Research Commons: A Speculative Scientists Reality in 2050 - Ivo Be

Transcript

Very much. We're looking forward to it. >> Thank you. Good morning everyone. Um I know listening all day can be quite tiring. Um and I have a little trick for you. So, in case at some point your your brain doesn't start to understand anymore what your ears hear, what really helps is actually like rubbing your ears. Um and if you want to try it now or later for a different talk. Um but usually suddenly, you know, like it pops up and the words actually arrive to your brain again. Um because I know, you know, taking in so much information. Um Cool. Um I'm going to talk about the future today. And initially, I submitted a talk with 2050. And then while I was was preparing it, I decided, "Nah, it's too far away. We need to accelerate this

thing." So, I moved it forward to 2040. Um I'm going to take about 20 minutes. Um and actually like really tell you a story from the future. Before we begin, I want to tell you two things. Uh I spent the last decade at the intersection of culture, technology, and capital. Uh I've built things, various products. I've helped other people build things. And somewhere in the middle of that, I quite became obsessed with the question of why uh wouldn't um like why doesn't humanity stop moving towards the future meanwhile the evidence is in the lab, basically, right? Um We have the breakthroughs. We have the labs that are doing the work. We have papers that are being published. But

somewhere in between, the discovery um and um the day it changes for a person's life, um there's some something that stalls. And it's not just capital, it's not regulation, and it's not even time. It's I believe that we forgot how to dream about any of it. Um the technology arrives faster than we can imagine living in it. Uh and without those stories, we don't move. We We stand still or we walk backwards into fear. Um that obsession actually became a podcast. And it's called I attract miracles.

We sit down with scientists and founders building quote impossible technology. And we don't just talk about the how, we give them the permission to do something that they weren't allowed uh since they were small children or teenagers um reading science fiction under the covers. We allow them to speculate about the worlds their work is bridging into being. Um the second thing I want to tell you, this talk is not a presentation. Um I've prepared a live pilot so to say of the format that we're building. And I'm going to read you the speculative story uh in the voice of a scientist.

And the idea here is to kind of like describe a world in 2040. What does a scientific reality uh feel like? Um But first and quickly, I want to talk about something um to kind of like really pinpoint what's maybe missing and I call it the miracle gap. Technology now arrives faster than we can imagine living in it. That space between what we can build and what we can picture ourselves inside of, that's where almost every breakthrough gets stuck. Not in the lab, not in the funding round, in our collective imagination.

For the next 20 minutes, I want to read you that dispatch from the other side of the gap where basically the future has arrived. Uh from a 2040 where one specific miracle has already scaled. The miracle is science itself. So what follows is a dis- dispatch from the future, no prediction, no irony, um just serious imagination. A day in the scientific commons, 2040. Lena wakes up to a notification.

Not from a journal, not from a principal investigator, not from a grant committee that spent eight months reading her proposal and then lost it in a bureaucratic collapse from the Commons. Lena is a material scientist. She works if work is even the right word anymore in a research cell that has no institutional address. It has a cryptographic identity, a reputation score, and seven active collaborators. A biochemist in Nairobi, a computational chemist in Chengdu, a philosopher of science in Berlin who provides what they call ethical attestation before any experiment proceeds.

The notification tells her that her hypothesis from 6 weeks ago, the one she ran on a Tuesday afternoon because she was bored and curious, has been independently replicated twice in two different research cells on two different continents. In 2026, that process would have taken 3 years, two grant cycles, and a conference she couldn't afford to attend. In 2040, it took 41 days. The Commons is not a platform. It's not a protocol. It's more like a Commons in the ancient sense.

A shared resource governed by the people who use it with rules that emerge from practice, not from legislator. There are 12,000 active research cells globally. No affiliation required. The cost to fork a validated experiment within the Commons is zero. Resources are allocated by DAOs that run on staked scientific reputation. Not on who you know, not on where you got your PhD, not on whether your university has a partnership with a pharmaceutical company.

Lena closes the notification and makes coffee. She doesn't feel the weight of what just happened. Her colleague Marco, so she never asked if that's his real name, messaged her from the Pronesis Council. The experiment is technically valid. The council has 72 hours to flag it. Lena read that twice. She has been in the Commons long enough to know what this means. But it still catches her off guard every time.

Because the experiment is valid, she ran it cleanly. The replication confirmed it. The polymer she's been working on, has a synthetic compound that makes it dramatically easier to move molecules across the blood-brain barrier, works exactly as the model predicted. The Episteme Council saw the results and cleared them in 6 hours. The Pronesis Council saw the same results and started a 72-hour clock. She opens the flag. It's not signed by an algorithm.

It's signed by a woman named Amara, who holds the rotational patient advocate seat, Lagos chapter. It contains three questions written in plain language, not scientific language, deliberately so. Who funded the original hypothesis? And do they hold any commercial interest in drug delivery efficiency? Has any community historically subjected to non-consensual consensual neurological experimentation been informed that this line of research even exists? Can the Commons publish this result in a way that makes the dual use risk legible to a non-specialist reader?

Lena stares at the third question for a long time. Dual use? The polymer that delivers medicine to the brain more effectively, also, by the same mechanism, delivers everything else more efficiently. It doesn't know the difference. It doesn't care. It's just a very good key for a very important lock. She thinks about what the world have have what the what she would have done in 2026 before any of this existed. She would have submitted to a journal. The dual use paragraph would have been on page 11.

The reviewers would have nodded at it. Nobody would have read it. She thinks about Amara somewhere in Lagos who is not a scientist, who will never run an experiment. She holds a phronesis seat in Lagos, one node in a lattice of bioregional councils that together form the interpretive layer of the Commons. The founders of the Commons decided before they launched, not after, that the people most likely to live inside the consequences of a discovery should have a vote on whether it goes public. Phronesis asks, should it have been run at all?

While episteme asks, did it work? The Commons require both signatures. It costs the network two to three days per major experiment. Every scientist agreed to this. Lena agreed to this. She remembered the moment she signed the governance covenant thinking, yes. Obviously, of course. Who would say no to something like this? She answers Amara's three questions. It takes her most of the afternoon. The Commons will merge her result into the public knowledge graph tomorrow or the day after once the flag is resolved.

She doesn't feel the delay as a loss. Let me tell you about the stack that makes this possible because it didn't appear from nowhere. The deepest layer is identity. Every researcher in the Commons owns their contribution chain. Not their university. Not their funders. Themselves sovereign identities means that when Lena's hypothesis gets replicated, the attribution is automatic, immutable, and hers. She doesn't have to fight for credit.

The protocol enforces it. The second layer is provenance. Every claim in the comments traces its lineage. There is no orphan data. There are no fabricated citations. If you want to know where an idea came from, you can follow the graph all the way back to the moment of conception. The third layer is where funding changed. Impact certificates replaced grant applications. You don't write proposals anymore. You publish your track record. Funding follows verified outcomes, not promises.

The guarantee of retroactive funding, even for failed experiments, would allow scientists to finance their future research. And this brings me to one of the strangest and most important inventions of the 2030s. Negative knowledge has a price. The experiment that disproves the hypothesis, the result that used to be called a failure and never got published because journals don't publish failures, is now the most valuable asset on the ledger.

Because if you know what doesn't work, you don't fund what doesn't work. You don't run the same failed experiment in 15 different labs simultaneously. You don't spend 30 years going down a dead end. Negative knowledge as an asset class, it sounds like something a DeFi protocol would invent. It changed the economics of science. None of this was inevitable, and none of it was easy. The collapse, and it was a collapse, let's not romanticize it, didn't begin with a scandal.

It began with a blackout. In autumn of '28, a wave of coordinated cyber attacks rolled through national research clouds across the continent. Data centers went dark. Ransomware locked up decades of clinical data sets, lab notebooks, longitudinal studies. Ministries promised restores. Insurers invoked acts of cyber war clauses. Very little came back. For nearly a year, entire disciplines were working from screenshots and preprints.

Public trust in institutional science didn't break because scientists lied. It broke because the infrastructure everyone depended on failed in public. And nobody was accountable for it. Nobody held a funeral funeral for the old system either. They had stopped attending long before that. What came after moved fast. In 2029, what became known as the Oslo Consensus built on the groundwork of a small research collective that had been quietly mapping the problem since the mid-20s declared that nation-state governance of science was structurally broken.

Not corrupt, not malicious. Structurally broken. Too slow for the pace of discovery. Too territorial for the nature of the problems. Too captured by funding cycles to take the long view. If you were paying attention in the 20s, you already saw the prototypes. Decentralized science funds quietly backing ex vivo studies and early pilots that no traditional grant committee would have touched. By 29 2029, the first fully regulated clinical trial had been funded, run, and published entirely outside the institutional stack.

No journal embargo, no press release. Just data with full cryptographic provenance. The establishment called it an anomaly. It wasn't. By 2033, impact certificates had replaced grant applications at 14 European research institutions. By 2037, the comments had reached critical mass. 10,000 active cells, 60 countries, zero central authority. The blackout was not a catastrophe. It was a permission.

That's the story. End of the dispatch. I'm standing here right now and the Miracle Gap is still open. Um and we we created I had tracked miracles as a podcast. But it's also a foresight instrument. And an invitation to dream of the world that we will live in. Every episode we capture the implicit world of a scientist. When for example, one of our guests, Professor Dr. Adelhelm, talks about sodium ion batteries, he's just not describing chemistry.

He's making implicit claims about the future of energy transformation. Or grid governance, or who has access to cheap storage and who doesn't. Those claims are seeds. We plant them episode by episode into a knowledge graph that accumulates across seasons. The idea is this. If you interview enough scientists building enough pieces of the future and you capture not just what they say, but what they assume, the cross-domain implications they state as background facts because they're too obvious to mention, you eventually have a map of what is coming before it arrives.

And this is hopefully going to be the bridge, not just the podcast. A foresight comments. And as I said, this is literally the first episode we recorded about 2 weeks ago. Um if you scan the QR code, you can actually get to the private YouTube link, which is not published yet. Um, so I would love for some of you to actually scan that and give it a listen. And feel free to drop comments into the into the YouTube video. We're really curious to hear from you how you like it, maybe what's missing. Um, and um, maybe what excites you the most about uh, Professor Dr. Adlhoch's vision.

Um, and we're also will be recording two episodes here um, during the conference. Um, and then further further episodes uh, in the next coming weeks and we're hopefully going to release the first season um, at the beginning of June. We're currently unfunded and this is an independent project that we just started because um, we really saw that miracle gap. Um, so if there's uh, some way you want to support us, uh, please reach out. Um, and uh, here you'll find our website. Um, there's also the newsletter at the bottom that you can already subscribe to to to stay alert to the release of the first season. And otherwise you can also find us on the usual channels like

YouTube and and so on. Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much, Evo Bethke. Thank you. I will definitely be supporting you, 100% and I think we'll also do some science together because uh, the whole publish and perish and intellectual property and the bureaucracy around academia like makes me want to kill myself. So I'm very very happy that >> Please don't. >> I've got a family to feed, yeah. So um, but it's great that you're doing something around this and D Sci might not like you might not see the immediate return on investment like but it is so important for humanity that academia is restructured and I think blockchain is its biggest um, opportunity to be honest. Any questions for Evo because this is a big big topic.

>> Oh, come on. Yeah, go on. >> Yes. Thank you. >> Yeah, Evo, I liked the talk a lot as someone also that's in academia and is constantly frustrated by processes of peer review and the bureaucratic as it were. Um I I noticed that one of the acts in that was this blackout scene. So, are you of the mind that in order to really get past these current gatekeepers that there needs to be some kind of a crisis that, you know, resets things in such a manner that they're not there? Because currently we're all stuck in this collective game together where we're all kind of competing with one another as researchers to get published in the top journals, to secure secure these competitive grants, etc., that would keep us locked in rather than looking

for these alternative avenues of open access, research commons, etc. >> Mhm. Yeah, I I mean, you're perfectly describing the problem, right? And but if the previous talk, I think, was was a great pointer and there's a lot of, you know, experimentation already within the Ethereum community that I believe we can learn from, you know? And I mean, with my previous work, for example, at at BioX and at and Molecule, we also did a lot of experimentation around how do we fund science, right? And I think one fundamental issue that I saw over the last 2 years as well is the fact that everyone wants to have a positive outcome, right? And as a biotech, for example, project, you only become validated once you have a drug in the market, let's say, right?

But the entire path up until that point, basically, that is not not any proof of success, right? You can execute it as well as you want. Uh as long as you don't have a a result in the market, that's basically pointless. And that's that's exactly part of the division that I tried to to formulate here is basically to say, "Okay, how can we shape that process differently?" And then, how can we build a reputation that allows you to trust in a system where even if you fail, you will be funded. Uh and that will allow you to continue as a scientist so that failure doesn't become something that's going going your career to an end, right? But rather uh enables the entire system to be more successful.

>> Yeah, you both hit on a super interesting point and that's also the difference between like applied and basic research. Like the most interesting science is asking questions that we don't know the answer to and even the grant system, you've got to almost like know the answer before you apply for the grant, which makes no sense because then you wouldn't need the grant, right? And I've got this friend who like back files grants basically. So once he's actually done it, he then like kind of pays himself back. And I think the whole kind of like almost Greek approach to science where you ask a big question like what is objective morality? And you don't know whether it'll like help some company increase their profit margin, but that's the beauty of science and I love that you are helping to fund that.

Um any other questions, ladies and gentlemen? Is anyone else in academia here? >> Yeah, exactly. That would be interesting to know how many PhDs are in the room. We'll know the hazard. >> One more question. Thank you very much. We've got some space. >> Oh no, it was not a question. You asked how many people is in academia. So I just >> So what What do you do in academia, young sir? >> Um I'm a researcher in machine learning, artificial intelligence. >> Oh, well, well, fair enough. Kudos Kudos to that. Um if anyone by the way is an academic and you want some connections to for example the Czech Institute of Technology, I'm very happy to connect.

So again, you can you can grab me afterwards. Ivo, please one more round of applause to Ivo. That was so fantastic. Thank you so much and best of luck to you.