With the help of Derek Robertson
A prince, a politician, and a group of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, enter a palace in Germany.
It is not a set up of a very witty joke. That’s what happened earlier this month when representatives of the past, present and possible future of human organization gathered at Bückeburg Palace in Lower Saxony, about 170 miles west of Berlin. The two-week DAO Incubator hosted by Heinrich Donatus, Prince of Schaumberg-Lippe, brought together about three dozen people to understand what DAOs can do and accelerate their adoption.
Ultimately, it remains unclear what DAOs might be good for, according to Germany’s former vice chancellor Philipp Rösler, who visited the gathering and said he, however, remains intrigued by their possibilities. .
“It’s an additional way of decision-making,” said Rösler, now head of strategy for the World Economic Forum, which was published a report last month to familiarize policymakers with The DAO. He added that the process of comparing DAOs to existing organizational models had just begun. “Only at the end,” he said, “will we know if it really is better than the classics.”
DAOs give governance powers to blockchain token holders, an organizational structure which proponents say could create better incentives and allow for more agile operations.
By allowing people to easily pool risk and commercial property rights, joint-stock corporations, which arose in 17th-century Europe, enabled the pursuit of more risky, complex, and long-term endeavors. DAO proponents think their innovation could be just as important. But what if DAOs are simply a solution in search of a problem?
Schaumberg-Lippe, 28, whose family owns the mansion, said existing DAOs are “too utopian” and should do more to engage directly with the real world. He suggests that DAOs could make it easier for people to organize and pool resources for purposes such as insurance and lending in parts of the developing world where social infrastructure is lacking.
Right now, many DAOs are focused on blockchain-based decentralized finance. Another early focus has been online funding: MoonDAO has raised millions of dollars for it send two people into space on a Blue Origin trip, and ConstitutionDAO, which had a member in the palace, raised $47 million in a failed attempt to buy an original copy of the US Constitution late last year. As I mentioned last week, more than a dozen DAOs now own landand dozens more are looking to get it, many with the goal of forming new communities of governance from the DAO.
Incubator participants concluded that some DAOs are more centralized than they let on and that many DAOs serve redundant purposes, so a framework is already needed for combining DAOs.
The prince, whose family ruled the area around the palace until the early 20th century, said the experience showed that DAOs could learn from one aspect of the royal palace governance model: organizing something helps people to gather into one. put it face to face, even if the members of the DAO are then scattered to the four winds.
Next, he wants to form DAOESCO – a play on UNESCO – setting up more incubators in other unused cultural heritage sites. As DAO creators figure out how to make themselves useful, he thinks, they can at least bring some energy and economic activity to rural areas.
There aren’t many fields with higher stakes than healthcare. meaning that AI applied to healthcare comes with a particularly high level of scrutiny.
That resulted in some good news last week: As POLITICO’s Ruth Reader reported for Pro subscribers, three new studies show that an AI model developed by startup Bayesian Health is remarkably accurate at identifying potential cases of sepsis, a potentially deadly reaction to the presence of bacteria in the bloodstream. (The founder of Bayesian Health, Johns Hopkins University professor of computer science and health policy Suchi Saria, is an AI expert for the FDA, whose work in this area we was observed last week.)
Most importantly, Bayesian Health’s AI is good not only at detecting sepsis cases, but also at avoiding false positives. That means doctors ended up responding to nearly 90 percent of the alerts given, a particularly important finding given high-profile cases like that of healthcare software giant Epic, whose sepsis model was found last year in a study had accurately identified only a third of patients with sepsis and produced a massive number of false alarms — something Steven Lin, executive medical director of Stanford’s Applied Health AI Research team, told Ruth was a ” wake-up call” for both healthcare and AI. industries. – Derek Robertson
Who doesn’t appreciate some free advice?
…on second thought, don’t answer that: Yesterday a viral thread on Twitter from a crypto world influencer offered some unsolicited ideas on how some of the world’s largest companies could apply Web3 principles to their business, including:
These ideas may sound a bit strange – especially in the unfathomable alien crypto jargon in which they are presented (and certainly gave their author that the contempt part). The startup reveals two truths about the crypto community: it sees hyper-ambitious blue-sky thinking as a virtue in itself and is convinced that blockchain technology can be a powerful tool for transforming or replacing existing institutions.
However, for those ambitious transformations to happen, it helps if people are actually unhappy with existing institutions – while the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street largely fueled Bitcoin’s rise, there are no mass street protests demanding an overhaul of Starbucks’ rewards program. – Derek Robertson
Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Konstantin Kakaes ([email protected]); and Heidi Vogt ([email protected]). Follow us on Twitter @DigitalFuture.
Ben Schreckinger covers technology, finance and politics for POLITICO; he is an investor in cryptocurrencies.
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