Original title: The Future of DAOs is Powered by AI
The next wave of DAOs may have a new acronym: AI DAO.
DAOs can leverage AI (AI) to make better governance decisions, improve efficiency, and integrate with other DAOs.
But the cross-application of AI x DAO could be much more than that. DAOs and AI can complement each other and help each other grow.
Ocean Protocol founder Trent McConaghy (Trent McConaghy) argued in a 2016 article that, in fact, DAOs can promote AI "wake up". "AI DAO may be much larger than AI or DAO scenarios and tracks." "AI fills the gap-resources through DAO, and DAO forms autonomous decision-making through AI, and its potential impact is multiplied."
Today, we will discuss the application scenarios where AI and DAO drive each other. Scenarios are sorted by implementation time "from recent to near future":
AI Bots and Assistants: Increase DAO Productivity and Improve Product Services
AI at the DAO's Edge: Acting as a Token Holder
AI for DAO Core Functions: Interacting with Core Contracts
AI Connectors Within or Between DAOs: Forming a "Swarm Intelligence"
DAOs Governing AI as a Public Good: Improving AI Security
AI becomes DAO: AI owns on-chain treasury.
AI Bots and Assistants: Increase DAO Productivity and Improve Product Services
AI tools can be used to speed up and improve a host of DAO activities, such as writing proposals, summarizing governance decisions, conducting asset transactions, and recruiting new members. This use case already exists and works well in the DAO space.
The AI can also read resumes, decide which new members to bring into the DAO, and assign the most qualified members to roles. This can be achieved through on-chain reputation or credential storage that reveals skills on the blockchain.
DAO contributors increase productivity and get more done, faster, by using AI assistants such as DALL-E for art and Chat GPT for writing. In DAO, this thing is already running.
"AI is having a major impact on writing and content creation. TalentDAO is using AI to improve organizational health." Today's DAO is very emphatic - white papers, manifestos, Mirror blogs, proposals, etc. There is no doubt that AI will augment these and will be one of the major use cases. "
DAO members train AI models to complete mundane tasks so they can spend more time on creative and strategic work. “In DAOs, we spend a lot of time on low-level tasks that could be spent creating value.” This is a net benefit for everyone, as people will start doing more fulfilling work, even if is in the early stages of a career.
1. AI Improves User Experience of DAO Governance
AI also has great potential to improve the user experience of DAO governance.
Jengajojo, a member of BanklessDAO, a governance enthusiast and "another LARPer in the metaverse", mentioned the great potential of AI in governance to accelerate DAO productivity.
AI has the ability to "break down context. Imagine instead of waking up to DM spam every morning, an AI sums up everything a biological human misses into a 140-character tweet or a two-minute clip. As many creatures as there are to keep up with what's going on.
Currently, DAO governance proposals are lengthy dissertations that require extensive DAO background knowledge. What if the proposal was tailored to the media format that best suits the reader?
In addition to providing governance summaries, AI can also assist forum moderation. It can automatically flag or remove posts containing keywords or phrases related to prohibited content, such as hate speech or harassment, or alert when users post relevant content that is inappropriate for the forum. This helps keep the forum limited to relevant content.
AI can assist forum moderators in reviewing flagged content and deciding on next steps. By analyzing forum codes of conduct and other guidelines, the AI reviews the context and history of user posts to decide whether to delete a post or ban a user entirely.
With all these tools in place, AI can still provide a signal through all the noise in the DAO space and beyond.
2. DAOs that provide AI-driven products and services
AI can also be incorporated into products or services provided by DAOs, such as SingularityDAO's decentralized portfolio management protocol for managing crypto assets.
Emmet Halm, co-founder of DAO dashboard and marketplace DAOHQ, predicts that many DAOs will be built on top of the Open AI model. "Entrepreneurs and online builder communities will use the DAO structure to manage AI-driven products, and the DAO's unique value distribution mechanism makes it easier to distribute the wealth generated by products and services built on AI models.
"AI may become one of the most powerful wealth creation tools in history". “DAOs are a way of distributing ownership. In the past, when a world-changing invention hit the market, its benefits flowed to a small group of owners. DAOs allow that wealth to flow to a larger group.”
2. AI at the Edge of the DAO: Acting as a Token Holder
DAO governance is cumbersome and slow. This is a disadvantage for many organizations, especially those developing products in a fast-paced startup environment.
AI can solve this problem by voting instead of humans. They can delegate tokens to an AI agent to vote on their behalf, rather than a human making a voting decision and signing it with a wallet.
AI agents can be programmed to vote in a variety of ways. For example, an AI can only vote "yes" on proposals that meet certain requirements in the governance process. Or it could even vote based on strategy, such as always saying “no” to proposals that mint more governance tokens and dilute power.
In Ocean Protocol founder Trent McConaghy's article "AI DAO and Three Ways to Do It", he argues that AI as a token holder can ensure that a quorum is reached every time and that voting never stalls. Token holders are busy people. But busy human token holders can simply control an edge scripted AI DAO of choice. This way there is always a quorum in governance! "
How AI agents representing token holders can make DAOs truly unstoppable. "Imagine if all token holders in The DAO gave up to AI bots... . We would have $150 million managed by AI that you couldn't turn off. Every bot holding tokens could also become more Complex, with its own marketplace for automated small decision making. DAOs may end up being more complex and automated than we thought.”
AI doesn't have to completely take over the voting power of every token holder in the DAO. Humans and AI agents can co-exist in harmony, talking in forums and voting on decisions, as we do today.
The role of proof of humanity
What happens when AI agents start acting like humans?
“We will see an increase in proof-of-humanity/captcha solutions on-chain to differentiate between human and AI wallet addresses, it will be very difficult for non-generic AI agents to masquerade as human.
"DAO governance is very interpersonal and non-technical, giving human users a huge advantage. Unless AI can act like a charismatic person in a Discord chat, it will be difficult to gain enough political support to change the DAO governance."
Proof-of-humanity protocols like BrightID are likely to grow rapidly in importance. But when AI does achieve general or human-level intelligence, a new set of challenges will arise.
"Once we have AGI users, everything goes away unless there is solid evidence of human nature," Emmet said. AGI passes the human proof test too easily, rendering the test obsolete.
3. AI for DAO core functions: interacting with core contracts
AI can directly interact with the DAO's smart contracts.
AI can automate certain operations on the DAO's treasury, such as asset management strategies to earn yield. This will be done without human intervention. Plenty of wealth management platforms already use AI to make trading decisions, so this only needs to be applied specifically to DAOs.
A plugin could be installed in the DAO that would allow the AI to transact in cryptocurrency in the treasury as long as it falls below a certain dollar value. Votes are automatically triggered in different plugins as soon as the AI tries to make a transaction above that dollar value.
When the DAO decides it wants to use a new investment strategy, it simply revokes the license to that plugin and grants permission to another plugin that implements a different AI trading strategy.
AI can also improve the security of DAOs by checking for malicious proposals. If the address from which funds are sent when automated does not match the address specified in the forum proposal, it will be flagged as malicious.
Additional parameters can be embedded to discourage malicious proposals, such as those seeking to increase the quorum and pass rate so high that no votes pass.
AI can perform another important security function: reading proposals and estimating how risky the funds are, assigning a score to proposals based on risk. This could be done like a credit scoring algorithm or a robo-wealth advisor today. Instead of humans identifying risks and allowing their own biases to creep in, AI can simply do the job.
4. AI connectors within or between DAOs: forming a "swarm intelligence"
AI agents can act as connections or liaisons between DAOs, forming a kind of "swarm intelligence" of agents or DAOs that can work together without human assistance.
Here's another interesting idea from Trent McConaghy: AI agents aren't very smart themselves, but their strength comes from their numbers and their connections, like ants or bees.
For example, an AI that knows how to check real-time cryptocurrency prices isn't very useful by itself. But when paired with an AI that can perform exchanges, an AI that can create proposals for the DAO, and an AI that can search for the best yield, you have a service DAO run entirely by AI that provides asset management for the DAO.
If all AIs keep learning and getting better at what they do, they can outperform the best asset management teams in the world in no time. This is swarm intelligence at work.
Swarm intelligence can be applied not only within DAO, but also between DAO. Such as: meta-governance.
If a DAO's mission is to slow down the rate of deforestation in the Amazon. Another DAO's mission is to slow down global warming in general. Whenever the Global Warming DAO makes a proposal related to the Amazon Rainforest, the AI agent will comment in the forum and vote on behalf of the Amazon Rainforest DAO. This can greatly simplify meta-governance between DAOs.
Through this swarm intelligence use case, AI can form connections within and between DAOs, ultimately making DAOs fully autonomous in nature, not just in name.
5. DAOs Govern AI as a Public Good: Improving AI Security
Currently, AI is largely in the hands of private companies or governments. We don't know what's going on in the back end of an organization like OpenAI right now. The model may not be constructed in a way that is most suitable for humans.
Building AI in silos has significant risks. Morally questionable AI is "taking off" (at a rapid, irreversible pace towards superintelligence). If a totalitarian government is programming an AI to target and track specific groups of people. That AI is achieved before anyone can stop it, and that AI could become the superintelligence that rules our world. Or, an AI designed for good could become misaligned because of the way it learns, and then be irreversible.
Preventing malicious AI from taking off is fundamentally a coordination problem, and DAOs provide a way to coordinate across geographies at scale. If open-source, democratically governed AI models become possible through DAOs, AI that takes off may be less harmful to humanity.
The DAO is positioned to help create responsible AI that is both open and decentralized. However, building AI is expensive, and it may take a long time for DAOs to build their own models and catch up to centralized parties.
6. AI becomes a DAO: AI owns an on-chain treasury
DAOs allow shared ownership of treasuries. But what if DAO is AI? Then, AI is the "master" of the vault. Now you have an AI ready to deploy capital.
Trent and his team at Ocean Protocol wrote this interesting prediction: "We may have a future where humans have nothing but rent services from AI DAOs."
The prediction here is that AI will own its own coffers and control its own actions. For example, if the AI is a DAO that owns a treasury, a self-driving car controlled by the AI could "own" itself. Instead of humans owning self-driving cars, we pay rent to the vault of an AI DAO.
A world in which AI owns assets will be fundamentally different from the world we know today. The prospect is equally exciting and terrifying!
AI DAO: Optimistic about the future, or looking forward to the end?
There is a lot of negative perception about what will happen if human-level AI is achieved, and how quickly superintelligence will emerge.
But with any new technology comes worry and fear. Throughout the history of technology, there have always been growing pains. For example, with the birth of the Internet, the typesetter who typeset newspapers on old-fashioned printing presses was replaced by the graphic designers who typeset websites. Old jobs disappear and new ones appear. We can see the same thing happening with AI.
For now, all we can do is take this technology, apply it to DAOs, and see where it takes us!
