A decentralised, AI-proof, federated trust standard for humans, not robots.
Caution
This is a working draft under active development.
The internet is dead.
A dramatic thesis statement, we know. But it's true. The internet, a once-glorious bastion of human engagement has, in fact, died. The exact time this happened is up for debate, but we think somewhere around 2016 seems a reasonable estimation. It's around that time that Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools became quite consistently good at undetectably emulating human communication, and so, naturally, the internet rapidly became saturated with non-human users. Indeed, the status quo today (in January 2025, as we write) is that a good proportion of social media posts, and comments, and direct messages originate from AI systems.
This concerning situation now requires a response.
The question, dear reader, is this: what can't an AI do? This question has slightly more nuance than may, at first, be apparent. You see we're not asking "what can't AI do yet?" We're asking what can't AI do ever.
We propose that a possible answer is this: meet humans in person.
AI systems may be able to convincingly emulate human communication. They may even be able to convincingly emulate human form online. However, they are not (and will not in short order be) able to emulate human form in person.
What follows, herein, is a proposal for two codependent technologies:
- An accessible, user-facing tool for viewing, managing, and growing one's own Network of Trust (NoT), and for signing others' public keys in person to help them grow theirs.
- An append-only decentrilised blockchain (small 'b'), to publicly store individuals' NoTs in order to facilitate verification thereof.
Note: we know 'blockchain' can be a scary and confusing word, associated with many unfriendly internet nasties (We're looking at you NFTs). But rest assured, in this case, 'blockchain' is meant in the purely-technical sense. No cryptocurrencies are involved in this project.
Contributions will always be welcome, thus is the open spirit of academia. This project is in need of skills from all disciplines, so please feel free to contribute any ideas you have. However, there's one caveat: please refrain from using AI tools to generate your contributions.
Contribution guidelines for this project
Cypherpunks Assemble!