Towards Symbiocracy

TL;DR

The broader project's goal is to enable natural entities to autonomously engage with their surroundings communities, supported by AI and blockchain technology. The Rio Sagrado AI-vatar, an AI/remote sensing infused ecological guardian within Brazil's Atlantic forest, embodies this approach. We seek funds to bring such AI-vatar on chain.

Context

From the 2022 "Articulating Symbiocracy" research proposal:

"Symbiocracy is a concept aiming to create habitable multispecies landscapes, (re)imagining the coordination of human governance with sovereignty exercised by an intimate, organismal life-togetherness across and among different species, symbiotically relating to each other and to the environment they share."

(DALL-E creation)

Since then we at Sympoiesis have been hard at work researching and prototyping interfaces that would make it possible for the symbiocracy concept to be materialized. Emerging technologies, like AI and remote sensing have been useful tools in that direction, yielding proofs of concept like the Rio Sagrado ("Sacred River") AI-vatar

Rio Sagrado AI-vatar

The Rio Sagrado AI-vatar is a hybrid AI and physical representation designed to voice and protect the interests of the Rio Sagrado, at the heart of the largest continuum of Atlantic forest in the world (Morrestes, PR, Brazil). It thus serves as a guardian by integrating scientific data with cultural history, highlighting the river's ecological and cultural significance.

(Rio Sagrado AI-vatar's physical sculpture beside its creator, Genadir. Picture taken at the "Salto do Sagrado" Waterfall Visiting Center)

(Rio Sagrado AI-vatar's alpha chat based LLM interface, trained with 20+ scientific papers on the river's watershed)

(Rio Sagrado AI-vatar's Metaverse Experience, developed to illustrate the concept of an AI avatar for the river.)

As an instance of the broader SymbioTotem concept, the Rio Sagrado AI-vatar is composed of a physical sculpture by a native artisan emphasizing local wildlife, and a voice-based LLM interface we are developing for human interaction, alongside dedicated water sensors to monitor the river's environmental conditions.

Most importantly, The Rio Sagrado AI-vatar is becoming a key piece in the community movement seeking the recognition of Rio Sagrado as a living entity worthy of legal and civic rights. This pioneering move aims to secure environmental protections using a technologically-enhanced implementation of the Rights of Nature legal framework, recognizing the river as a stakeholder within human-centric institutions. Such status would allow the river to stand in opposition to a railroad development project that threatens the entire bioregion and its unmatched biodiversity. As a legal person, the river may be able to influence environmental policy and actions affecting its ecosystem, via their AI-vatar, thereby reinforcing its ecological and cultural significance through legal and communicative capacities.

The Quantum Leap

With the beta deployment of the Rio Sagrado AI-vatar/SymbioTotem planned for Q2 2024, we started to imagine how this effort could be integrated with identification processes that would grant the AI-vatar a kind of "community perceived" personhood, enabling it to "enter into contracts" with the community (both local and global). After all, the proceedings for the river's official legal recognition as an entity of rights will take time. And this is where blockchain technologies can make a difference.

Objective

In a nutshell, we want to develop a protocol for enabling on chain AI-vatars/SymbioTotems to perform autonomous information request<>action<>assessment event cycles on land, (or “autonomous action-inquiry”) as representations of watersheds, forests, beaches etc (now referred to as bioziones). The action inquiry will be performed by verified on-chain observers (in exchange for crypto compensation), enabling the latter to “evidence” itself and its goals throughout time, creating a persistent identity.

This document outlines a more detailed sketch for how this could work at the protocol level. But in essence a rough route (taking the Rio Sagrado as a prototype) would involve:

1. Create Ethereum Wallet for the AI-vatar: Set up a wallet specifically for the Rio Sagrado AI-vatar, using Account Abstraction for enhanced capabilities.
2. Register an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) Domain: Acquire an ENS name (e.g., riosagrado.eth) to simplify the wallet address for public recognition and interaction purposes.
3. Implement Smart Contract for AI-vatar Interaction: Develop smart contracts that allows the AI-vatar to process input from the sensor network and make requests (e.g., clean-up operations).
4. Onboard verified observes: Create wallets and mechanisms for locals to become verified observers of the AI-vatar, allowing them to take actions (and get compensated) when requests are made.
5. Run focused experiments to get feedback on the mechanism and the community reaction.

The idea is that the proccedings from this grant could fund the work hours to set up the above, as well as seed fund the Rio Sagrado's wallet for initial interactions with the community. These experimentations will be critial for a near-future design and implementation of a dedicated token system (the SymbioToken) for identity verification, action compensation, and governance process participation.

Netweaving

The Rio Sagrado AI-vatar as well as the Symbiocracy concept are intertwined with the emerging ReRe (Regenerative Resources) web3 cultural regenerative protocol, materialized via the creation of a Common Pool of Shareable Resources (CPoRS) for the Rio Sagrado AI-vatar, which could be used towards the catalyzing of the aforementioned self-inference event cycle.