The final chapter
We’ve come to the end of the Human Organization 4.0 series and I hope I’ve at least encouraged you to think deeper about DAOs and their potential to change the rate of human progress. DAOs have immense opportunities and we have only begun to understand how to utilize them effectively. I believe DAOs have the potential to revolutionize the world over the next half century and increase the ability of the world’s population to have equitable opportunity to leverage its talents. Let’s recap the previous seven entries in this series.
Part 1 - There have been three major eras in how humans organize with each transition marking an increase in the population that can enact large change and participate in that change. We are about to enter the fourth era, one driven by the advancements of DAOs.
Part 2 - Human organization era transitions have three important ingredients: (1) the ability to distribute risks among many different parties, (2) the ability to create incentive structures to align activities, (3) the technology available for information flow. DAOs, and the technology that power them, have these ingredients.
Part 3 - DAOs are the empowerment of individuals to contribute their talents regardless of their geographical location, their political power or their wealth. For the first time in history, the entire world population has the opportunity to initiate and/or participate in large change. DAOs also provide a more effective mechanism (albeit far from perfect today) for group decision-making, one in which meritocracy leads to more influence in the decision-making process.
Part 4 - DAOs remove gatekeepers that prevent equitable access to opportunity. DAOs provide an equitable framework that will be a much more efficient way to organize humans, foster ideas and reward persons based on contribution, merits and risk-tolerance
Part 5 - Liquid democracy (or dynamic representation) is the concept that voters (of all types) should be able to select their representatives based on specific topics and change that representative election at any moment. Liquid democracy, which was impractical from a technological sense until blockchain made it possible, is a far superior method of selecting leadership and aligning leadership to the will of the voters. DAOs can utilize liquid democracy to ensure better decision making processes and outcomes.
Part 6 - Tokenization allows for more efficient transfer of information (whether that’s preference of presidential candidate, interest in a cat video or demonstration of your coworker’s superior skills) and does so in a secure, cheap and programmable way that is not possible without blockchain.
Part 7 - There are many valid criticisms regarding DAOs, however I believe most of these criticisms will be resolved as human experience and expectation evolve to support the new capabilities presented by DAOs.
Thanks for taking the time to read this series. I’m interested in keeping this conversation going. Hit me up on Twitter @kylelangham. Happy trails, Kyle.
By Kyle Langham, Director of Data & Analytics @ DFINITY Foundation