Divya Siddarth and E. Glen Weyl
We are excited to introduce the Decentralized Social Technology Collaboratory (DSTC), a cross-company and multi-partner collaboration with a home base within Microsoft Research (MSR) Special Projects. Collectively, we are exploring how to responsibly create a technological foundation for Plurality (opens in new tab), envisioning scalable complementary systems built on input from diverse groups. DSTC brings together dozens of researchers across MSR, from nearly every division of the company, and a range of external collaborators: the Harvard Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics (opens in new tab), the University of California Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (opens in new tab), EY (opens in new tab), and Protocol Labs (opens in new tab). Together, we hope to build the largest, strongest and most socially conscious decentralized technology research group in the world.
MSR is called to this work by the sense of responsibility we feel as developers of core ideas and tools in this space, such as Proof of Work (developed (opens in new tab) by Cynthia Dwork), Data Dignity (developed (opens in new tab) by Jaron Lanier), and Quadratic Voting and Funding (developed (opens in new tab) by one of the authors). Our experience with such technologies has taught us that we can only maximize their potential if we address their real risks through broad interdisciplinary and cross-sector partnerships.
Decentralized social technology for individual and collective empowerment
Decentralized social technologies (DSTs) could address many of the pressing social and commercial challenges of our time. Three examples that jump out for recent headlines are the challenges of (1) reconciling free speech with informational quality and decency, (2) the harnessing of the billions of underutilized personal and corporate computers to address the shortage of silicon, and (3) ensuring clear provenance of information in the face of increasingly powerful generative AI models.
Decentralized protocols such as Mastodon (opens in new tab), Twitter Blue Sky (opens in new tab) and Matters.News (opens in new tab) (winner of a recent Tech4Democracy challenge (opens in new tab) Microsoft organized with IE University and the US Department of State) are making considerable progress in addressing the first challenge by empowering community self-governance and accountability in place of centralized and often decontextualized content moderation. The second challenge is being tackled by our collaborators at Protocol Labs, whose Interplanetary File System (opens in new tab) and FileCoin (opens in new tab) protocols have empowered and incented, respectively, many thousands of machines distributed across the world to provide one another with on-demand storage. Solutions to the third are being explored via cryptographic signatures, proof-of-personhood models and a range of identity systems (such as verifiable credentials and Soulbound tokens). And these examples are just the beginning of possibilities the space may enable ranging from secure and private data sharing for ambitious social impact (such as disease diagnosis and carbon accounting) to new identity systems based on community information that are both more empowering to individuals and more secure for relying institutions.
However, many current decentralized implementations are inconsistent with other fundamental values including environmental sustainability, the rule of law, democratic accountability and privacy. The speculation, exploitation and fraud that have been rife in the “Web3’’ space have discouraged (opens in new tab) many established and legitimate social institutions in the private, public and social sectors from developing DSTs. Discussions of the potential of these technologies are often driven by ideologies far outside the mainstream that envision (opens in new tab) the abolition of central banks and even nation states and their replacement by highly financialized systems.
The vision of DSTC is that, with responsible engineering and broad collaboration, we can achieve many of these benefits while mitigating the harms and building a more hopeful and consensual vision of the future.
Phase one collaborations
Microsoft researchers will be working with collaborators globally to co-investigate responsible decentralized technology, focused on the following pillars:
- Sustainability: Alongside Microsoft’s Sustainability team, our researchers are building the capacity to measure and offset the environmental impacts of decentralized technologies. Taking a forward-looking perspective, we are also piloting decentralized resource allocation methods for the application of carbon offsets to climate resilient infrastructure.
- Identity: Solving the problem of output authentication raised by large models requires granular, cryptographically sound identity primitives. In close partnership with our product teams, our researchers are investigating possibilities for non-transferrable, community-based identity tokens, proof-of-personhood primitives, and social key recovery.
- Social data structures: Researchers are extending cryptographic constructions such as designated verifier proofs and blockchain-based common knowledge frameworks to preserve privacy and context across information flows.
- Large model governance: Researchers at DSTC are exploring a range of necessary primitives for foundation model governance, including data provenance, cryptographic signatures, mechanisms for value returns to data creators, and dynamic models of collective intelligence.
- Ethics: In collaboration with the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, researchers at DSTC are pioneering the field of DST ethics, informed by progress in both AI ethics and bioethics.
Looking forward
While these ambitions may seem grand, the experience in Taipei illustrates how they may have transformative impacts at scale. Leaders there, especially Digital Minister Audrey Tang (who is writing a book (opens in new tab) with one of us supported by technology infrastructure (opens in new tab) built by the DSTC and Protocol Labs), have harnessed many of these tools to empower citizens to reach social consensus on challenging political issues, combat misinformation, collectively bargain their data for needed environmental services, privately share information to protect public health and secure data from cyber attacks. Together these applications have helped the country achieve the world’s overall strongest response to the challenges (opens in new tab) of recent years, growing robustly with low inflation and virtually no deaths throughout the Covid era.
At DSTC, our mission is to scale these pluralistic models, focusing on sustaining social legitimacy alongside bold innovation. Just as Microsoft Research has worked to define responsible and industry-leading impact in the field of artificial intelligence through partnerships, incubations, and research, DSTC will do the same for transformative social technologies.