Tauchain, Agoras and The Knowledge Economy — “The Computers Don’t Understand Us”
This article was originally published on The Daily Chain, 15th September 2020.
“Of course it would be great if computers could just read everything we wrote on the Internet and know our opinion about anything, and then build the opinion map and see where we agree and disagree. But as we know and feel very painfully the computers don’t understand us.”
“An Introduction to Tauchain” by Tauchain founder Ohad Asor
The Computers Don’t Understand Us
Deafening is the sound of a million voices talking at once. Yet individually, or in small groups, human discourse and discussion teaches and inspires. If we could exponentially increase the number of participants in a productive conversation it is reasonable to assume the result would be an exponential increase in inspiration, or knowledge productivity.
However, efficient human collaboration at scale is unfeasible. Active participation in decision making and opinion-sharing en masse is unimaginable. Machines, not humans, operate together efficiently at huge scale.
Machines do not know what we want, or how we feel, or what we think. But can they be made to, and what are the implications of a Human-Machine-Human relationship?
“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.”
Oscar Wilde
Tauchain
“Tau is a decentralized blockchain network intended to solve the bottlenecks inherent in large scale human communication and accelerate productivity in human collaboration using logic based Artificial Intelligence.”
IDNI.org
Tauchain can be thought of as a social network for knowledge exchange and discussion aimed at sharing opinions, answering questions, and forming consensus.
It’s creator is Ohad Asor, a computer scientist and mathematician who back in the 1990’s was the youngest university student in Israel. He leads a team of highly experienced developers under the auspices of Intelligent Decentralized Network Initiatives (IDNI).
“Imagine something that looks exactly like Facebook; groups, likes, posts, comments. Just instead of writing in English they write it in a really controlled English that computers can digest.”
“An Introduction to Tauchain” by Tauchain founder Ohad Asor
“Tau as an organizer in our Human-Machine-Human approach to communication, we can effectively summarize and query all discussed data in an efficient and comprehensible way, and, for the first time in history, allow discussions to accommodate for any number of participants while remaining productive.”
IDNI.org
A goal of Tau is software collaboration wherein the software being used to collaborate is itself the software being developed. In Tauchain a new block is also new code, updating and self-evolving and auto-updating the network in real-time.
Tauchain is therefor whatever its users want it to be. It is a ledger of its own code. What blockchain algorithm will Tau use? Whatever algorithm the users choose.
The vision is to gather knowledge and opinion and using machines harness it to create better society. But how should the computers know what we want?
Computers dumb to our thoughts can be taught. And for this to happen a different approach and language is required.
Tau Meta Language (TML) transcends other computer languages by enabling them to communicate with each other; a metalanguage for language.
we developed a paradigm which we call Human-Machine-Human communication: the core principle is that the users can not only interact with each other but also make their statements clear to their Tau client. Our paradigm enables Tau to deduce areas of consensus among its users in real time, allowing the network to boost communication by acting as an intermediary between humans. It does so by collecting the opinions and preferences its users wish to share and logically constructing opinions into a semantic knowledge base.
IDNI.org
Agoras
If Tau organizes data, then Agoras monetizes it. Agoras puts the economy in knowledge economy, and utilizes a token (AGRS) to exchange value within it. Computational resources markets, automated businesses and advanced financial tools stand at the center of this knowledge economy.
Agoras will be a fully featured intelligent economy revolving around the production, distribution and pricing of knowledge, thereby aligning monetary incentives with Tau’s capabilities over which it is constructed. Agoras will also share Tau’s dynamic architecture, allowing its parameters to be amended based on the community’s desire in real time. In addition, it will feature a computational resource market as well as advanced financial tools such as a derivatives exchange that allows risk-free interest with zero inflation.
IDNI.org
A long anticipated Tauchain whitepaper was published on August 20, 2020. This first part of our exploration of Tau will conclude with a quote from the whitepaper dealing with paradoxes in self-referential statements.
The forthcoming second part will get more technical and dig deeper in anticipation of the Tau and Agoras initial release scheduled before year’s end. When done we should all have a better idea what to expect.
The Law of Laws
“Consider the following law: “all laws, including this one, can be changed given majority vote”. Is it a law, or law of changing the law, or law of changing the law of changing the law? Well, it is all at once, because it refers to itself. It refers to how this law itself may be changed, and by that it’s a law of changing the law ad infinitum indeed. It is important to note that this law makes perfect sense and raises no paradoxes, a concern that commonly arises in self-referential statements”
“Tau-Chain and Agoras” , Ohad Asor. Editor: Prof. Dr. Avishy Carmi (August 20, 2020)
Useful Links
Tauchain and Agoras website
Coingecko / Coinmarketcap
Whitepaper
“An Introduction to Tauchain” by Tauchain founder Ohad Asor (video)
Artwork: “The Tau Towers of Knowledge” by capitanart
