INTRO

Problems today range from insurmountably large and complex to completely miniscule and just barely relevant. Destructive forces created by mass technological advances have made the annihilation of enormous swaths of humanity possible in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, it appears the measures put in place in the current system have failed to account for curating the required values in the leadership of our nations that would decrease the likelihood of such destructive forces ever being used to as close to zero as possible. As humanity, should we not only have the ability, but also the moral duty to ensure that the destruction of others be eliminated to the highest degree possible? Should we not be dedicating an enormous amount of effort into trying to figure out exactly how it could be that we could cease the destruction of our fellow man? Rather, new generations are more interested in acquiring “Likes” on Facebook and hearts on Instagram while getting retweeted within their respective echo chambers on Twitter, feigning progress when in reality, a huge majority of users of those respective platforms will have absolutely zero net impact on making society a more positive place and will be completely irrelevant within a few decades, perhaps except for their families and closest of friends.

Multi billion dollar businesses exist not solely for, but with great benefit from, the inability of these generations to see through exactly what is happening. The consumerism based tendencies of those that think buying the next doohicky or widget will bring them happiness is capitalized on by this strange cloud of product sellers, advertisers who strangely know not only what you want, but can also use that data sold to them for untold amounts of money from the companies that provide us our “Social Media tools” to learn about what we want perhaps even before we’ve attempted to purchase that product or anything similar online or in person. The advertisements and pay walls that are thrown in our faces as we browse the Internet are a sign that we have everything that we need to survive and arguably that we need to thrive. It is the duties of these sellers to convince society that after they buy just one more gadget, and only then, will they find true happiness and prosperity. This claim is false. Plain and simple. We can examine the research, but I will simply allow you to perform a thought experiment yourself and come to your own conclusion. What is the one thing you want the most? Just think about what that is and what you do to gain possession of it. How hard would you work to purchase it? Now, imagine you own that thing. What now? Would you not come up with another thing that you want more than the thing you have just acquired? Would this process ever stop? While it is absolutely true that I have never seen anyone frowning whilst zipping around a lake on a Jet Ski, the pursuit of acquiring things for happiness simply does not and will never sustain itself.

In order to find true happiness, we must look within. We must ask ourselves questions about how we can improve. We must ask about how we can help others improve. We must ask how we can improve our relationships, our friendships, our discipline, and our care for our surroundings and our community. We must not only ask, but we must listen to what we have to say to ourselves, and then we need to act those things out. The only true, sustainable way to adjust the course we are currently on is to make changes. Not changes as menial and insignificant as voting for a candidate that wears a different color tie or dress next round of elections, but changes such as injecting morality, honesty, kindness, maturity, respect, and expertise into our systems of leaderships. It is necessary that we, in a tangible way, raise the highest values we can hold as humans up the hierarchy of values so that corruption, greed, dishonesty, and manipulation are no longer how you rise to positions of influence. We should think about the things that are so simple that I was taught them in Pre-school and Kindergarten. We need to be kind, we need to share, we need to help others, and we need to be respectful. No longer do those values hold any value on a mass scale in today’s society and I have a plan that can fix that based off of what I believe to be one of the most impactful technological innovations at least within the last 100 years, if not the last 1,000 years. Decentralization and digital scarcity will solve problems that we have today. It may create new problems as well, but it is our duty to ensure that those problems are of much lesser magnitude than those we are currently experiencing today.

I have laid out a rough draft of a plan to extract tangible, scarce, exchangeable value from exuding positivity in society below. I would appreciate it if you could read through and help me understand where my ideas have fallen short, what you don’t agree with and why, where I can do a better job explaining, where I can add more details to something that may be vague, where I can fix a grammatical error, and any other feedback you may have. This proposal is merely that. Nothing has been implemented yet, but the technology that underlies each idea already exists. There are certainly questions of implementation and how to best go about doing something like this, and I would love to hear about your feedback on those fronts as well. Most importantly - do you agree that there are issues that need to be solved today? Can you think of a better, more robust way of doing that than centering our efforts around some of the only human universally (in the most general sense possible) values and trying to move forward as a collective in competition to be the best humans we can be in the positive sense? Thank you for reading this intro and I, again, look very much forward to starting a conversation with the group of people that will help make the world a better place for all to exist and thrive for centuries.

(Please forgive me for my poor formatting - I’m also 100% open to any better methodologies for formatting this idea that you may have for me)

1) Enumerating and Rating Positive Characteristics

I will come up with as many examples of positive behavior that I can think of.
a) I will then assign positive archetypes or characteristics to those behaviors, setting the stage for a range to be creative from the least exhibitive of certain characteristics and the most exhibitive of those characteristics.
b) From that score, I create a hierarchy of what I believe the truest characterization of characterizations is. For example, both openness and truthfulness can be though of as positive characteristics, but I would place truthfulness higher on the hierarchy. Same thing goes for physical strength versus kindness. Both are great characteristics, but I would argue that kindness is more valuable in a generally thriving society.*
c) From the hierarchical categorization from 1b), we can assign a “meta value” that would multiply any participant’s evaluation in that category to create some ideal value, which can eventually be used in trade. That ideal value store would be constantly created based off of a given user’s placement in the hierarchy of different values. From each category, you are ranked amongst everyone else in the system. Each time unit (think millisecond, second, minute, hour, etc here) that passes, you earn representative to your valuations in those categories along with that categories multiplier. That would end up being some number that is scarce in its nature and can be exchanged for goods and services.

2) Enumerating and Rating Positive Behaviors

Create extensive list of actual behaviors (as opposed to traits) and try to assign traits to each action in some approximate proportion. For example, if the action was saving an elderly woman from a burning house, the traits exhibited would be at least the following: brave, compassionate, self sacrificing. Then, we can theoretically come up with some way to enumerate the proportion of that trait that was exhibited for that action. This list would be extensive and would involve tiny positive actions (opening a door for someone) to enormous actions (such as donating some of your value to save an infants life that needed heart surgery)

3) Growing the Voting Pool By Inviting Positive Public Actors

from (2), we have a list of positive things you can do. We continue this process slowly by paying attention in public to people that are exuding these positive behaviors, explain the system and the goals we are trying to achieve, explain that we want them to join because they were doing good, and provide a way for them to join. If they join, they now gain influence over the voting on different rankings of positive characteristics. There need to be mechanisms through which that power can be revoked for all that are involved, but once they’re in, they do have an equal vote as everyone else in attempting to determine a collective ranking of both the traits and the actions. By ranking both traits and actions, we can attempt to observe which traits are most valuable to the collective group, which we have also established is, at least in the initial observed sense, positive actors in society. That may not be the case ultimately for any respective individual, but that is why there need to be safeguards in place to either remove bad actors or at the very least downgrade their voting power in determining what is positive. Special care needs to be taken here though so as not to create an echo chamber, but rather to facilitate a constructive discussion about what is good.

4) Measurement of Positive Actions of Actors in Order To Determine Trait Demonstration

After some threshold of observed stability is maintained in the ordering of positive actions and traits and a larger group is established in order to continue the ensure diverse opinions, we can begin to observe behavior of the actors in the system through some process similar to vlogging. This process will be more complex than that, but considering a simple example, I could record myself picking up trash for 30 minutes in my surrounding area and could upload that to be evaluated. I will simply have to make some claim that “I just picked up trash for 30 minutes” and that will somehow have to be verified - I imagine Machine Learning could easily be used to verify rather than human observing the video. Although a human could easily watch a 30 minute video and verify that the action did indeed occur and then I would add that action to my collective actions. The traits that the system agreed upon for picking up trash along with their collective proportions could then be added to my score and then we have an actual value associated with positivity. That value could be exchanged within the system for goods or services, and would also be used as some kind of a ranking and weighting of vote power.

5) Proof of Stake - Proportional Voting Power Relative To Trait Demonstration Through Action

Now that actions and the traits that the actions exhibit have established some sort of order (which would constantly be in flux as every single actor is a different person with different culture, different belief structures, and different motivations and experiences) AND we have begun actually measuring in a real way the actions taken by actors in the system, we have created a scoreboard of some sense. Those traits that actors in the system demonstrate have a tangible record which can be used to evaluate the actor’s relative ability to demonstrate that trait. Now that that is the case, we can use that record to determine an actor’s weight in making some decision. That is not to say that that actor will have absolute voting power in decisions that require a certain trait, but rather that their voting power will be relative to the traits required for a given proposal and that if they exhibit the trait more strongly than another arbitrary actor in the system, than their particular vote will be considered more strongly by the system. This is where the Proof of Stake comes in. Those that demonstrate more strongly the desire for a positive society, as determined by the objectively positively minded (self correcting) system by nature of their behavior have a higher stake in making that society - and by transitivity - the system more positive[1].

[1]Special care needs to be taken here to explain that what this system aims to achieve is not a utopia, and there are many, many brilliant pieces of literature that explore the idea of utopia and that an equal outcome is simply something that, while perhaps possible, could not work as those that propose the idea would believe it to work. What this system aims to achieve is the highest net positivity, and it also allows us to examine the changes in that net positivity. While competition is healthy and highly encouraged, hurting another human’s well being at your own personal gain is something that I don’t think can be argued is a good result. There will always be those that are better than you at something and that is not only okay, but also necessary in order to know how to become better yourself. Without delving into any kind of metaphysical claim - simply ponder what your ideal self would look like. Would you be kinder? Would you work out more? Would you eat better? Would you be more patient? These are all questions that, in my opinion, have very simple and obvious answers. There is always room for individual improvement, and so there is always going to exist an individual that does something better than you or me. The desire to take responsibility, orient yourself towards being the ideal that you can best imagine, and helping others do the same is something that I consider to be one of the most valuable propositions imaginable.

To quote Jim Carrey: "I can tell you that the effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is" - Address to Graduating Class of Maharishi University School of Management, 2017

5a) What Voting Would Look Like and Be Used For

We can consider a proposed voting system for any kind of decision that needs to be made as follows:
As a proposer of some improvement to the system, I can include which positive traits should be weighted more highly in making votes towards this proposal. The actors of the system can also submit which traits they believe should be considered in the vote and discussion of the proposal. The proposals to which voting needs to be applied will become more apparent in later steps. Up to this point, we just have a group of positive actors determine the traits and behaviors that they believe are most positive as well as some sort of record of real examples of actors performing those behaviors. The performance of these behaviors can be thought of similar to the mining process for certain generation 1 cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, it takes ~work and energy~ to prove that you are a good actor. The concept is the same here, except that instead of paying a higher electricity bill, you are exuding more effort to make yourself and your community a more positive place to exist within. In that regard, this system would require both Proof of Stake (in a positive society) as well as Proof of Work (in order to determine voting power and provide some exchangeable, tangible value)

6) Painting the Picture of Ideal Archetypes to Perform Various Jobs in the System

Now that we have established ranking a positive traits, positive behaviors, have begun to rank ourselves in each trait according to real world acts of positivity and have established how that will effect voting weight in various decisions, we can begin to discuss what various “Careers”, “Jobs”, or “Gigs” would look like according to the traits exhibited. For example, what does a good Software Developer look like? What does a good Project Manager look like? What does a good Taxi Driver look like? What does a good Janitor look like? While it is absolutely unavoidable that machines and technology will without doubt replace some, if not a majority of, professions in today’s society, we can nevertheless discuss the traits that would be ideally exhibited by individuals who wish to perform those jobs.

I surrounded Careers, Jobs, and Gigs with quotes, because the way in which society currently functions is changing, and I believe we can make it change for the better in a way that allows individuals to pursue their passions, reach to be more creative, reach to find what drives them and reach beyond what is currently possible in a society where it is expected that you leave your house, drive perhaps an hour to some other building, perform tasks of someone else bidding, spend a majority of your day there, return home to spend a couple hours with your friends, family and loved ones and maybe doing something that you are passionate about and that could truly make a positive difference in your life and maybe the lives of those around you, and then repeat that process around 10,000 times before you hopefully have enough stored value to stop doing that and finally get back to doing things that are most important to you. I believe life is too short to continue to be complacent in a society where not only is that the expectation, but the absolute norm.

Getting back to the point here though, I want to paint a picture of how I think we can improve this system, at least in the technology space. Charles Hoskinson touches on this explanation beautifully in his explanation of the Cardano project’s vision in this video:

He mentions that Cardano aims to allow open exchange of information that is backed by peer review in order to create the most robust system possible. He also mentions what a shame it is that technological feats such as HoloLense are closed off and the research that backed them and those who researched the technology that made the project possible will likely never be made public under the guise of competition and protecting intellectual property.

While competition, as I’ve mentioned above, is absolutely necessary in a functioning society, there are some areas where I believe cooperation can leave a much larger positive impact on society. Competition and the requirement for absolute growth have led companies like Facebook and Google to try and hoard up all of the private data they can on an individual and sell it to the highest bidder for their own gain. While Google certainly also does do many positive things for community and society, and Facebook perhaps does as well, the latter has former top level employees who openly admit that they are attempting to program society in order to addict them to their respective platforms. One former exec even claims that such technologies are ripping apart the social fabric, as can be seen in this interview:

The need for continued growth of these companies as influenced by their boards of investors and the like have caused them to necessarily reach their tentacles deeper into everyone’s everyday lives. While the services are certainly valuable in some sense as we can now instantly search unimaginably large sets of data for just what we are looking for and we can keep up with friends and family who perhaps don’t live in close proximity, I believe they are doing more harm than good, and it is not out of the realm of imagination that they can be replaced by systems which have no interest in selling your data to some advertising agency that will use that (VERY ACCURATE) picture of you to attempt to trick you into believing that you need some dohicky that in reality will just put more financial strain on you and mandate that you continue participating in the rat race of going to work every week and bringing home your next paycheck.

7) Real World Application and Implications in Software and Technology

A paragraph above, I already said I was getting back to the point and again got off topic slightly. I certainly apologize for that and will continue to try to condense and organize these thoughts as I continue to think of them, but I’d also like to say that, if you’re reading this, I am more than appreciative of you taking the time to do so, as I’m very passionate about these things and think we can truly make a difference - we just need to think about how and then do it. You know the Nike slogan… So, returning to the HOW of improving this system, at least at the level of the software that we all use.

Once we create the archetypes of the Software Engineer, the Mobile Application Developer, the Backend Developer, the System Reliability Engineers, the Designers, the Program Managers, the Technical Writers, the Translators, the Historians, the Teachers, the Experience Experts, etc, we can then propose mirror systems to those currently in existence, and can continue to innovate as a collective, rather than as a discrete competitive group. Let’s consider creating a mirror of Instagram. What does Instagram do? It shares pictures and allows you to comment and heart them. It has a great user interface and performs well and scales beautifully.
Here is a playlist on YouTube that covers how to create a clone of that application: Build Instagram to Master Swift 3 and Firebase 4 & 3. - YouTube
In 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for almost $1,000,000,000. (Facebook’s $1 Billion Instagram Purchase: Was it Worth it? | TIME.com) Now granted, that playlist I linked is 25 videos, and that would take a long time to go through and create. However, if each video was around 10 minutes, that gives us 250 minutes, or just a little over four hours or work. Obviously it would take longer than that to follow, so let’s give a little added estimation padding in there and so it’ll take 10 times as long as just watching the videos for an estimate of 2,500 minutes. That’s still just around 42 hours and barely longer than the standard work week. If you created this application based off of these tutorials and the application you created worked exactly the same, if not better than the Instagram application in its state that was sold to Facebook, do you think anyone would pay you almost one billion dollars for it? The answer is obviously no and therefore you must consider the questions: A) How the hell did Facebook make so much money by offering a free service (for a majority of their users) and B) Why was Instagram worth so much money to them? The answer to A) is that they sell your data to advertisers and the answer to B) is that they wanted more data (images contain obviously more amounts of data than plain text and now machines can “see” what is in those images to better tailer what is targeted to you in terms of advertising) This is a gross oversimplification of that transaction, but they certainly didn’t buy Instagram for their mobile application alone. My argument is that rather than some centralized company sucking up hundreds of millions of dollars based on the usage of their applications, I believe those responsible for creating such brilliant technology should be compensated based off of their contributions to those projects. From the above layers, we can imagine the following proposals:

a) We want to create an application that scales to any sized user base
b) We want it to have a beautiful UI with feature x, y and z
c) We want it to be as efficient as possible and use as little data and as little battery as possible

From those proposals, you would solicit the work of a group of designers, system architects, mobile and web engineers, etc etc and have them submit work for review, very similar to the way software is created today. Only the kicker is that you don’t have to rely on employees, but rather those interested in creating that system and that have the time and ability to do so. They can submit code that must be up to standards (with some criteria that have been previously established by vote of the system) and that code must go through review, just as code does today. There will also be some impact measurement rating system that will determine exactly how often the work you’ve submitted is used by the system and you will be compensated for (with the value generated by the system simply through usage of the components of the system). The question then arrises as to how the value with which you are compensated is generated and how it is exchanged around the system. We have already established how value can be “mined” from the system by exuding the voted upon positive actions. As you use an application built upon the foundations of the system, you’re value store will be depleted according to some criteria that again, would be established by the votes of the system. For example, maybe using the Insta clone will deplete your value store by some unit per time and using a YouTube clone will deplete is by a little more than that, since you are accessing data that is larger in scale (long form video vs short form video / photo) but again, the way that usage would be charged would be a flow rather than some discrete payment, and you can liken this to using a battery to power a flashlight. When your battery runs out, you would replace it and if your value store would run out, you would simply perform more actions that would benefit others to replenish your store of value to continue using whatever thing you were using. This forms a perpetual chain of need to create value as well as the ability to replenish that value. The ideal scenario is that each contribution’s weight per unit is somehow determined by an agreed upon vote and that the contributor is compensated so long as what they are contributing to provides value for some other actor in the system.

8) Where Will All of this Infrastructure Live and Who Will Own and Run It?

That’s a great question and one that I would be silly to try and propose an answer for. If the above layers were implemented properly, top talent from all over the world could participate in the system to make these things work at scale.

I do know of at least one project that aims to monetize and compensate the sharing of computing resources, and that system is called the Golem Network and can be found here: Golem. I don’t claim to have a solution to these immensely difficult problems of computer science, but I believe that if this system were in place, it would motivate those that do have the solutions to commit their talents to solving these problems in an open, transparent, and beneficial way.

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Application and Implications in Existing Structure

1. Implications on Gig Economy / [INSERT THING HERE] Sharing Businesses

Business that surround practices such as Ride Sharing, Home Sharing, Car Sharing and Food Delivery (among anything else you can think about sharing) would no longer be necessary in a centralized sense. There is no reason for Company U to benefit greatly while the people that drive Company U’s customers barely scrape by. The tasks required in a ride sharing application are the following:

• Ensure safety of all passengers
• Ensure background checks of drivers
• Coordinator pick up and drop off of all passengers in a timely and orderly manner
• Address customer complaints and at least attempt to ensure customers maximum satisfaction
• Facilitate payments from customers to drivers

There are obviously more than that, but I state that the above are a reasonable summary of the responsibilities of such a ride sharing company. There is not one of those tasks that can not be done in a more efficient manner by a large, decentralized, positively motivated group of talent in a better one than a single collective of people that call themselves Company U. Not to mention, as automated driving becomes more relevant, who does some centralized company need to be in control of that? So long as the duties described above are still maintained by responsible, intelligent, cooperative actors, why does some CEO need to get paid a ton of money? My thinking is that they don’t. Not only are they not necessary, but I believe they also prevent further progress and innovation from being made by essentially limiting the pool from which the innovation may come.

1. Rewarding Responsibility and Positive Motivations Will Provide For New Outlook on Ownership of Goods

Revisiting the idea of the gig economy and how different structures from today could exist under this system, I’ve thought about how you could go about purchasing something like a house, or a car. A couple of questions arise from that question:

1. Why do we need to individually purchase houses and cars, and similar goods?

2. Could some hybrid of the sharing economy and the current status quo exist where perhaps as a community, you own (through good behavior and positive track record of responsible usage) a portion of some good and can figure out how to share what are typically considered large investments? This idea can have an entire article on its own, but I just wanted to note down some implications to perhaps spur some idea inspiration to think about things outside the box. I am in no way claiming that that would be an improvement necessarily, but I do think different ideas such as that one are worth exploring.

3. Implications on Media Distribution

Currently, piracy of digital media is an enormous issue that movie studios and the government are trying and failing to contain. With the advent of BitTorrent sharing protocol and the abundance of availability of the Internet, it simply seems impossible to “cut the head off the dragon”, so to speak. In fact, one of the logos for The Pirate Bay is the multi headed hydra (pirate bay hydra - Google Search) insinuating that it cannot be killed, and that attempts to do so simply result in the popularity of the site growing. With the above mentioned system, we can imagine an age where sharing digital content is not only encouraged, but is rewarded, as there could be a hypothetical distribution of content that not only makes content more available to larger number of potential customers, but also rewards (proportionally, in relatively small amounts) the sharing of content. After all, any advertising is good advertising, and if these things (BitTorrent) are going to happen anyway, why not attempt to make things a little bit more fair for the creators. Sure, the argument can be made that they are multi million dollar corporations and your act of not buying their content won’t hurt anyone, and while that may be true in isolation, it doesn’t work at scale.

1. Further Implications

I’m going to end the post now, but I would just like to leave a few breadcrumbs that will lead into future posts that also become possible should this system be created:

Trustworthiness and Openness in Government; Self Moderating, Self Improving Academic Systems to Curate the Best of a Vast Array of Lectures (similar to Jordan Peterson’s idea for online university: Jordan Peterson | Creating an Online University - YouTube); Permanent Record of Decisions Made in Society Cemented in a Technological Way Documenting What Went Right and What Didn’t Work; many, many more that I look forward to hearing about and discussing with anyone interested.

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In Summary:

I truly appreciate you taking the time to read through this post. I realize it is very long and I am going to work a ton on condensing things down, organizing these steps and ideas in a more consistent fashion, and will begin creating applications that go along with each layer soon. Everything will be open source and I am going to document as much as I can, and I look forward to hearing and responding to any and all feedback. I realize this idea is completely out of the box, but I think we’re living in one of the most potential rich times in human society. Unfortunately, the illusion of the rat race inhibits a majority of us (as far as I can tell) from pursuing that potential. A system that would free us form the illusion of such a rat race while also empowering us all to work together to form a more cohesive effort to improve not only ourselves, but our communities should be a welcome idea in my opinion and I truly look forward to discussing the possibility with you and making this idea into a reality.

PS: I'm new to Steemit, so here is my customary introduction!! Looking forward to continuing the conversation with you all and can't wait for a wonderful and beautiful 2018!

*: Not necessarily in all societies. Just in one that I would posit could be ideal and somewhat similar to our current implementation of society.)