Universal Income, Powered by AGI, Owned by YOU.

The AGI DAO is a global network of individuals who are excited by the future that Artificial General Intelligence will bring. We are passionate about developing AI and ensuring that it is used responsibly in society.

[originally written March 2022]

Let’s dig in.

“AI as smart as humans”, aka, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is inevitable, and with every major player in tech dedicating their brightest minds to the task, it may very well arrive within YOUR lifetime.

AGI promises that machines will be able to complete any task just as well as humans, many tasks better than humans, and most excitingly, some tasks that are currently unimaginable by humans!

In many industries, AI is already becoming the best “candidate” to hire. Robots are replacing assembly line workers, self driving vehicles are replacing truck drivers, and as the CEO of OpenAI says, AI will be able to replace many more jobs in the near future.

Two outcomes are almost guaranteed to follow the creation of AGI. 1) the cost of labor will become cheaper, thereby making most goods and services cheaper, and 2) the demand for AGI as the source of labor will increase.

Outcome #1 is great for society! We make possible a world where every human can afford more goods and services than they once could.

Outcome #2 is a little scary for society… as demand for AGI as the source of labor increases, the demand for human labor will correspondingly decrease. Bottom line, it will be harder for humans to find employment.

It is no surprise unemployment is not great for society or for the individual. Besides the standard of living decreasing for the individual, the individual faces more physical and mental health issues and society experiences more crime. If we are not careful about AGI entering the workforce, the world will experience a period with a great amount of suffering for those that are not able to quickly adapt to the new system.

Enter The AGI DAO

If you are new to the web 3 world: a DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. DAOs are a group of people coordinating to achieve a common mission. DAOs use community voting and computer programs to ensure that all members have a say in the decisions of the organization.

The AGI DAO’s mission is to ensure that the value produced by AI is distributed to everyone in the world, specifically distributed to those whose jobs are replaced by AI and to those who helped develop AI.

To accomplish this mission, we are designing a system to collect the value produced by AI and a protocol to fairly distribute that value.

Distributing Value

We believe that some form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the most promising method to distribute the value produced by AI. UBI programs have been implemented on a small scale with positive results. With a well funded UBI, we can ensure that every human has enough money to pay for food and housing.

This blog will not be used to debate if a UBI will be a net positive for society but for the unconvinced, here are the debates.

How exactly money is distributed in the UBI is an area of focus for the DAO. Being a DAO, we are excited by a token to serve as the medium for distribution because tokens offer public transparency for fund transfers and allows for immutable computer programs to execute the transfer of funds. If this UBI tokenomics excite you, join our discord to start contributing and being rewarded for your ideas!

Collecting Value

In addition to establishing a protocol to distributing value, we must define the system for collecting value. One method proposed by Sam Altman in his blog, Moore’s Law of Everything, is for governments to tax companies that use AI. It’s a really great idea that has many more interesting details (especially having the tax be paid in company shares). The blog is worth the read if you haven’t seen it yet.

The only problem with the solution is that in order to help every person in the WORLD, every government in the world must vote on and implement new legislation. In the US, AI is already taking jobs and the government has yet to act. Moreover, if one government taxes AI and another does not, companies will be motivated to move their headquarters to a new country in order to evade taxes. We believe that we can act now on a global scale with a sustainable business that contributes to, and incentivizes other companies to contribute to, mitigating the undesired effects of AGI.

If we do not want to lobby and wait for the government to tax companies that use AI, there are two obvious alternatives. 1) we own all the AI in the world, sell it as a service, and ensure the value we generate is distributed to those who need UBI. Or 2) we incentivize companies that use AI to contribute to UBI.

Our current approach is a combination of the 2 alternatives.

Own all AI? Impossible. Own some AI? Possible. Owning some AI means we need to ensure that companies choose to use our AI. Goodwill? maybe. Drawing more customers to them? Possibly. Providing a better product? Definitely.

How will we build a better product than the Google, OpenAI, Facebook, Numenta, Apple, Amazon, and every college university? 1) By working with their contributors 2) by operating through a DAO structure and 3) by having better data that is relevant to AGI.

To work with their contributors

We will be airdropping tokens to every living researcher who has published a paper in AI. This is a thank you for their hard work in pushing the field forward, and this gives us access to a highly technical group of people who share our excitement for creating AGI.

Advantages of operating as a DAO

1. Equity Incentives: Currently, most employees in big tech, and most researchers in academia are paid a salary. Equity is a much bigger incentive to contribute and can help these contributors get their fair share of the company that they help create. “Wealth is generated not through selling time, but by owning assets with asymmetric payoff.”
2. Intrinsic Motivation: members work on what they want to work on ensuring everyone has passion.
3. DAOs generate a lot of unique ideas: AGI hasn’t been created yet and many argue that our current neural network implementations will not be sufficient to reach AGI. We need new ideas. Not more data and more compute. A DAO captures input from all walks of life and voting allows for the best to rise to the top.
4. Flexible: The idea of 9 to 5 employment is a relic from the industrial era. Knowledge workers are like athletes, meant to train and sprint, then rest and recover.

Advantages of a DAO to create UBI

1. DAOs are global: with members from every continent, there will be incentive to ensure that every country benefits from the value produced by AGI.
2. Voting power is distributed: DAO members, users of our algorithms, and investors in our mission all have a say in how to develop AGI and structure UBI.
3. Contributors have a voice: DAO members will be the best suited for this decision because they will be the ones who have put the most effort into developing the tech.

How we will be self-sustaining

On the path to AGI, we will develop AI for solutions for many different tasks. We can sell the AI that we develop by offering APIs. As a DAO, we will target providing AI services to other DAOs.

As an example of what kind of AI would align with our goal to create AGI and that would be beneficial for a DAO: we can train AI to break down high level goals into actionable tasks. Most DAOs work on a “bounty system” in order to get “freelancers” to complete tasks for them. Defining all the required tasks takes effort that we can automate. This is also an interesting task for reaching general intelligence because AI that understands composability and compositionally (two hard things for current neural nets) will do better at this task.

Another example is training AI to actually implement a solution to the tasks of the DAO. This will also give us data about how much employees are currently being paid to complete the task. Once AI is able to complete the task, we will be able to quantify how much we should charge for this service to help ensure a fair amount is given towards UBI.

Solving both of these tasks will significantly reduce the barrier to building a business.

We are already partnered with DiviDAO to collect data for both of these tasks. It’s much easier to collect this data than it ever has been in the past because DAOs operate entirely online, and submissions for tasks must be approved, meaning task implementations are submitted.

Our Values

We believe that the wealth generated by AGI should be distributed to all of society. Everyone’s voice should be heard about what is done with AGI, and the best ideas should win. We want to ensure that AGI is used safely. We value transparency, openness, curiosity, and freedom.

Next Steps

Reach out if you want to be a part of this collaboration!

We will be raising money on juicebox.money in order to get an initial fund that can pay for contributors and the compute power required to train our models which can then get us to a self sustaining revenue stream.

Contributors will be focused on 1) implementing AGI and 2) defining the structure of the UBI.

For the AGI work stream, first actions steps of the DAO will be to define new models to implement by targeting the problems with current neural nets (composability, generalizability, transfer learning, etc.) and to define tasks for testing. Although, as DAOs do, members can work on what they find to be most important!

For structuring the UBI we need to figure out 1) how to ensure value of AGI is captured fairly 2) how that value is distributed 3) how much is distributed and 4) to whom is it distributed to.

Summary

Create AGI to fund UBI

WAGMI

- Nick Linck