Creating a Digital Ecology That Works
Released on 03/11/2014
The natural law is the idea
that the laws of our society should mirror human nature.
A lot of our institutions, our governments, our markets
and things are based on this notion of natural law
that came up in the 1700s,
and the natural law they're referring to is that humans
are basically competing all the time and fighting.
But that's not who I am,
and I don't think that's who you are, either.
My inspiration is a whole series of situations
that didn't work very well,
schools that didn't work very well,
organizations that didn't work very will,
and disappointment with government in general.
And I just think there has to be a better way.
It was clear that the digital ecology, the digital society
wasn't turning out the way people hoped.
You should have the same rights and obligations
in your digital self as you have in your physical self.
You should control information about you,
who gets it and what they do with it.
You shouldn't stand naked in the digital spotlight
in order to be able to get something done.
So I began thinking about this and realized
that the problem was that the basic model
of what is a human was wrong.
There are anthropologists that are studying
early human society and what they find
doesn't match with the natural law of the 1700s.
Now we know that early humans
were actually very egalitarian.
Human nature is to do trading and interaction
with trusted others.
We should make the social networks that we're building
mirror the way humans like to operate
and how we operate best.
And it's not open competition.
It's through trusted networks.
If you can trust people and you know
that this is a safe relationship,
because it has all these other relationships,
turns out to be more optimal.
So the core thing of the trust network
is that you own your data, it's private,
and you only share it
when you're going to get something back for it.
At our NGO, IDcubed, we've actually built
the software and built the legal contracts to do this.
Currently, the only people that have these trust networks
are the big guys, the banks, the hospitals,
things like that, and what we're doing
is making them available to the little guy.
What that's going to do is it means
the big guys are not going to have as much power
as they used to have.
So what I'm trying to do is think about
how can we make a new digital society
that really works for humans, you know,
that's fair, that's safe, that's efficient,
that's scaled, that's inclusive.
So how feasible is it in time scale?
The answer is it could happen very quickly.
You have the old banks, the old institutions,
tottering along based on their ownership of the data,
and when you get a competitor
that gives people back their data
but is just as efficient, it could happen almost overnight.
(electronic music)
Starring: Alex "Sandy" Pentland
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