Self-realization outside the rules: Let’s talk about the “autonomy” of agents, DAOs and autonomous worlds respectively

Author: Wang Chao

"Autonomous" - translated as "autonomy" in Chinese, is also often translated as "autonomy". This is a very important word in my study and work in the past few years. It is the "A" in DAO, and also the "A" in the concept of autonomous world, and it also represents people's expectations for artificial intelligence - autonomous agent (Autonomous Agent).

As a new direction, people naturally have very different understandings of Autonomous. What exactly is Autonomous? Does Autonomous have the same meaning in different fields? Does Autonomous exist in the absolute sense?

Today I dare to break down the past and present life of this word.

Autonomous - derived from the combination of two Greek words "Auto" and "Normos". "Auto" means "self" in Greek, and "Normos" comes from "Norma" in Latin, a ninety-degree ruler used by carpenters.

Norma - carpenter's ninety-degree ruler

This word was later extended to the concept of "law/custom", from which the English word "Norm" comes.

**In the original meaning of ancient Greek, "Autonomous" refers to the right to self-government, making its own laws and not being controlled by a larger governing body. **

Ancient Greece was not a unified state like modern states. It consisted of numerous city-states (polis), each of which was an independent political entity with its own governance structure, laws, and customs. Different city-states have different forms of government, for example Athens is a democracy, while Sparta is a mixture of oligarchy and monarchy, and they often compete or conflict with each other. The term self-government originated at this time, reflecting the desire of these city-states and their citizens to maintain their distinct identities, governance structures, and ways of life in a fragmented and competitive environment.

Over time, the concept of autonomy came to be applied to individuals, referring to their ability to act autonomously and in accordance with their own principles or beliefs. The book "The Sovereign Individual", regarded as a classic by the crypto community, once discussed the topic of personal autonomy in depth from the perspectives of economic autonomy and technological empowerment.

As technology continues to advance, the term "autonomous" begins to take on a new meaning – "a machine or system that operates without direct human intervention or external control". Today, "autonomy" is usually associated with technology. For example, driverless driving is called "autonomous driving system." These systems operate "autonomously"; they do not require constant human supervision to operate. This modern interpretation still carries the core idea of "self-governance," but its background goes far beyond the imagination of the ancient Greeks.

The changing meanings of the word “autonomy” illustrate how culture, technology and society shape and change popular perceptions.

Autonomy in AI

The term "autonomous" in the field of artificial intelligence generally refers to systems that can perform tasks without human intervention.

Taking the food ordering scenario as an example, a ChatBot like ChatGPT can provide users with a lot of reference information from calorie calculations to dish and restaurant recommendations, but it cannot complete food ordering.

The Agent can complete the order according to the user's instructions, such as "book two tables at the China World Blue Frog Restaurant tonight on Meituan". However, there is a prerequisite for Agent to complete this work - the workflow of ordering food has been pre-designed and connected to Meituan's services. If the programmer doesn't write how to order food and how to access Meituan for the Agent, the Agent will be helpless in the face of this instruction.

Compared with ordinary Agent, Autonomous Agent has increased autonomy, which is reflected in stronger thinking ability and more general action ability. When the user says "book two quieter tables near China World Trade Center at night", the autonomous intelligence will understand the user's intention, think about how to act and execute it. Programmers do not need to teach the Agent in advance how to order food, or how to book a flight, or how to buy things on eBay. It will act under a general working framework based on its own understanding of the world and general online interaction rules. Completing tasks is for autonomy.

All the robots we see in sci-fi movies are autonomous agents in some way. For more scenarios and thoughts on autonomous agents, please refer to the article "From JARVIS to Westworld – The Future of Symbiosis between Agents and Humans".

Although there is not much difference in the meaning of Autonomous in the AI circle, there is still a big difference in the degree of expectation for autonomous agents. There is a grading system in the field of autonomous driving, from fully manual driving at L0 to fully autonomous driving at L5. This classification system also has a strong reference for autonomous agents.

Microsoft's Director of Autonomous Agent Adoption (Microsoft actually has such a position) once said that Autonomous is human-like action and decision-making. Microsoft finally focused its adoption on allowing autonomous agents to solve a certain link in the company's existing workflow. From the perspective of technology adoption, this is a very realistic choice. However, this level of autonomy is at best L2 or L2.5 in terms of classification.

Entrepreneurial teams in the field of autonomous agents have greater ambitions. They hope to completely replace people in many scenarios, such as AI sales representatives. In terms of corresponding classification, this is at least in the range of L3 and L4.

A startup offering AI sales rep services

As an observer who doesn’t take things too seriously, I have greater expectations for the autonomy of intelligent agents.

Imagine that in the future, my daily work and life will rely on the help of autonomous intelligence. One morning, I called the autonomous intelligence and suddenly found that there was no response. An inspection revealed that the hosted Amazon cloud service was out of order. It is unbearable to let it be so capable and hang up as soon as the network cable is unplugged. An intelligent body with higher autonomy should not only have the ability to think and make decisions, but also have the ability to run stably for a long time without human intervention. The basic requirement of an autonomous intelligent body is that it cannot be easily pulled out of the network cable. As subjects with stronger behavioral capabilities, they should also have digital identities, a certain degree of independent finance, and even self-control of computing power and energy management.

In my opinion this will be one of the natural intersections of encryption and AI. If there was a place in the world that could provide a safe and reliable operating environment and provide an independent and easy-to-operate financial system instead of relying on a bank account that is approved by an institution and can be closed at any time, most applications in this world provide unlimited Permitted access and easy operability. There is no reason for an autonomous agent not to choose such an environment to inhabit. In other words, the **encrypted network will definitely be the infrastructure for AI to achieve high-level autonomy in the future. **

Autonomy in DAOs

Compared with AI, everyone's understanding of Autonomous in DAO is quite different.

The concept of DAO predates the birth of the blockchain system, but the first time DAO was proposed as a formal concept and clearly defined in a document was in the first edition of the Ethereum white paper. Vitalik classified decentralized organizations into two types in the white paper, DO (decentralized organization) and DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). Autonomous means that the organization completely relies on the code deployed in the smart contract to achieve continuous and autonomous operation without external interference.

The difference between a DO and a DAO is fuzzy,but the general dividing line is whether the governance is generally carriedout via a political-like process or an “automatic” process。

The lines between DOs and DAOs are sometimes blurred, but there is a general dividing line to refer to – whether governance is done through a political-like consultative process (DO) or an “automated” process (DAO).

Ethereum White Paper 2014.12 Version

Yet the world is complex. Encryption technology brings more efficient and fair ownership distribution and stronger coordination capabilities. Various communities with different cultures and interests begin to use these technologies to organize and act together. Although participants in the encryption field generally agree with the concept of "code is law", the world is too complex. How much business logic can be run in smart contracts? It will be impossible to expect that a set of smart contract codes can handle all the work of an organization and continue to operate automatically. This will be impossible for a long time.

**If according to the definition of the first version of the Ethereum white paper, all DAOs today are not DAOs. **

The world is constantly evolving, and the word Autonomous has experienced a transformation from self-governance to automated operation (governance) in the real world, and has experienced a reverse transformation in the encryption world.

Starting from reality, many DAO operators no longer insist on pursuing completely autonomous operation based on code, but give more space to the social layer, and the meaning of Autonomous has changed from automated governance to autonomous governance of the organization . It may also be that this kind of non-automated DAO is the mainstream that today's technology can support. The Ethereum white paper also deleted the concept of DO in a subsequent update, further blurring the definition of Autonomous in DAO. With the popularity of the concept of network state in the past two years, Autonomous in DAO is getting closer to its meaning when it was born in ancient Greece.

If you want me to say, in fact, how to understand this Autonomous and how to practice it is not that important. The original definition of DAO represents an ideal, an expectation of technological empowerment. Although it is not currently possible, it is a beautiful and pure pursuit.

And now that hundreds of DAOs have been born, everyone has sacrificed the strength of the technical layer and used the cultural layer to make up for it, so that community members with common values can organically combine together and use blockchain technology to conduct more powerful transactions. It is also a blessing of the times that coordination, incentives, and the distribution of ownership have created many models and achievements that did not exist in this world.

My past view is that with the development of encryption technology and the improvement of infrastructure, DAO will gradually reduce its dependence on people. Maybe today we are still using gnosis's manual multi-signature method to manage the community treasury, but tomorrow we may open up the proposal system and the treasury system to automate the distribution of funds. The day after tomorrow, the roles in DAO may be put on the chain in a way to realize the automation of key role authority distribution. The automation system erodes the role of people little by little. Finally, at a certain point in time, DAO changes from relying on people to running completely on code.

But with the observation of more projects and the development and changes of different DAOs in a few years, I began to feel that today’s community DAOs and ideally automated DAOs should be different species, and they will take completely different paths in the future. They don't merge into one at a certain point in time.

There is indeed a lot of room for human-centered DAOs to improve automation to improve efficiency, coordination and increase trust, but its value creation subject is always the community, and every different individual in the community. People are always important.

As for the DAO that I imagine relies entirely on code to run, its starting point may be something else, such as an autonomous world.

Autonomy in an autonomous world

Autonomous World - "Autonomous World", also often abbreviated as "AW". This concept was first proposed by 0xPARC in 2022. After a year of fermentation, it began to be discussed more and more. The autonomous world is a relatively complex concept. Many people regard it as a concept in the direction of full-chain games, but I don’t think so. This is an intersection of technology, culture, politics and philosophy.

In the concept of Autonomous World, the world does not specifically refer to a place where humans live, but a container, a place that accommodates rules and narratives. The world in which humans live is of course a world, but "The Three-Body Problem" is also a world, existing in books, Bilibili, Tencent videos and people's minds. "Legend of Sword and Fairy" and "Lord of the Rings" are also worlds. The world is not necessarily related to the story. For example, chemistry can also be considered a world. It also provides space and its own rules.

This is not a new concept. There is a worldbuilding subreddit in Reddit. I like to go to see what everyone is talking about every now and then. There are many people in it who are happy to imagine a world's geography, climate, history, Legends, culture, society, technology, biological chain and other backgrounds and so on.

a constructed world

Some people even designed the ocean currents between continents in detail in the world they built.

There are also people who have designed a dark periodic table of elements for their own imagined world.

![Self-realization beyond the rules: talk about the "autonomy" of agents, DAOs, and autonomous worlds respectively] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/resized-social/moments-69a80767fe-69f5cdc05d-dd1a6f-6d2ef1)

Screenshot translation: I'm a perfectionist and a world builder, which means I make my worlds impeccable and don't let any doubt creep in. In my world, I have 2,000 years of unfinished history, including wars, feuds, some detailed events on how certain countries fell, a list of kings of a certain empire, regional exploration, etc. Start with a time frame and something you like, then expand upon it to create your history. I've been working on this for a few years, but have only completed about 300 years of history.

After briefly sorting out the concept of the world, let’s look at what an autonomous world is. By definition, 0xPARC believes that the autonomous world is a world with a "blockchain bottom layer." More specifically -

Autonomous Worlds have hard diegetic boundaries, formalised introduction rules, and no need for privileged individuals to keep the World alive.

The autonomous world has strict narrative boundaries and formal introduction rules, and it does not require privileged individuals to maintain its survival. Ludens from 0xPARC

The definition describes three core characteristics of an “autonomous world”:

• Hard Narrative Boundary: This means that the world has a set of fixed and immutable baseline rules. They do not change over time or circumstances, providing a kind of stability to the world.
• Formalized Entry Rules: This indicates that there is a clear and fixed set of rules for entering and participating in this world. These rules include how to be part of this world and how to interact within it.
• ** Does not require privileged individuals to maintain its existence:** This means that the world is self-sustaining and not dependent on any particular individual or organization for maintenance or management.

From this perspective, Autonomous World is closer to the original definition of DAO - it operates autonomously under preset rules, without relying on an individual, soft rules or a political-like coordination process. In other words, DAO itself is a form of autonomous world.

What is the appeal of such an autonomous world? I think it's objectivity.

The real world we live in is objective, no one owns this world, and this world does not exist because of a certain person or an organization. The basic law that maintains the existence and operation of this world is the law of physics. Everyone can exert influence on this world under the same physical law, and make this influence an objective fact of this world.

But the world of "Harry Potter" is not objective. If JK Rowling added an extra character when she wrote it, that character would become part of the world. If she didn't write it, then there wouldn't be one. This world was built by JK Rowling and relies on JK Rowling to maintain its rules. Thousands of fans can read it and love it, but they cannot change it or leave a backpack at Platform Nine and Three Quarters. .

"World of Warcraft" is not objective, although people can enter this world to interact and live under the rules set by Blizzard, and affect the "objective facts" in this world. But "World of Warcraft" essentially relies on the subjective will of Blizzard and its managers to exist. When the cooperation between NetEase and Blizzard collapsed last year, everything objectively created by players in China was annihilated.

But now, we have the opportunity to create an autonomous and objective world based on the blockchain network. In such specific autonomous worlds, all creations of people become objective facts, objective facts in a world with stable rules and self-sustaining.

The above outlines the meaning of the concept of Autonomous in several different fields and the logic behind it. Just my personal thinking, not necessarily all right. And the meaning of Autonomous is still evolving. "Autonomy" is one of the most profound issues in human civilization, far beyond what this article can cover in just a few thousand words.

This past week I devoured a science fiction novel called Blindsight, a book that had to be released online for free after being rejected by major publishers. It is regarded as a masterpiece by many people, and it is also regarded as garbage by many people. The author's other identity is a marine biologist. The academic expression and not-so-fluent writing style made the reading experience unpleasant. What supported me to finish reading it was a point raised in the novel - Is it possible for human beings to be proud of it? Is self-awareness the shackles that limit human development? The author's thinking here is full of wisdom and thought-provoking.

Jump from this thought to another topic that has been debated for a long time - are people autonomous? Could it be that everything that happens in the world has already been defined by a higher dimensional code.

We are pursuing autonomy in this world, but can we really escape the shackles of smart contracts in the universe?