DAOs as novelty search engines

DAOs are networks that are defined by nodes and links, corresponding to people and relationships.

Leaders with differing ideas naturally surface in groups of people, and it is equally natural for people to follow leaders and causes they believe in. Rather than replacing hierarchies, DAOs create a mechanism through which a single organisation can allow many hierarchical teams to explore different directions simultaneously.

We are biased to believe that the interim steps resemble the final goal, and use objectives to reach stepping stones that appear to lead to the final destination. However, without knowing the nature of the territory, those objectives may well lead us to get stuck.

DAOs are a generating system for discovery, with people and information as its parts.

Similarly, in a mature DAO, individuals will be able to understand a part of the network (local context), but they will not be able to appreciate it as a whole (global context). Individuals will interpret the DAO in their own way, and explore directions that affect their local context without having to consider the context of the whole. As they mak... See more

DAOs are novelty search engines which can more efficiently explore a search space by enabling many cooperating teams to collect and integrate stepping stones.

And so we arrive at the crux of the argument. DAOs are novelty search engines which can more efficiently explore a search space by enabling many cooperating teams to collect and integrate stepping stones.

Consider vacuum tubes. It was obvious to nobody that they would enable the first computers. This only became clear after vacuum tubes and associated computing discoveries had been made, so that someone could make the connection. If you had set out to build a computer in the 1800s (as Charles Babbage did), it’s unlikely that you would have drawn thi... See more

Great ideas tend to come from a single mind and leadership is a requirement for effective human collaboration. Hierarchies are well-optimised to enable strong leaders to achieve strong outcomes. DAOs do not get around this fact. Hierarchies work because they enable leaders to synthesise the contributions of a group.

So what’s the alternative? Well, novelty search is a form of non-objective search. Instead of following the stepping stones that appear to lead to the objective, simply collect stepping stones that lead in interesting directions. Focus on newness, regardless of where it leads.