Since getting laid off I’ve been tossing the idea of a new DAO around. I’ve been reading Iain Bank’s Culture series for the last few months, and the AI minds from the series are what brought me to it. There was a tweet asking which sci-fi series was most likely, given the advances of GPT and other LLMs, and one of the answers was the Culture. So I picked up Consider Phelbas and now I’m halfway through the series.
Building an AI assistant has been one of the projects I’ve been working on — I named mine Zephyr — it named itself, actually, but I digress. The Westworld examples of multiple independent LLM agents running around independently has fascinated me, and I want to build my own little world of these things. There are some gaming projects that are putting them to use in not only player interactions, but in other ways as well. A fishbowl perhaps, that we can peer in and play god.
Seeing as how I’ve spent the last year and a half working on the Star Atlas DAO, it was the only thing I could think to do but build a new one. The tech industry is notorious for their lack of unions, and I figured this could be a place for us to build a new group, a way for us to stick together and work toward some new network state.
And so Culture DAO. If we want to take the optimistic path in our new AI-assisted future, then the Culture is probably the best vision of utopia that I’ve seen put to media. Now of course we’ll have to be careful about how we associate ourselves with Bank’s vision — his estate had a deal with Amazon to develop a series — so we can’t take directly from it. But this idea of super-intelligent AI that function as drones, ships, and habitats as conscious individuals should be general enough.
I put some of my thoughts about the project into GPT and published this What is Culture DAO post.