Web3 Has an Identity Crisis on its Hands

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Any­one who has inter­act­ed with Chat­G­PT has expe­ri­enced this unset­tling ques­tion: “Is this thing human or not?” 

That ques­tion is, in essence, the long-await­ed fail­ure of the Tur­ing Test.

We’ve been unwit­ting­ly using the Tur­ing Test as a proxy for online iden­ti­ty for decades now.  Over time, it would become clear whether we were inter­act­ing online with a per­son or a machine. 

With the advent of Chat­G­PT and gen­er­a­tive AI, how­ev­er, we can no longer rely on the Tur­ing Test as a proxy for “I’m human.” And dig­i­tal per­son­hood ulti­mate­ly requires some way of know­ing whether or not we are deal­ing with a real person. 

Web3’s vision of dig­i­tal per­son­hood has relied on both decen­tral­iza­tion and the Tur­ing Test to be able to say, “I’m human and I con­trol these dig­i­tal assets.” When Chat­G­PT broke the Tur­ing Test, it showed us that decen­tral­iza­tion alone is insuf­fi­cient for dig­i­tal personhood.

If we’re seri­ous about dig­i­tal per­son­hood, then it’s time to get seri­ous about dig­i­tal identity. 

We have to archi­tect Web3 to sup­port iden­ti­ty from the top down.

What makes a human, human?

Many may be sur­prised to learn that the dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty move­ment has its own Satoshi-like fig­ure who authored the defin­i­tive white paper on dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty a full sev­en years pri­or to Satoshi’s famous Bit­coin white paper. 

In 2005, Kim Cameron brought the stone tablets of iden­ti­ty man­age­ment down from the moun­tain­top when he pub­lished his land­mark paper, The Laws of Iden­ti­ty.

While Kim may not have been as mys­te­ri­ous as Satoshi, his work on dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty was as defin­i­tive as Satoshi’s work on decentralization. 

Kim put for­ward a prob­lem state­ment for dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty that was as sim­ple, clear, and con­cise as Satoshi’s prob­lem state­ment for decen­tral­iza­tion. It’s instruc­tive to look at them both together.

Kim’s iden­ti­ty prob­lem state­ment (2005)The Inter­net was built with­out a way to know who and what you are con­nect­ing to.

Satoshi’s decen­tral­iza­tion prob­lem state­ment (2012): Com­merce on the Inter­net has come to rely almost exclu­sive­ly on finan­cial insti­tu­tions serv­ing as trust­ed third par­ties to process elec­tron­ic payments.

While these two prob­lems are dis­tinct, they are inex­tri­ca­bly inter­twined. We have to know who and what we are con­nect­ing to online (Kim/identity), and we have to be able to do so peer-to-peer, with­out an inter­me­di­ary (Satoshi/decentralization). This is just as true in the dig­i­tal world as it is in the real world. 

In a post-Tur­ing Test world, how­ev­er, the prob­lem of iden­ti­ty has tak­en on a new urgency because machines are increas­ing­ly able to spoof peo­ple. We will not enjoy the full fruits of decen­tral­iza­tion with­out also mak­ing dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty a top priority.

Toward the end of his life, Kim gave us yet anoth­er way to think about the chal­lenge of dig­i­tal per­son­hood. He gave a talk where he said that, when it comes to our online lives, “Con­tent is what we are, aspects of our iden­ti­ty, but we don’t own it, we don’t keep it, we can’t con­trol it. Basi­cal­ly, we lack a dig­i­tal shel­ter that would offer the same fun­da­men­tal pri­va­cy as a home.” 

In short, we are dig­i­tal­ly homeless.

Just as per­son­hood is impaired by home­less­ness in the real world due to lack of pri­va­cy, dig­i­tal per­son­hood is sim­i­lar­ly impaired by dig­i­tal home­less­ness in the dig­i­tal world. 

Dig­i­tal per­son­hood requires a dig­i­tal home — a dig­i­tal place where we have the pow­er to decide what parts of our dig­i­tal selves we share with oth­ers and when and how we do so. That dig­i­tal home is insep­a­ra­ble from our dig­i­tal identity. 

Decen­tral­iza­tion isn’t a suf­fi­cient prin­ci­ple for over­com­ing our dig­i­tal home­less­ness. If we don’t also archi­tect for dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty, we will nev­er know who or what we are con­nect­ing to online and AI bots will over­whelm human beings. 

Up until now, we’ve been able to skirt the archi­tec­tur­al demands of dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty because when push came to shove, we could lean on the Tur­ing Test as a proxy for our human­ness and we could man­age our dis­persed dig­i­tal selves with­out ulti­mate­ly requir­ing a cen­tral­ized dig­i­tal home. With the advent of Large Lan­guage Mod­els (LLMs) like Chat­G­PT, those days are gone. 

Kim Cameron, unfor­tu­nate­ly, is gone too, but his Laws of Iden­ti­ty live on. All those who aspire to true dig­i­tal per­son­hood would do well to remem­ber that Kim came before Satoshi, and iden­ti­ty comes before decentralization. 

As Kim said, in the online world, “con­tent is what we are.” Now that gen­er­a­tive AI has ren­dered human-qual­i­ty con­tent vir­tu­al­ly free, we should make sure that we have an alter­na­tive method to val­ue and rec­og­nize per­son­hood in the dig­i­tal world.


Dr. Richard Smith – Berke­ley Math­e­mati­cian and PhD in Sys­tem Sci­ence – is a fin­tech entre­pre­neur, the CEO of The Foun­da­tion for the Study of Cycles, and the author of The Risk Rit­u­als newslet­ter. He has built a rep­u­ta­tion as “The Doc­tor of Uncer­tain­ty” amongst his aca­d­e­m­ic peers and has helped gov­ern­ment agen­cies and For­tune 500 com­pa­nies alike make sense of com­plex sets of data. In his upcom­ing book, The Risk Man­i­festo, Dr. Smith will aim to fur­ther edu­cate investors on how to cir­cum­vent self-destruc­tive instincts and adopt a sys­tem­at­ic way to man­age their fear of risk. With his back­ground in math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­ries of uncer­tain­ty com­bined with his invest­ing and trad­ing experience,Dr. Smith is a reg­u­lar speak­er and lec­tur­er and par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoys oppor­tu­ni­ties to share his knowl­edge and help oth­ers gain an edge in the market. 


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