Algorithms as Institutions?

The shift of trust in the history of time

Many years ago I had a fairly simple idea.

It consumed me quickly enough; I thought about it night and day but alas time was not on my side. Now that I have more control over personal time, I have been happily chipping away at this idea.

As I refine, deconstruct, reconstruct, and reimagine it, I continue to see its versatility and possibilities. More fundamentally it got me thinking about human organisation and asking how, historically, have humans organised themselves, how has this evolved, and what is to come?

This is something I think about often.

Brief History Of Me

Historically, society has seen hunter-gatherer cultures, agrarian and agricultural communities, many wars, and the formation of complex societies and the nation state which saw the development of legal frameworks, financial systems, and public services. Nestled amongst that are different belief systems stemming from religion, spirituality, astrology, and the like.

Then there's me. I grew up at a time where nation states and institutions were already the inescapable dominant paradigm. I would go so far to say I have sashayed/stumbled (depending on who you ask) from institution to institution my entire life - from birth at a hospital, then formal education at various institutions, to work at a handful of large hierarchical organisations. I am not religious, so this takes away the complexities of a belief system cultivated by another type of institution, but then there's family and marriage as an organisation, which can also be heavily influenced by religion.

Do I Love Institutions?

I have known institutions all my life. It has guaranteed familiarity, security, justice, welfare, and day to day conveniences. It is the way of human organisation that I am most adept at, and if I were to analyse why institutions seem so second-nature to me, it boils down to two things: trust and risk.

Trust is risk mitigation. I trust my bank to safeguard my assets, more so than I would trust a person. I trust that public infrastructure will be well-maintained, because I pay my taxes. I trust that my sidewalk will be clean in the morning, because I pay my house service charges. These services are the responsibility of institutions, and if not fulfilled, they will be held liable. That is risk mitigation.

But modern information technology and larger access to information has broken down so many previous barriers. Individuals, groups, and societies now interact in transformative ways. Large institutions have failed. At the same time, accountability, transparency, and legitimacy can be ascribed to individuals directly, without an intermediary, in ways not possible before. While elites and institutions were previously seen as guardians of knowledge, culture, and governance, and responsible for leading society where mass participation was harder because of constraints of communication, this is not the world we live in today.

Pourteaux puts forth this unique proposition: that how we think about institutions is the most important political divide of our time, far superseding the debate of liberty / authoritarianism or left / right.

The amalgamation of all of the above - the project I am working on, Pourteaux's article, and my wild imagination - has led me to gravitate towards thinking about human organisation without an intermediary or elite, and how trust will look in the future. And it leads to this question: if not institutions and elites, to whom or what do I then trust?

[To be clear: The above is not an indictment of current elites or modes of government/institutions, but rather to understand why and what form human organisation takes today, what purposes it serves, and how else humans can organise given that society today is vastly different from 50 years ago.]

Algorithms as Institutions?

A lot has been written about modern technologies and a trustless society. I don't really believe society can be 'trustless', and my view is that trust in society will always exist. Over time, the need for trust has not quite changed, but the way we trust have.

It is where we place our trust in the future that is the point of investigation, and whether we will see a shift of trust away from institutions, with the supported of decentralised technologies like the blockchain. [I like Vitalik Buterin's take on decentralisation and the blockchain: that they are politically decentralised (no one government or authority controls it), architecturally decentralised (no infrastructural central point of failure), but there is logical centralisation (there is one end state, which is commonly agreed upon)]

This may sound more radical than it actually is - and it's definitely not a case for anti-institutionalism. Rather, it's the view that algorithms and smart contracts have immense potential to facilitate mass participation and foster collaborative ecosystems in unprecedented ways. If this happens, will we see a continuation in the profound shift in trust that has historically occurred in societies, one from interpersonal (hunter-gatherer), to elites (aristocracies and monarchies) to institutions (modern nation states) to the masses (the network society)? In other words, will we witness the extension of trust to society writ-large, through the help of decentralised technologies, with transparent governance? In this scenario, trust would also be extended to the smart contracts and algorithms to implement transactions without the involvement of third parties. Institutions may well exist then, but in a different form from the ones we are used today.

And so these thoughts originate from the project that I am working on. In due time I hope to be able to talk about it more openly. The developments in decentralised technologies are splendidly intriguing and captivating. I imagine this must be how it felt like in the 1990s during the internet boom, where transformative technologies were at people's disposal, facilitating exploration and innovation.

Anyway, I am curious to know what you think about the future of trust and human organisation.