Advancing Autonomous Entities; Exploring Recursive Task-based Organizations

[akuznets0v]

First, a bit of background

Hello! My name is Andrew and I’m a recent computer science grad. I’ve been working in the field of crowdsourcing for a while now, and I believe there’s a very powerful revolution for labor organization lying inside of blockchain. I’m really interested in the blockchain space and have been spending this summer travelling and attending various different blockchain conferences and hackathons in both North America and Europe. This fall, I’ll be a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon exploring human-machine hybrid systems.

Really excited to see the cool work that everyone is doing here, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me or Adeel. We’re always glad to help.

Main Idea:

Smart contracts not only enable us to prototype organizational structure, but also prototype algorithms that can generate organizational structures. Since a smart contract can handle both recruitment and receive funds, it is possible to generate financially sustainable smart contracts.

This means, for the first time, we have the technology to prototype technology-based organisms, whose movement is algorithmically recruited human labor and lifeblood is (cryptocurrency) capital. In particular, a cryptocurrency-based organizm lives on the same borderless wavelength as the online labor it recruits, a critical piece of overhead that slows traditional crowdsourcing workflows. Whether you're looking to make your company into a DAO, or build a novel organizational structure such as a dynamic self regulating charity, this is an extremely exciting development. However, there are some critical problems to figure out along the way.

Problem

Complex crowdsourcing is hard. Ideally, we could break down any complex revenue generating task that our organism wishes to embark on into small micro-tasks. Ironically, generating workflows of tasks is a task in and of itself. In fact, the academic collective intelligence community has realized that for anything interesting, No Workflow Can Ever Be Enough [1] - there must be a new paradigm developed. This presents a problem for our blockchain-based organism, one that we’ll need to solve if we want it to solve non trivial complex tasks by itself to be self-sustaining.

The way forward

Initial Stage:

Brainstorm several solutions to implementing task subcontracting on the blockchain. The current leading thought is a combination of a recursive token that vests as each subcontract is verified as complete and ready to be merged. However, other solutions may present themselves. We'll need to think about both task decomposition and integration.

Prototype Stage:

We implement our idea in pure solidity, and test the basic concepts. This stage culminates in a pure solidity proof of concept.

Integration Stage:

Taking our solidity code, and integrating it into a current DAO platform such as Aragon. This stage culminates in a small proof of concept.

Experiment Stage:

Deploy our solution with mini-user study and analyze the performance and faults of our solution. This stage culminates in a blogpost.

[1] http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2018/workflows/workflows-cscw2017.pdf

[sohkai]

Hey @akuznets0v—great to see you here after DappCon!

I think your goals might be also similar to #16's, in having an autonomous organization create, assign, and verify tasks :). It might be useful to collaborate with @johngrantuk to see if you two might be able to help or combine efforts. In particular, his projects seems like a useful "input" to the question of "what to subcontract".

[YalorMewn]

Hey @akuznets0v you're submission has been approved, and your mentors are @Smokyish from @Blockternship/team-aragon would you like to start a fresh repo or fork an existing one in ?

[sohkai]

@akuznets0v I'll be helping @Smokyish out as well, on the dev side :). It'd be great to see you make a subcontracting Aragon app, integrating with our existing Token Manager app to manage the vesting (we already have basic vesting included in the Token Manager).

Aragon.chat/channel/dev-help will be the best place to reach us for any questions!

[Smokyish]

@akuznets0v It looks like you haven't replied to the question that @YalorMewn posed, what to do regarding the repository? Are you working on this somewhere or planning to work on it?

[akuznets0v]

@Smokyish We're still currently in the first stage, so there isn't code to push yet. Currently, we have some markdown files. I'll make a repository in the original org, and fork it in.