybody else just like you this is actually one of the problems of

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    conflict in the world today you see a lot of people worried that their you know culture their way of life is being erased uh but it's this same Dynamic that we've talked about it is the oppression of the average it is the fact that we are trying to be molded we are trying to be stand with a common template the known good configuration uh and we recognize in ourselves there's a part of us that doesn't fit no matter how normal we are

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    no matter how ordinary we are nobody fits in the cookie cookie cutter perfectly there's a part of the dough that will be cut off that will be removed that will be left you know as the crumb and that is a loss to the soul you know that that is the part of us that part that doesn't fit it that's the most special part of us and we want to rescue it we want to make something of it we need to recognize that within our communities we need to recognize that within our peers and we have to be willing to to fight for it because that

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    difference is as you know I said reflecting on children that's the root of progress that is the core of the new method the Beating Heart of the new meta uh that is onc discovered uh we make it happen by being weird and by being committed to our weird it's not the thing where you know somebody points it out and we're a little bit embarrassed we're a little bit reluctant we laugh it off you know I'm not saying be a jerk uh but I am saying recognize that the

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    differences the idiosyncrasies the eccentricities of the self uh are the most valuable parts of you and the timeline is going to sand them off right that you are going to get likes for the things that people agree with and you are going to have the posts that you know nobody recognizes nobody comments on maybe nobody agrees with it but you keep iterating on the theme you keep recognizing what is U unusual and special uh about yourself and you can

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    escape you can find your way out of that shadow of conforming it you know I I I was asked to Pine on digital sovereignty what that means uh con uh in policy terms classically uh the way we've seen it start to apply is governments to trying to regulate the internet uh within their own borders saying oh you know you guys can do this and that uh but what comes in our territory you have

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    to answer to our government you know you have to turn over your records this that and the other this was seen quite recently with telegram right uh the marketed as secure messenger it certainly uh wasn't before but it especially is not so now the French government and basically every Western intelligence agency has this poor guy locked in a hotel room in in Paris and threatened with jail if he doesn't

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    cooperate um but it's to recognize this uh just as everything else is is trying to be erased in the form of large political uh International blocks uh borders are trying to be erased uh digital sovereignty is not um this thing that they're uh describing where you know we they try to regulate the internet for our purposes uh digital sovereignty in the purpose in the for the purposes of

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    the individual uh is where we recognize that there is a civil liberty for the internet and for our interaction with it for our systems whether we're talking about our money whether we're talking about our connection uh whether we're talking about our writing whether we're talking about our reading there are legitimate uh uh limits on their authority to regulate and the only way to preserve our digital sovereignty is be to create our own

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    systems uh that are inforced Through Math uh that are enforced through uh architecture uh that no level of law or influence or you know grabbing some guy at a hotel room uh or everyone in this conference uh and in M jail cell will be able to change and this is the importance of things like the original uh sort of Bitcoin idea is that there is nobody that you can put under the gun to change it now we've seen a lot of inventions uh we've seen a lot of uh

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    novelty and Innovation uh since then and some of it's been powerful some of it's been useful uh but it's important to remember this or principle uh the things that we took for granted in the last decade uh can no longer be counted on to be left alone as the price Rises as we see you know the black rocks come into the community as we see the big Banks enter it as we see governments begin to talk about strategic reserves and

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    Investments sort of the uh arms race get sparked in our domain uh where they're trying to compete for part of the new territory we have to recognize that more and more encroachments are coming into our communities and I don't care how strong you are I don't care how principled you are care how brilliant you are as long as you have a physical body that they can reach uh they are

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    going to try their best to put their influence upon you uh and whether it crosses uh or when it crosses from that border uh of the legitimate exercise of authority to the illegitimate uh expression of it will you be prepared and that's the question we as a community need to ask ourselves uh we need to ask these projects and we need to think about uh what happens tomorrow for meme coins you know it doesn't matter these things have no meaning anyway they're they're chasing the trend it's uh sort of a popularity

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    contest for a moment for the round it is a game we recognize that for what it is if you want to play okay fine so long as you're not hurting anybody it's the the same thing is sort of the freedom of opinion but uh when you're playing for real Stakes when it's no longer a game we're playing games power uh you need to be ready uh you need to make sure that your digital footprint uh your your digital Homestead cannot be colonized it can't be oppressed it can't be taken out from

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    underneath you uh by any State uh and with that I'll say let's open it up for questions brilliant brilliant Edward thank you look I bought this t-shirt I had to buy it from a uh had to buy it from a from a from a Twilight fan site um but but Team Edward right Team Edward big time um so it might look weird to the audience I can see Ed here on the on the screen um so to my bosses you can

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    find me if I want but this is my copy of ponent record I got it as soon as it came out I've read it three times it's a brilliant amazing book Ed I think it's unlikely we're going to cross in the street this week um but I've written a little message and I know it's not the same as you signing it but if you could just give your approval and look you said be weird right so I'm just going to be myself so I've written uh to David my number one

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    fan keep fighting the good fight sport lots of love PS the truth reign supreme and there's a little Gap here that I'm going to sign with Edward snorton if you say if that's okay oh please do don't uh don't be shy about adding don't don't be shy about adding at the very bottom there stay free brother all thank you that's going straight on eBay Stay Free and stay weird all right well

49. 24:08

    look it's got coffee stands on it I've used it that much all right we have a a few questions prepared and I'm I'm so excited to ask you them um so you spoke about it a little bit uh you can call it the regime change I know some people around the world would say that uh but given the US election results um where do you think the US goes now in terms of privacy and security you know he's

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    talked about dismantling the deeps there and getting out the government whether or not he does I don't know but what direction do you think it's heading yeah I I mean this is difficult and it's it's funny because the uh you know crypto Community has really gone all in for Trump of course because he said nice things in in some areas but it's much more complex uh speaking more broadly uh frankly I think he's not especially tuned into this so it's not something that's going to be driven at the presidential level but I do think

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    there is a maximalism uh for power for influence and that's common to all presidents uh the question is just you know how aware are they of it um I think whoever he puts in charge of this is going to you know crack it open as far as they can uh but again I I I don't think that's a trump specific thing the reality is there is a global race right now uh for intelligence agencies of law enforcement broadly to see all of the data that they have access to that I

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    described earlier right it's any kind of digital record that's being created uh previously was being ingested into these systems these repositories uh that then had to have human algorithms applied to them uh you read permanent records so you're familiar with it but things like X key score it's a search engine uh for going through this trying to pull out what you want you could you would put in

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    what's called a selector it be somebody's email address their cell phone number number uh the MZ or I uh EI uh basically those are the identifiers for your cell phone uh it's a key that's built into your sim card or the handset uh which is known to your uh telephone company right and that's reported up the chain and that means even if you like change the SIM card in your phone the handset is still the same so they oh this phone just had a different SIM card put in they can sort of De anonymize you

54. 26:27

    uh through that but the Telco uh would provide these things to the government in basically every country right uh and it's not broadly understood this used to be available because of weaknesses in the operating system not to everybody who's putting apps on your phone and then you know Facebook was using it everybody else was using and they're still finding ways to get it through special Partnerships with the OS makers Google or Apple uh but basically it's the big uh OS makers now

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    Google and apple plus the Telos who have the best access ACC to this data but of course those guys are very closely cooperating with the US government or you know your local jurisdiction with their government um and the question is what they're what they're doing with this now there's been limits on uh their ability to understand everybody all the time right now uh the status quo is they were watch everybody all the time that's what Mass surveillance was about um

56. 27:25

    everything that you were doing was being recorded and it was putting in being put in the machine uh but it wasn't necessarily being taken out of the machine unless they had a reason to look at you then they dial back sort of the surveillance time machine and go all right what's everything this person's done over the last five years uh but now uh it's possible uh and we just saw I just read a headline last week about paler or or somebody like that uh is going to be signing a

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    contract uh with the government to a classified Cloud um that is uh applying basically AI analytics they're putting these models onto classified clouds and it doesn't say what the purposes are but it's very obviously for crunching this kind of data they want to train it on everything uh and they would to be able to say you know who looks anomalous uh you know we've fed all the behavior of

58. 28:20

    all the people we don't like in there what's the common pattern what are the indicators uh that make people more likely to be this and then who have haven't we discovered who's not known to us look at everybody look at the whole human body and pick out anybody who is weird and this is another actually way that your weirdness is valuable it creates a kind of her immunity if you

59. 28:43

    are a little bit weird but you're genuinely not hurting anybody uh you are reshaping the human average of activity uh in a way that's a little bit more heterodox that provides protection for people who actually need it activists dis journalists um where your weirdness pushes the boundary of behavior a little bit out to Mak space for somebody else uh to do something that frankly could change the world uh this is not to say that you're not going to change the world I hope you will uh but it's just recognizing the

60. 29:17

    small ways in which everything interacts so anyway to get back on the question and sort of summarize in in brief uh the trend's going to continue it's going to get worse based on what it is uh but what's really interesting here uh and which what I can't predict but I'm very excited about uh is the open sourcing of these models uh has been very useful and I think it's very rapidly increasing individual capability

61. 29:41

    uh if you guys haven't used these things yet whether we're talking about llms whether we're talking about the generative Imaging models diffusion models um like the kind of mid Journey thing online like Chad GPT being the llm thing uh don't use those online versions like sure they're fun to look at for like 10 seconds uh but the open source models now you can go on GitHub and in like three commands you can have this running oh what just happened there hang

62. 30:07

    on one second for me we've lost your you're you're pretty fast yep stand by there's stand by here we go there we're back am I back yeah OBS just crashed I thought I thought you were getting too deep in I thought the government was coming back yeah you know I think I think they were like oh man this is this is too much let's kill yeah anyway um yeah the the the bottom line is you guys can do this yourself it's incredibly easy like the

63. 30:40

    whole reason it's easy is all these academics who are not Court programmers are doing it but just using this running this yourself where you don't have the same levels of censorship or if you do have the levels of censorship you can remove them from a model do it your own way is incredibly empowering you will understand these Technologies much better and they're going to apply more and more to your life I'm telling you guys you don't understand uh if you're not using it you need to use this uh

64. 31:03

    because the technolog is moving rapidly uh you have these Imaging models like I said diffusion models you have the llms the large language models uh which are like chat GPT you talk them to them you ask them whatever now they have Vision models which is basically an llm plus an ability to understand images you give it a picture of anything and say what is this it'll tell you you give it a transcript of you know something you wrote on your hotel napkin say what does

65. 31:27

    this say type it for me uh and it it'll do it they have language interpretation models like open whisper and when you start putting these things together you can make your own live translation systems from languages you don't understand you can do all of these things you can write scrapers you can write in a PO programming language that you don't understand at all because it'll write the code for you uh and I I

66. 31:50

    I just promise you your human capability uh will begin to sort of go a lot wider than you thought and the sky the limit now remember this in the other direction something that concerns me is the fact that they have you know these audio analysis models now um where you just feed it an audio scream and Bam there's the text for human back you know when this happened in 2013 Obama came out and he was like no no no no one is listening

67. 32:16

    to your phone calls and this was supposed to be reassuring because everybody was thinking like you know German staty there's a guy with headphones on there like transcribing your call unless you were on the very top list that was never going to happen happened to you but that wasn't what we were accusing them of in the first place the funny thing is we were accusing them of using algorithms to achieve the same outcomes without having to go to that step well the reality is now they can

68. 32:40

    actually have machine models that will soon enough in capability be able to do this the global amount of phone calls won't be that large and eventually they will be able to process all of this on the fly at line speed with these machines and as soon as you speak it it's going to happen but okay you go you know that that's on phone calls I assume my phone calls are being you know intercepted as they cross the global

69. 33:03

    path I'm a sophisticated crypto guy right uh well guess what guys they're starting to build this stuff into surveillance cameras very very very crude implementations right now but you can go buy you know a camera off the shelf from China Huawei uh not Huawei hike Vision or dahwa um and they've got uh basic capabilities like human detection uh like vehicle detection it'll tell if a car pulls into your driveway or whatever you know you see it on ring cameras this is very very crude stuff object

70. 33:36

    detection uh but what happens when they're able to bake these Audio models into the chips on the camera and it the camera will offer you do you want a transcript of everything that was said within the hearing distance of your surveillance camera and it's cheap and it's easy right and then they do this to every camera that's in the city and suddenly now everything you're saying in public that's not on a is going into

71. 34:03

    repositories maybe it's just on the camera maybe it's not leaving anywhere in in a Freer country but what about a less free country uh what about when those free countries become less free themselves uh so anyway the the ground is changing very rapidly here I would say the trend is to quantifying more of the world ingesting more of the world uh and it is becoming more interpretable our job as a space is to

72. 34:28

    create uh areas where they can't do that um whe we're talking about uh sort of private uh transactions and whatnot I've said in other talks so I won't rehash it here um but yeah we've got a lot of work to do I'll leave it there uh next question no absolutely that was brilliant um right this one's going to be a little bit spicy I thought the people in the room I think um but if you

73. 34:52

    are glued to Twitter now X then you probably saw Edward uh a few months back call salana out for being centralized why why why is it you think Solon centralized that I mean SBF um he's not he said it he's not as much of a threat now as he used to be but uh Sam bankman freed the VC guys in general like if you look at Bitcoin if you look at the uh public ownership of it it's it's effectively 100% right they're like oh you know there's uh certain addresses that hold a big amount of the ecosystem yeah but

74. 35:32

    these are largely like exchanges these are ETFs and then of course there's Satoshi but his coins have never moved they're never going to move um but the idea is that everybody got uh sort of a fair chance at that it's it's open it's distributed uh when you look at node ownership uh how the network grew it was um a bunch of people running these things on laptops now INF fairness it's become a lot more centralized now we have mining Industries is much more competitive because the difficulty rate

75. 36:04

    is shot to the Moon um but when you look at a lot of these competing systems right they're run out of data centers by professional companies by DCS uh who own half of the ecosystem uh when you look at the coin Distribution on salana when it came out um the you know public sale for it like didn't exist I don't know exactly what it is I'm sure somebody on Twitter will complain and say I'm wrong okay that that's your right be weird

76. 36:29

    guys um but look a lot of people get into this because they're they're trying to defend the value of salana which frankly I don't care about I don't care if salana uh you know goes to a thousand or if it goes to 10 um and I I don't think that's how we should be evaluating coins either uh we we can't bypass the fact that that is the case um but the bottom line is a series of choices were made in the architecture of

77. 37:01

    that and many other ones like I didn't mean to I shouldn't have called out salana specifically I said I wasn't going to name names I did it anyway it was a mistake uh I'm sorry anybody I offended but it is absolutely more centralized than many of its competitors people will argue it's decentralized enough um well your entire network goes off sometimes hasn't happen a while you've been progressing and that's great right uh salana does have low low cost

78. 37:26

    of transactions that's great great uh it is fast it's effective it's efficient in many ways that's great uh but what happens when you start stepping closer to that world that I just described uh throughout this talk in many ways um and you have more and more states starting to go all right what if we can take this ecosystem and make it ours uh what if we want to you know stop all these transactions stop the network entirely what you know you can't do that

79. 37:57

    with some points you can't with others now the salon guys go well it's distributed enough now it's decentralized enough now there are all these uh you know um different jurisdictions we're dealing with okay maybe Fair all right but you can't say it's it's more decentralizing these others uh come on guys any anyway that's it no I appreciate the I think collectively as an industry like there's a lot of people in here that live salon and me included um we're trying our best right and and

80. 38:27

    it's difficult with the with the incentive alignment whatnot uh we've got a couple of minutes left Ed I could do this for the next five years but uh I don't think you can um I don't think these people want to see you for that long uh but I I'm am a pretty much a a human Optimist right uh I know it's it's a scary world that we live in and and the things that you've warned us about and you contined to do so um they can be

81. 38:51

    really Dawning right so what if anything and I hope Nia will be a part of it it will prevent this onslaught of AI going the same route as meta as you know Twitter forly and perhaps even now and and these big web two companies that depend on surveying their users to survive uh the only thing that stops IT from going that direction is us I mean that's the only answer it ever is um

82. 39:23

    Power tends to centralize uh networks tend to centralize uh crypto has tended to centralize since the beginning um because there's a benefit to be had right in the good years centralization is an advantage it's only in the hard times that you realize the benefits of decentralization I mean everybody in this room who's really followed Bitcoin from the beginning would understand that if Bitcoin had not been decentralized uh Bitcoin wouldn't exist

83. 39:57

    by now it would have been Stamped Out everybody involved with it would have been arrested you know it would be a story in the news 10 years ago uh just like Liberty reserve and all of these other uh alternative currency implementations uh when it started to be a threat to what was considered to be the government's uh Monopoly domain on you know their powers um the boot would have come down and it would have stomped hard

84. 40:22

    uh with AI uh they didn't start it uh this is a power that they are attempting to entitle themselves to who is that they I'm talking about States broadly here um corporations of course are the ones who have the largest technical Advantage uh they have the intellectual Advantage because they're the ones developing this uh and as the first movers uh they are having the large uh sort of Head Start in terms of access to data sets and what I think the way you fight this sort of a weakness in the AI open source model that I've been uh

85. 40:58

    praising so highly earlier uh is we are getting the weights from the models right these are the things that allow you to run inference against what these guys have trained and then released to us which is useful and like I said it's amazing I love this stuff um but you can't replicate the work and in many ways you can't extend the work you can't improve the work in quite the same way because you don't have the original data set I think if we really wanted to improve this one of the best ways uh to

86. 41:28

    deal with the AI inequality uh would be to say look if you guys are going to publish a model or not publish a model if you're going to use a model uh commercially you have to make the data sets available uh not just the weights um and of course you know no company in the world is going to do this they would have to be forced to do it Kicking and Screaming uh and this is where a lot of people would would argue

87. 41:51

    against me go you don't own that it's not yours you can't tell people what to do with it um and this is where the hard questions of government come down right what is a a legitimate and illegitimate use of authority um are we supposed to be leveling the playing field uh or are we supposed to be creating space for people to do what they want when they have an advantage to allow them because they are the ones who started it right they're the weird ones they're the ones

88. 42:15

    who took the risk they're the ones who gambled we've been you know upping that all day long uh who are weed out change the rules uh mid-match well the question of course is when it comes to disparity of outcome uh to a certain level when we are in an winner take all world uh do we want to let there be a winner of the world uh because fundamentally at the end of the day like we we love each

89. 42:39

    other we love people uh both dangerous dangerous animals uh and just like John Stewart Mill was writing you know 200 years ago uh just like opinions and actions there is a difference between them and there are lines where there is a legitimate role for government to interfere uh when our actions start to infringe on the lives of others how do we control that um recognizing that people will strive for the best for themselves often at the expense of others how do we ensure some basic level

90. 43:11

    of fairness and I think when we see the power and the promise of AI there are going to be real questions about the the future uh the problem that I have is that the government of course knowing the government see all the legislation that they've provided over the last 50 years they are going to construct this legislation in the worst possible way uh they're going to be guided by the very companies that that we need to restrain

91. 43:34

    uh their lobbyists are going to shape and be literally authoring the legislation that they're going to rubber stamp for the legislatures that's then going to rule us uh and so I I think we have really have a lot of work ahead of ourselves to go all right with this great set of disadvantages how will we catch up how will we retain an edge for ourselves if all these data sets are

92. 43:56

    coming to be locked away if increasingly the weights are going to be locked away um and we're basically fighting uh a sword fight with a toothpick but that's where Ingenuity and youth I hope will rescue us uh we've got a lot of smart people in the room some of you are younger than others you know I used to be the youngest guy in the room uh now I'm not any but that's you know that that's the story of humanity

93. 44:21

    that's how it goes uh for you uh out there whether you're working in crypto whether you're working working in AI whether you're working in both one of the interesting things about AI is it's getting easier and easier to train um we're never going to have equal resources uh I don't maybe you can shake down uh some of these VC guys and free up their money uh without giving up the

94. 44:45

    soul of the project you know that's my hope for things like salana uh salana was basically born in a prison because of how much VC money they took and it's you know VC project from from the get-go um but maybe it can become something I hope so and you know the vs definitely hope so because they're getting rich off it um but the the the the bottom line is we've given away a lot of ownership of ourselves of our online lives of our

95. 45:16

    digital footprint uh that we didn't know we were giving away uh because we clicked okay to the terms of service even though that wasn't a choice even though you can't go you know throughout your life without clicking okay to continue on your phone turn it on first uh very first time doesn't matter who you bought it from you got to click okay to continue you got to click okay to sign up you got to click okay to log in uh and all of these terms basically make you give up more and more and more of

96. 45:40

    yourself that's not a choice uh that's something that's forced on you because you can't get through life today without having a phone you can't get through life without passing all of these Gates that are constantly being uh placed in front of you you're being asked to sign up to more and more subscriptions you were being asked to sign up to more and more rules uh and a little bit more of the life that we used to take for granted is now being you know placed

97. 46:05

    Beyond these barricades uh and that's been the direction of the future My Hope Is that the people in this audience and audiences like it around the world uh find ways that we can tear down these barriers uh that we can Pierce through these barricades that we can connect with each other no matter where we are no matter what we think no matter where we started no matter what we have

98. 46:30

    uh and without becoming alike uh in terms of average and instead of becoming uh molded by these systems pressed into you know the cookie cutter uh we have a shared fraternity A diversity that reaches Beyond language Beyond culture Beyond borders Beyond beliefs and recognizes there are commonalities in the things that we love there is a global average in the things that we like and that's okay there are

99. 47:08

    things that are appealing to everybody and that doesn't mean we hate the popular right uh but it does mean we respect the difference and we embrace it and we nurture it so that we can have new things that we can have better things without losing our appreciation for the things that we inherit and that's all I have to say thank you very much Edward you um look so they they asked me not to swear too much but you are so rock and roll I think a lot of people in here

100. 47:49

     would agree you know 10 years ago or so you you were the Catalyst of a of a revolution and not everybody in cryp or web 3 is is here for the same reason but there's certainly a significant am of people who are here to be that group that you were just talking about and to be the toothpick holders to take on uh the sword wielding uh Warriors of big Tech and big government now I would love

101. 48:14

     to talk about it all day Edward but I'm afraid we are out of time brokenhearted is there anything else you want to say uh before we wrap it up just stay free stay free you heard it rock and roll thank you so much Edward S everybody