Human-First: Decentralizing Identity and Governance in the Era of AI

This reminds me of a previous job. The management—none of which were technical people—just loved the idea of investigating “the blockchain” and “IoT” and “machine learning” and “AI”, but had no clue what it meant. I left after a couple of months.<p>Has anyone else read this article and had the same experience as me? I genuinely second guess myself when reading it: have I lost the ability to read? Am I stupid? I read all these words on the page yet I have absolutely no comprehension of what was said. What on Earth was written on the “formalising humans on the blockchain” section for example? There sure are a lot of words, but nothing actually got said.<p>What, <i>exactly</i> do they want to do with a blockchain and <i>why</i>? It’s a simple question.<p>Oh, they have some cryptocurrency token they want to sell. Gotcha.

&gt; What, exactly do they want to do with a blockchain and why?<p>Here’s my take: they want to enable voting online with some level of trust. One major problem with online voting is ensuring each voter only votes once. In traditional voting (e.g. for a political office) the government is the one ensuring each eligible voter only votes once. Since the point of this is to “decentralize” voting, they need a complicated cryptographic approach to stand in for the governments role in ensuring one person one vote instead.

Quadratic voting on the blockchain should be a library you can throw into your blockchain project, not its own token with such a marketing effort behind it.

I fail to see how they solve the central issue: validating that someone is actually a human and not a bot.<p>Even the hash of the video of the father declaring the birth of his daughter; all it proves is that the video was _created_ before some specific date. It _doesn&#x27;t_ prove that the details in the video are real, or even that the video wasn&#x27;t just created by an AI.

I think most of what they say is fear mongering and totally irrelevant. For example, the image that says &quot;the biggest threat to democracy: these people never existed&quot; and showing the AI generated faces. How is that the biggest threat to democracy? Aren&#x27;t things like the two party system, a corrupt media that pushes political agendas instead of reporting objectively, social media polarizing people with echo chambers and feedback loops which create social fires over simple things, etc more of a threat to democracy than spoofed AI people walking into a voting booth? I understand that they would like to push their platform as a saving grace, but it seems like yet another crypto scheme that is trying out the political angle.