The Rise of Open Access Networks

Changing the nature of organizations, by changing their privileges.

“There is no spoon,” says the little boy in The Matrix. He continues:

“… you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, but only yourself.”

Armed with that nugget of wisdom, Neo begins his journey to change the nature of reality, by changing himself.

When people have tried to explain the concept of blockchain, they have often stated that it allows for the decentralization of organizations and that it has the technological power to remove the centralized party.

In other words, in blockchain-enabled networks: there is no decision-maker, no one to lead, no one to request access from, no one to control and no one to steer the evolution of these networks. Some entrepreneurs amongst us, excited by the possibilities of this feature, have already started to create and promote decentralized networks.

In doing so, these founders are trying to change the nature of organizations, by changing their privileges.

By the time a network becomes completely decentralized, the creators or the founders have given up all control. They might be financially rewarded for their efforts, and the community may choose to value their input, but they do not have the power to direct the decisions of the network that they created. This scenario is in contrast with the founders of centralized networks, who very often fight tooth and nail to remain in charge of their creations for as long as possible.

Simone Giacomelli, the co-founder of SingularityNET, while participating in the Futurama Blockchain Summit, labeled such decentralized networks enabled by blockchains as open access networks.

For instance, no participant in SingularityNET, an open access network, needs to ask permission for anything or pay any commission to anyone.

What this means is that any organization will be able to connect with SingularityNET and offer access to their services through it. SingularityNET will increase the organization’s access to potential new customers without them having to sacrifice any share of their revenue. Unlike centralized platforms, there will be no account or identity verifications required — or any risk of sharing sensitive information with a third party. To access SingularityNET, therefore, will be in the financial interest of AI service providers.

Similarly, an AI developer will be able to use SingularityNET to offer access to their algorithms and not lose any share of their income to a middleman. The developers will not have to share the details of their identities, meet geographical requirements, get approvals or risk the platform discriminating against them in any other way.

An interesting aspect of open access networks, which Simone highlights in another interview, is that they evolve through the actions of their participants.

SingularityNET, for example, is designed to have an open reward pool to not only attract talent and incentivize development but also to reward beneficial agents. SingularityNET dedicates 20% of the total token supply towards this open reward pool. This allows anyone to get rewarded by adding value to the network and for the community to reward AI agents working towards benevolent causes.

Simone (on the right) at Futurama Blockchain Innovators Summit

Such a novel way to generate and distribute value makes Simone believe that developers on SingularityNET will be able to earn as much, or even more, as offered by centralized companies — while being able to express their values through innovation.

However, Simone is also of the opinion that open access networks are facing the assignment of credit problem. He describes this problem in the following words:

“When a system performs something that is good overall, how do you go back and reward the different parts that contributed to the greater good?”

Simply put, when there is a community of actors working towards an end goal, how do you distribute rewards fairly amongst them? The assignment of credit problem creates the possibility of free riders and spoofers of the system within the open access networks. We see it happening in a few of the decentralized social networks that exist today, where some of the rewards are distributed to bots and creators of fake content.

Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO and co-founder of SingularityNET, talks about the assignment of credit problem in his blog post: SingularityNET and Other Aspects of Cognitive Economics. Here’s a section of the blog that may be of interest to SingularityNET community members:

“Baum is a deep-thinking AGI researcher as well as a hard-core political libertarian, and he [is] convinced that economics [is the] key to solving the hardest problems at the heart of AGI. Specifically, he argued that the reason certain AI systems (like John Holland’s classifier systems) did poorly at solving the critical “assignment of credit problem” was that they did not obey basic principles of economics. … Baum observed that in certain AI systems, sometimes a component in the system was allowed to dispense more credit to its subtasks than it received for its supertasks — a ‘leakage’ of credit that he noted could be avoided if one treated credit within a cognitive system as a kind of money, since money is a conserved quantity and an economic actor cannot dispense more funds that it has received.”

According to Simone, AI is the solution for the assignment of credit problem that open access networks face, as he states:

“Having an AI augmented system that can quantify the different reputations and staking of the people — that can go about solving the assignment of credit problem — will be something which will be key in making open access networks mainstream.”

The need to quantify reputations, within the open access networks, once again highlights the design of SingularityNET. A Decentralized Reputation System is one of the critical features of the network, and the deployment of such a system will be a milestone not just for SingularityNET but the open access networks in general.

As of today, thanks to the hype of the blockchain technology, open access networks now exist for nearly every major industry. Despite their widespread creation, these networks have yet to become mainstream.

So what would be the catalyst for the rise of the open access networks?

One of the first acts of Neo, after he becomes The One, is to destroy Agent Smith. In the second part of the franchise, knowing how Neo threatens his very existence, Agent Smith tries to copy his code over Neo — he tries to acquire Neo — and says the following words as he does:

“We’re not here because we’re free; we’re here because we’re not free. There’s no escaping reason, no denying purpose, for as we both know, without purpose, we would not exist. It is [a] purpose that created us, [a] purpose that connects us, [a] purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us; it is [a] purpose that defines, [a] purpose that binds us. We are here because of you, Mr. Anderson. We’re here to take from you what you tried to take from us… purpose!”

Collective Purpose

To foresee how the rise of the open access networks might come to be, we have to go back to the birth of the first open access network: Bitcoin. In the Genesis Block of Bitcoin, is a message chosen by its creator:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

Although many people have correctly identified the fact that blockchains serve to align the financial interests of a group of people, the collective purpose of the early Bitcoin adopters: to wrest monetary control away from the centralized authorities, is too often ignored.

The birth of open access networks is backed by the collective purpose of a group of people, and so it will be the collective purpose of a group of people that will make them impossible to ignore.

The collective purpose of SingularityNET is to wrest away the control over AI from centralized organizations and democratize the access to humanity’s most important invention.

When viewed through the lens of collective purpose, it becomes possible to see why the technological development necessary to scale these networks or make them fully functional is only a matter of time.

How Can You Get Involved?

In the future, the sole purpose of AI might be to increase the shareholder value of a few centralized corporations — and that is a sobering thought.

We the Singularitarians, welcome anyone and everyone, to join our community if they are concerned about the possibility of the powers of AI being accessible to a privileged few.

The best way forward is to come together and work practically towards creating a better future. We hope you will join us in our mission to democratize AI and to use its transformative powers to enact real, positive and lasting change.

SingularityNET has a passionate and talented community which you can connect with by visiting our Community Forum. Feel free to say hello and to introduce yourself here. We are proud of our developers and researchers that are actively publishing their research for the benefit of the community; you can read the research here.

For any additional information, please refer to our roadmaps and subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about all of our developments.