Hanlin Ma

Blockchain technology introduces a paradigm shift into higher education, presenting opportunities for innovative transformations in human organization and democratic operations. Education-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) on Web 3.0 are anticipated to instigate change across the spectrum, from classroom pedagogy to broader educational systems. Our research concentrates on the micro-level exploration of the merger between the decentralization principles of educational DAOs and traditional democratic classrooms. In the course of our experimental study, we analyze an experimental postgraduate course that uses a governing token to stimulate decision-making processes, empowering students with a participatory role that mirrors DAO operations. The implementation of popular DAO tools is discussed with the goal of crafting a classroom environment reflecting the decentralized decision-making structures intrinsic to DAOs. While we underscore the potential of decentralized teaching methodologies to enhance democratic education, we particularly focus on students as the primary facilitators of collective decision-making. According to our investigation, students showed a greater understanding and positivity towards decentralization than expected, suggesting that a suitable environment could boost positive behavior in class. Furthermore, in an architecturally decentralized class, a properly operational tokenomics could enhance classroom liberty, particularly for elite students, who might exert significant influence due to tokenomics and reward mechanisms.

Given the need for Human-Machine moral Interaction, an AI system that focuses on moral theory involving intersubjectivity is worthy of attention. We will build a network knowledge representation framework based on the second-person standpoint moral theory to analyze the design philosophy of a general artificial intelligence (AGI) moral machine. We then use this framework to investigate an interactive moral machine designed by Bello and Bringsjord (2013). In constructing a feature of mindreading, their study faces philosophical challenges to combine the empirical source configuration of its inheritance function and the multi-world setting of the Polyscheme itself. We try to prove that the integrated structure of the Polyscheme based on a third-person perspective, multi-world setting cannot afford a continuous self that can accommodate enough diversity of the stimulation relationship between the concept of self and other. Moreover, we suggest that the psychological distance structure of mindreading should mainly come from the internal “self” of the system. This requires the system to have an intrinsic kernel, meaning a design philosophy completely different from the integrated style of Polyscheme.

Anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism are a pair of basic directions in cognitive science and AI research. These directions correspond respectively to “first person” and “third person”. The confrontation between these two concepts not only has guiding significance for the exploration of cognitive science but also has ethical importance. Human-like AI (for instance, Artificial General Intelligence, AGI for short) research hovers between them. I propose a second-person, or limited consensus perspective as a philosophical and ethical research context that is integrated with the first and third person to constitute a “trinity” relationship—what I call the “trinity of the contexts of intelligent artificiality”, which could be represented by the relationship between emulation, simulation, and imitation. The consequences of the general loss of the first-person context will be explored, including the uncertainty of the ethical landscape of humankind—such as the fragmentation of the self—and the risk of going against the original intention of AGI research. This cannot be fixed by returning to a first-person perspective. The second-person context is an idea that is situated between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, and it may be employed to avoid these risks. This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution

As ancestors of the idea of the metaverse - Cyberpunks and Cypherpunks - propose two distinct attitudes towards Cyberspace, and this difference also infuses their attitudes towards the metaverse. These two attitudes will powerfully influence the developmental direction of the metaverse and how it will be recognized and accepted by society. Given that the visual space is an artificial reality created by technology, they not only illustrate two different ideas regarding “realities other than the physical one of human society”, but also illustrate two different ideas regarding technology itself. The Cyberpunk view of the metaverse could be seen as techno-pessimistic or Luddiism. Cypherpunk’s metaverse view, on the other hand, is “technological transformationism”, which carries multi-possibilities of living styles of human being, and it almost incompatible with Luddism.