A thought piece on the final frontier of the blockchain and the advancement of humans and friendly AI.

Blockchains as a Brain

Inspired by The Blockchain Artilect & The Ultimate Question

The blockchain so far has been proven to be useful in a variety of applications. Currently blockchains have given us a glimpse of more liberty, freedom, actualization, ideation, and has expanded the possibilities for everyone involved in the cryptospace. Everyday more physical entities and ideas are being represented and stored on the blockchain. It is only a matter of time until we actualize our thinking onto the blockchain as well. Uploading our minds to the blockchain would allow us to exchange big health data securely and anonymously, upload and sync mindfiles to the blockchain, create digital intelligences that advocate for us on the chain, and be able to share and compare quantitative and qualitative experiences.

Thinking as a Blockchain Process

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Codifying thinking into a blockchain process would not only benefit humans but could help integrate the communications between AI and humans alike. We can define thinking as "a set of inputs processed into outputs". This is very much similar to how we define reality. Inputs can include sensory data from outside the system, and data saved inside the system in the form of memory. These inputs are processed either to a specific location for processing, or processed where the are stored. From there the outputs can be in the form of taking an action, storing something back into memory, conducting a transaction, or making a note or trigger for some sort of future action. The potential uses of standardizing thinking are far reaching and quite exciting. These potentials include:

• AI and Human Integration
• The ability to audit logic and thought processes of AIs
• Intelligently control the process of mind capturing and uploading.
• Give rise to new economics systems such as self-mining ecologies and proof-of-intelligence
• Facilitate long-term transition to intelligent multi-species digital societies.

Personal Thinking Chains

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Currently we have primitive digital identity services like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Minds etc but none are proper representations of who you are. If and when we have the ability to make mind uploads, the blockchains could act as a "personal-thinking-chain" to store life-logging information. This life-logging data could be collected from wearables, inter-cortical recordings, EEG interfaces, and cognitive nano-robots. With this collection of data there is enough information to be able to create an accurate in vivo personal connectome. A connectome for those of you wondering is a complete wiring diagram of neural connections within an organism's nervous system. Its as if you took a complete picture of someones state of mind, including the current states of individual neurons and memories. From this data you would be able to make backups of your mind. This could potentially help people who have suffered from a stroke, or people who have Alzheimer.

Such an in-depth look into someones mind would let us be able to compare the data with others to solve the age old question "are you seeing the same red as me?" This ability to be able to not only compare quantitative facts but also qualitative. This would be the first time in human evolution would we be able to experience life in someone else's shoes. The social impact of this technology could be huge. When mirror neurons touch in the mind of a simulated "someone-else", this is the place of where pure understanding lives.

A way to be able to make sure nobody abuses the information of an individual is to not store the mindfiles to the blockchain but instead host the files on a system like IPFS and manage access control through the blockchain. IPFS is a large scale P2P web hosting service which stands for Interplanetary File System. I recommend you check it out IPFS. So in the case of health care data, on-chain transactions serve as a way to provide unique ownership and access to files.

Digital Mindfiles as DAOs/DACs

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One idea that excites me is the potential to be able to backup your mind and make hundreds of digital duplicates of yourself. In the future the pace of everything will be so fast that we will have to make copies of ourselves to ensure economic, social, and intellectual relevancy to one another. Image hundred of you writing Steem articles and another hundred trading cryptocurrencies on your behalf. These digital MindDAOs (new word?) could have varying degrees of autonomy ranging from guided operations to creating art and researching sciences. At the end of such a busy day you sync your copies to your "prime self" from the blockchain, integrating all your experiences into one.

Blockchain-based Advocates

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Blockchain-based Advocates are like smart contracts that executes on your behalf during unknowable, unpredictable, and uncertain future events. For example in the case of aging or incapacitation a Blockchain advocate could act as a voice for you in your absents. It would make decisions based on your current state of conditions, truths from an oracle, and your own interests which have been determined based on a mind capture of your brain. You could also use blockchain advocates on the blockchain to periodically verify your run-time parameters and conduct decentralized back-ups.

As I mentioned briefly these super smart contracts or blockchain advocates will reference to oracles or "information arbiters" for sophisticated truths. These oracles could also be used to send smart contracts and computers standardized instructions on the latest mind uploading protocols or software updates on a massive consensus network. This could be the route to friendly AI.

Final Thoughts on Friendly AI

The potential for the blockchain to act as our advocates could help us solve the problem of AI being able to understand our motives. Instead of relying on a few people to trust to give inputs to AI we can directly upload our minds, attach a smart contract to the mind file to interact with the blockchain, and have the blockchain store the outputs of decisions that have been processed by the everyone on the network, including other AIs. Maybe this will be in the form of decentralized computing through IoT. Everything is happening so fast, and I'm excited to see what will come next.

Be sure to follow me as I will be exploring some of the potential applications in depth, with the hopes of finding current software to achieve these goals. Let me know if this has sparked any ideas in you in the comment section below!