Blockchain Ethics: Pure Reason or Pure Madness?

Hi, thank you. Well, I think it's an interesting topic to discuss but I wouldn't go as far as to claim that I can prove that blockchain ethics matter. But today I would like to argue Is it even a feasible thing to discuss? Maybe it's too absurd. I don't know.

And if we have slides. Okay, but I mean, why I'm talking about it like that. I think it can be weird to you because you come here. I've been here for two days talking to all the good people, people who care about values, about morals, about what they do. And it doesn't seem like such a strange issue.

But I want to take a different look. I want to try and look at the whole field. Let's take a philosophical look what blockchain ethics might look like. And is it even absurd or not? Let's argue.

So to do that, I will firstly look at how things are now in blockchain space in research. And I will try to make radical skeptical arguments against why blockchain ethics is not a real thing or can't be a real thing. And I'll do it in a philosophical tradition of trying to argue and providing counter arguments. And if I will be able to persuade myself and you that it is a feasible thing, then let's take a look at what it might look like and what it is. And then, of course, how do we get there?

So that's a very quick look at the state of research in AI ethics. And if you can see it on the left, I mean, even if you're not following this field, you probably heard a lot about AI ethics. It's everywhere. I mean, if you have to do anything with philosophy or ethics, people immediately assume, oh, you're doing AI ethics. The field is exploding.

But if you look at the blockchain ethics, I mean, it's not the real data science. It's just a quick, dirty scrap. But you will see that it's almost non-existent in comparison to AI ethics. And I mean, I am doing academic research myself, both in ethics and computer science, and I ask myself where this field is, why it does not exist. And I think there are some good reasons why people are not eager to jump on that topic, why some people outside of crypto are not super excited about trying to argue about ethics.

So just a few quick snapshots, how things are all fresh, all from the last year. So that's a story about, you know, PomPom, you probably all heard about it. They introduced live streams, and people were doing all sorts of weird and questionable things just to get attracted to their token, to get attract people to their token. And one guy, he was like 12 years old. He launched some token quant on PomPom, and then he was scamming people and people were commenting on that.

Yeah, he's just 12 years old, but he already made 30,000. Cool. And then people were doxing him and his family, and it was, you know, usual drama. And it was sort of entertaining, but also not. So even school kids do that.

But I mean, even presidents do that. That's beautiful. And it's a tracker of a president's success. And then you see the chart, and it looks just like this, a school kid PomPom coin chart. It's exactly like that.

So everybody is scamming, everybody seems like school children, presidents, and I'm saying plural, not just, you know, one president, but I think we can name quite a few of the people on the top doing exactly the same thing. And it's funny if you look at that, but it's also not funny, because there are some darker stories on PomPom also, and other live streams, and people just, you know, imitating suicide or doing actual suicide, and then somebody launching meme coin on that, and people are buying that. It's not funny anymore. So is crypto moral compass is broken beyond repair? Is it completely broken?

Some people in industry also said that last year. That's not me saying that. This has been said many times before. But is it broken so badly we cannot repair that? Well, let's try to argue about that in a philosophical matter.

Let's leave aside emotions. Let's just make rational arguments about that. So I will make three arguments. And I mean, philosophers like to do strange thought experiments, thinking about crazy things like brain in a vat, or maybe aliens painted zebra in a local zoo. And I mean, these are all respectable philosophers doing that.

So maybe we can also argue about this strange hypothesis of blockchain ethics existing as a field, and as a industry standard. And let's make arguments why it cannot. Three of them. First, argument from complexity. Second one, argument from incentives.

And the third one, argument from casino. So first argument, I think we all heard that many times. And we all say that to each other, people who gather to these places and discuss crypto, they say, it's too complex for people, people don't get it. I mean, are you talking about layers, network layers, protocols? Are you talking about DeFi, tokenomics, it's all too complicated.

We will never be able to make people understand and make informed decisions in crypto. And there always will be people who will manage this to their advantage, to use this information asymmetries to extract money from people who don't know better. Now, while that might be true, it's not an argument against that, because we have complexity everywhere, all new technologies, everything we use, everything is complex, you know, transport system, medicine, medical research. I mean, it's not an argument to say that we should stop medical ethics and let just doctors do whatever they want, because it's, you know, too complicated to understand. No, we have to deal with that in an institutional systematic way, developing industry standards to leveraging these asymmetries in a meaningful way.

Oh, but then there are better arguments against blockchain ethics. And you all remember this guy, yes, raise your hand, who does not like him. Yay. But he was talking a lot about ethics, he was talking about altruism, about empowerment, environment, and that it all ended up like that. I mean, it's hard not to get cynical when something like that happens.

And I think he just not scammed people. He, he literally delayed the ethics in crypto, I don't know for how many years. So yes, and we hear that if you even say or try to say nice things, people will cop them for their own personal reasons. However, this is not just about wrong incentives. This is about different types of incentives.

And that's a well known phenomena, a crowding out of morals. It happens when you try to introduce economic incentives to the context where people would do good things for moral reasons. But once you incentivize people monetary with fines or fees or rewards, it suddenly doesn't feel important to them. And I think this is both a blessing and a curse in crypto that economic incentives work so well. But then we become so upset with them, that we try to fix everything with that.

And I mean, if you have a problem, and you try to throw money at that, and you hope it will be solved. Yes, it works also on European level. But I mean, if your problem is people chasing money, and you throw money at that problem, it's going to be the same. So we need to get out of that box, out of that mentality. And we can do that.

Finally, you know, my favorite argument, everything is casino anyway, it's all decentralized casino, all apps are just that, and it's not going to be anything else. And, well, that is just logically not true. That's a good example of logical fallacy of composition, when we try to argue about the whole while making claims on part of that. So yes, I mean, maybe most apps in crypto are about gambling. Maybe even 90% of them, it still doesn't matter if we have 10% of apps and use cases, which are morally significant.

And I can tell you that it is the case. I mean, for many people, outside of jurisdiction, where you can trust banks, where you can trust government, for people outside of these good spaces, crypto is a lifesaving mechanism. It is truly an anti-dystopian technology to transact with your close ones to support your family, maybe outside of your country, maybe to help them in some other ways. So it does work, just works. I mean, I'm not being philosophical here, it's just life reality.

So how many of you think that we can do blockchain ethics? I mean, have I persuaded anybody by this argument? Okay, so at least two, three people, that's good, getting there. So for these people who agree with that, or maybe for people who don't, but want to entertain this thought, we need to answer two questions, what blockchain ethics is, and how we do it. And the first one, we had this discussion before, just yesterday, people will say, morality is complicated.

Yes, moral theories are complicated, but the concept of morality is not, it's just how you treat each other, and how we treat ourselves in the context of these systems we built, and how these systems treat humans. So it's quite complex, if you think about it, but it's also very simple. What makes us humans in the end? But we don't treat each other just like mechanisms, but like other humans. And a couple of quotes from philosophers of technology I like, I want to read them to explain what I mean by that.

Ethics of technology focuses on incorporating moral and societal values into technology design, enabling designers to anticipate, prevent and resolve societal and ethical issues. So you see the bold text, it's to anticipate. And the second quote is about challenges, which are around assessing technologies towards accompanying their development. So it's not after the fact, it's not after you have fixed that, you build something and fix it. No, it doesn't work like that.

You have to begin in the first place from knowing what you're doing and why. So if you rephrase that, for me, blockchain ethics is about design of possible worlds. I mean, in philosophy, if you know a bit about logic, maybe formal logic, you did math, you know, framework of possible worlds. It's a powerful framework. It says, you know, about truth, about what's possible, it's a technology of things.

But I think we can also refer to that in the context of ethics. Because once we design for the world we want to be in, we make a value judgment, we make a choice, which world do we choose? And to do that is to do ethics for me is to try to explain these choices to ourselves and others. So it's not complicated in the end. But how?

Okay, this is complicated. Because it's not just talking about things. And I mean, you could talk about things. We talk about ideologies, for example. Yes, ideologies are good.

They are important. But ideology is pointing and saying, we should go there. And people will go there. But some people will also dismiss you because they will say it's just ideology. You're just pointing there, for whatever reason you have, maybe you are naive or irrational.

Now, morality and moral philosophy as a field, it's about explaining why are you going there? Not just pointing, but explaining giving good reasons. And if people will ask you hard questions, you will be able to explain why. And applied ethics is also getting there, actually, not just pointing or just rallying people around the flag, but getting there. So in AI ethics, it works in a different way from what I think it should look like in blockchain ethics.

And there are two good reasons for that. So just to give you a brief 101 on applied ethics, from the 80s in medical ethics, in bioethics, the dominant approach is called principalism. It is a way to kind of distill this complex moral theories like the ontology Kantianism into something applied and usable. And it works because medical professionals can agree on things. They work in the same context with same problems, I mean, maybe from different angles, but principles work.

They don't work so well in AI ethics, then they're probably not going to work in blockchain ethics. And same with embedded ethics approach. I mean, you could teach students, engineers, ethical theories to help them. But how do you do it in open space, in open source? You need to read Kant before you can submit pull requests.

No, ridiculous. So what we could do, we could refer to methodologies which work. And that is value sensitive design. We discussed that yesterday. So come to me, I will tell you what it is.

Ethical risk analysis and wide reflective equilibrium. These things work in ethics of technology. I believe they can work in blockchain ethics. So, yes, and to fix that, we need to overcome free issues, lack of agreement on what do we mean by things. Then, of course, how do we mitigate people leveraging information asymmetry for their benefit?

Then, of course, regulatory challenges. And I mean, sorry for lawyers, but ethics and regulation are not the same thing. They are not the same in authoritarian regimes. In Europe, they are much closer, but we are not in a real world. And unfortunately, they are not always the same.

So, and insert your challenge name here. And yesterday at Duck event, which was amazing one, if you've been there, hello again. We decided to make a telegram group for people who want to argue about ethics and blockchain. I don't know if you even think it's stupid, if you don't understand what that or maybe you just love to argue philosophy. Please join.

Please talk to us. Maybe something will come out of it. Everybody is very welcome just to change my mind. Maybe you will. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Georgi. We will have a Q&A session. I forgot to tell you we have a QR code on the right up hand side. Using Meerkat, you can post your questions now and upload your questions and we will be doing our Q&A session. Yes.

So right now we only have one question, but please feel free to send your questions. Meanwhile, sorry. Yeah, you can log in with Zoopass. Your ticket will come with Zoopass. Is it now working?

I hope it works. Yeah, we can just get the mic around for meanwhile, but then for now I'll just the first one. So I'll read it out. It's quite far. If crypto is about abandoning institutions and creating new ones, how do you pitch ethics in a way that doesn't appear as an instrument of incumbent institutions?

But I think sometimes people forget about where these institutions come from. And when it comes to democratic institutions in Europe, for example, human rights and legal framework to build around them, they are very much coming from moral philosophy from people like John Locke. So they are not something which exists in vacuum. And this is not something detached from moral philosophy at all. We just don't pay attention to where it comes from.

And I think in the same way, technology ethics, it is very much rooted in moral considerations. A Bitcoin, if you remove moral reasons for using it, it's just expensive, slow database. I mean, it is, but we have good reasons to value that for non-technical reasons. Yeah, we have another question that just came in. Can you touch upon communities and ethics?

Oh, yes, that's absolutely great. So, I mean, there is a lot to unpack. And for one, I mean, positive comment would be we can build communities around our values. And that's what people are doing in this space. And you meet amazing people who have a strong moral compass, who care about the right things.

And sometimes people say, well, different communities have different values. And, you know, on a very deep human level, we disagree sometimes about interpretations. We don't disagree on the essence. And morality, to me, is something which is fundamentally human, something we most of the time can agree on, on a very deep level. So I think it's also a way to build communities, but also to build bridges between communities.

With that, we are at the end of our written questions. But if there are any questions, we can just get the mic around. Hi, we're discussing ethics here. And I just submitted a question earlier, which was censored. It was removed.

I'm not sure. I mean, I did review the community guidelines and my question did not. But it relates to the talk. Because in the crypto industry, when the genocide started in Ukraine, there was a big positive movement towards pro-Ukraine. I've got a lot of people putting the Ukraine flag in the bio.

There was a lot of support donations happening. It was very amazing to see that movement. And when it's happening in other countries like Palestine, there's dead silence. I was asking, why is this happening in a space where, you know, we all care about self-custodial ownership of assets? Why don't we speak up when it's happening in a different country, when it's not close to Europe?

I don't know. You can have a pessimistic answer that maybe people don't care deep enough. I have a different answer. People get tired from evil. I come from Russia originally.

I moved away a long time ago. But you could see that, you know, people getting tired and tired and less able to resist the evil. And people in Ukraine are resisting it. And people in Palestine too. And still it happens.

And not everybody is as deeply invested in that as we would like to see in an ideal world. I have no easy answers to that. Yes, what you say is absolutely correct. And you're saying very painful things for many people. I mean, I just have hope that we can get to a better world where it's not true.

Yes. Sorry, I can't log in. I have no idea why it's not allowing me to access the app. What do you think about the ethical guidelines for blockchain systems the EU Commission has put out, actually supported by your own who was mentioned in your, your side of him? Well, I mean, what can I say?

I agree on many things with your own maybe because he was my PhD supervisor. So I like his ideas. What can I say? I also think that maybe I don't completely agree on everything. And it's too nuanced discussion to just explain it, you know, in one go.

But I think we need to focus more on what makes blockchain ethics a distinctive field and things like decentralized systems, you can't just build values in like in artifacts, like you could do in robotics, and then verify that this is exactly like that. I mean, yes, principles are a very good start. I think it's very important that we talk about these issues on different levels, both here in these communities, both on European level and national level. That's about building bridges. That's about discussing ethics.

Because if we don't talk about it, we will have the same guys like SBF coming again, saying something. And because we just don't discuss that we will take everything at face value. So to me, every discussion is extremely valuable. Good. Congrats.

With that, we need to wrap up here. And once again, thank you, Georgi, for the talk. And we will be here in five minutes with the next talk. Thank you.