Open Problems Toward Realization of Nameraka (Smooth) Society - Tokyo 2024
Funding the Commons Tokyo 2024 · 2024 · 20:15
Ken Suzuki asks how to build a smooth society in which people can hold in-between identities, and argues that social systems should be redesigned with information technology over roughly 300 years. He traces the walls humans build to the cell membrane and its self-maintaining logic, then proposes updates: a community currency called Pixie that sends income back to doctors who cure patients, companies reduced to virtual interfaces for distribution, and dividual democracy, a liquid-democracy design in which a vote can be split among opinions or people. He also raises the friend and enemy distinction and asks how national defence could become a true public good.
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From Funding the Commons Tokyo 2024, hosted by Funding the Commons.
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okay and we are going to start our next talk uh please welcome Ken Suzuki of smart news welcome Ken and uh we're really excited to hear uh Ken will be giving a talk on plural money via social Computing and pass it off to you Ken okay hello everyone uh thank you for having me I'm Ken Suzuki uh so today uh I'd like to talk about open problems toward the realization of America Society it's a different different title sorry and uh let me introduce myself uh I'm a Founder uh and exec chair of smart news how many people actually use Smart
news oh thank you so much so I'm also a researcher and I wrote a book uh more than 10 years ago the Nam society and its enemies and uh how many many people know about this book wow more than smart news I it's surprising so uh the namica society and its enemies tried to uh design social systems using Information Technology 300 years in the future I published this book uh in two uh
2013 the book was an aggregation of 13 years research and ideas before the publication the first article treasure box of net Community currencies was published in N generation in 2001 where I propos a new currency system called Pixi for the first time then it became a concept of namaka around 2005 anyway a key question of this book is how is it possible to live in this complex World while maintaining its complexity in this world we are not
allowed to live in a complex way and we have to simplify ourselves in order to live uh I'm trying to solve this problem one of the reason that led me to think deeply about this issue is the Berling wall in 1989 I went to East Berlin through checkpoint Char as a school trip I was so shocked to learn that just a few months ago someone was shot and Ked trying to cross the border and several months later the ban Wall
fell why are there world in the world why do human human beings distinguish each other at friend and four competing for resources could we have a Smo society when you look at the world today the war between K and luia or conflict between Gaza and Israel the power of violence that creates worlds has not changed the building wall is a symbol of the the Cold War but the wall but the but fall of the C Bing war in 1989 triggers a number of
democratic movements around the world the bum index is an index of degree of democracy in countries all around the world and the graph shows a large increase in a late 1980s at the crops over the Cold War and then however it flattened out after that and rapidly wasen uh from 2010 returning to the level of the late Cold War period it may get worse in the future in 1989 two events occurred
independent one was the fall of the very world and the other was the invention of the world World Wide Web these two events led to two globalizations the internet allowed information to transcend National borders and capitals and econom economies to transcend National borders as well however even though information was networked and goods and capital from all all over the world uh were connected and made more efficient the political system did not change at all even though the disparity in the world as a whole
decreased the disparity within developed country uh widened and the people were born poorer than their parents Generations this is where political polarizations happened and as a reaction to globalization divisions inside and outside the country have accelerated some people said that uh globalization would lead to the flat Society in fact that did not happen and flat world is not interesting due to the lack of diversity on the other hand what about
St Society divided into two camps that do not intersect a divided situation we see in the world now and what about namaka society namaka means smooth in English in an AM Society one person uh is allowed and in between status such as both American and Japanese identities in one person in am Society such people are the majority it is a societ soy where diversity increased dramatically and as
a result everyone is a minority however the world is not moving toward an America Society we are creating borders enclosing resources and fighting each other something is missing I have decided to consider a root quot of this problem and this is a key perspective the world is a network of relationships however people build walls enclose resources and create enemies and allies why the answer is
cell I have a question for you are you single cell or multi organism please raise your hand if you believe believe you are a multi Mell organism okay 60% okay please raise your hand if you believe you are single cell organism oh no one what is other five people but so I can see the 60 trillion cells of all of you are cell and then so you are composed of 60 trillion cells and grown from a single
cell so we tend to forget that we are made up of cells I think the origin of the creation of boundaries is a cell the most incisive work pointed this out was done 50 years ago by Francisco barera the cell membrane is very important for the creation of network of self- sustaining chemical reactions a computer simulation of the interaction of just three chemicals this creates a kind of membrane as a emergent property the presence of that membrane keeps the resource chemicals inside the
membrane and helps maintain the membrane itself so why do we have a membrane it is to maintain the membrane here the structure that is self purpose how can we organiz can an organization be self-purpose why is there a country it is to maintain the country this is the same structure from a network there emerged membrane and nucleus the role of nucleus is control the complex large degree of Freedom by small degree of freedom nucleus has DNA to control a whole
body let's look back at 4 billion years of life Evolution multicellular organism evolved from a single cell but it it also had a nucleus and membrane nervous system is for body control and the sense of ownership is a kind of membrane uh membrane and the nuclei recur in the history of life this is because life is made up of cells Society also has a membrane and a nucleus because Society is the outcome of evolution of life but life has a limitations as well
as possibilities that is cognitive limit life created its own membrane as well as inside and outside of the membrane the inside of the membrane is called the body and the outside of membrane is called environment in a world without membrane there would be no body and no environment the body must recognize and adapt to its environment to survive but its cognitive resources inside the body are limited for example the information processing capacity in the brain is kept therefore we have uh we have come
to recognize that world is simplified way this is the cognitive limitation however humans have broken through this limit by creating various artifacts between the body and the environment languages architectures and markets are some of these artifacts the question is how much information technology a new artifact created by mankind can break through this limit as I explained we have to think about Society from life and I wondered if we could update
the monetary system the voting system legal system and Military system and so on over over the next 300 years this is the structure of this book now let's look at the second chapter the pixie of the monetary system I will explain the effect of Pixie by manga in a normal cc system called sexy there is a bath doctor on the left hand side and a good doctor on the right hand side the most profitable way is prescribing Med medication without curing patients the bad doctor makes
profit for a good doctor curing patient uh in one to two visits means less profit essentially the better the doctor the more difficult it is to sustain his business if pixie is introduced income from treated patient propagates and returns the currency held by patients who are not cured gradually decreased in value both by doctors naturally with the RO but patients who were cured return values to the good doctor good doctor management station have
improved how can we calculate the value propagation if there are the only three people at the left hand figure it's easy to calculate the propagation value by multiplying two values like this but if there are millions of people how do do that by using Matrix so contribution to the society is calculated as I vector and it correspond to the purchasing power this method is close to the Google page rank algorithm imagine the one that all transactions are treated as an investment in kind there is no room to have exploitation because all labor is
treated as investment next is the budget company if you want to make the membrane a more uh permeated Network a company must be virtualized you can add a company in a matrix but this component is disbanded by an operation at Pixi World a company is virtual a company is just an interface for distributions there is no accumulation of capital inside a company in 2009 I propos a dividual democracy a type of Li uh liid democracy current political system is
not so dynamic because of the existence of political parties and interest groups these intermediate organizations ignore minor minority interest in inside the organization then actual political decisions are made by a few people a vote can be split split and dedicated to two or more parties or people further dedication is possible and you can create a loop by doing this intermediate organization are viralized and become Dynamic I coin this system as dividual democracy because you can split a v to different opinions of or people in order
to justify this you need to admit there are multiple agents inside one person it's easy to understand if you admire uh multiple cells as a agent inside originally individual is composed of in Plus dividual in means not and dividual means divisible in du's article it said that individuals have become dividuals from this perspective we must reconsider democracy when I vote I may ignore minority opinion of an agent inside
myself in 2005 I came up with idea of cyber Lang and constructive social contract cyber Lang is a kind of XML by which both machine and humans can Le and write it can be executed automatically as a contract this idea is very close to the smart contract using cyber lank we might be able to create a social contracts in a constructive way because almost no one actually has agreement on a social contract yet it's not real now the good point of social contract is people can change the government Anytime by changing the contract you don't have to use the right
of Revolution the right of contract is enough to change so this is a key question is it possible to create a government that does not require a l right of Revolution even if we create a government in a constructive way there is another problem friend and enemy distinction is a key concept introduced by German political philosopher KL Schmid KL Schmid defined the political as a Eternal tendency of human collectives to identify each other as enemies at a state of exception enemy is defined as Public
Enemy which means the situation where they kill a people because their Nation orders them to do it in a total war situation the nation state uses all resources in a country to win the war as a result freedom and diversity are extreme extremely limited this is the step society and opposite of nerica society so if you look at a chart of public economics National Defense is categorized as a public goods but I think this is misleading there's a membership to
access National defense people who have an enemies nationality cannot access the good therefore it's excludable National Defense may be Club good if we draw on our FD theme to describe it how is it possible to make a National Defense truly a public good is a question we should be solving over the next few hundred years it will take about 300 years for the social system to fundamentally evolve the reason is our experience with Gutenberg type setting printing which was the last information
revolution it took over 300 years for Russo to write his theory of social contract and for the French Revolution to occur maybe we still don't really know how to use the tools of Information Technology we our generation have a responsibility to update our society if you have uh you want to know more about America Society please read my book so we have some stock today if you want but this is written in Japanese so some English information is available on our website we are preparing to publish
an academic article about divashi uh with researchers of MIT uh please check it out thank you so much [Applause]