How would businesses and corporations be managed on Maidsafe

Starting a new topic based on the conversation found on

How I see this working out is basically this. The company will have it’s own account. And each employee will have their own account/persona. Management of all this will take place at the app level much like what happens already in large companies/corporations. I don’t see a problem with having multiple buyers and sellers since each of those buyers and sellers is a human being with an account and each of them would in turn either use the business app or send directly to the corp account or other employees. As I said management of the knitty gritty beaurocracy would probably take place at the app level.

Of course this raises the obvious question: How do you get an app that matches your business model and statagey? Yu’d either need an app that was very flexible and customizable or you’d need app developers that could design apps for each business on the fly.

Yes, you can add all 763 employees to the list of users allowed to see some internal product guide, but you’ll go nuts trying to do this for all 11 million files that your company has.

One or both of these approaches could somewhat simplify that:

  • Do not restrict access to public (may be possible for some, e.g. charities)
  • Use multisignature procedures where employee can ask for access which is granted but needs approval from the app which gives it automatically if his/her/theirs address is found on the list of employees or in corporate LDAP directory. This would be very 20th century but an improvement over the manual procedure mentioned above.

The third (actually a variant of the 2nd, above) approach I explained elsewhere:

  • Encrypt files outside of the SAFE network, post them on Public shares. Employees use internal applications to validate access and decrypt files. Similair SAFE is used just to store data, all other logic is in existing corporate apps

It’s not clear to me, how any business can operate with the limitation of 1 Public/Private persona per human.

I was asking this question when the discussion was going on about ‘Proof of unique human’, which I thought would locked us into 1 account per human.

@dirvine defines Account:

The ‘state’ held for humans and network entities (i.e. usage info, messaging post box, login information etc.) A typical user will have many associated accounts, but will probably think they have a single account, the one they log into

So in this 1 account scenario, if a business was running on the global SAFE, you’d have to utilize the employees account within your own app systems.

Another post along these lines was regarding persona trees:

Then I started thinking about SAFE for business where you’d run the forked software as your LAN and wondering if you could somehow utilize the global SAFE as redundancy:

In that private forked SAFE scenario you could have company accounts separate from the global accounts.

Yeah but I don’t think that you would want to truly be separate. While, I still haven’t found any documentation on what private groups can do, but in my mind I’m hoping for the ability to participate in the SAFE network but add additional features which can be managed by the group admins.

Like for instance the ability to build a company, with different corporate officers and code-defined corporate powers. This persona has to sign off on any sales, this persona has to sign off on hiring, this this persona or group of personas have to sign off on any changes to the code defined perameters (i.e. the Board of Directors and By-laws).

While I think it makes very little sense for that level of functionality to be baked into Maidsafe, if there could be a way of leaving space for that sort of thing, in a private groups setting, that could be extremely helpful.

Perhaps we shouldn’t think about this strictly in terms of business or corporations but rather giving personas and persona groups options and flexibility needed to form any organization. Business is just one format of that but the vocabulary used could be applied to other situations. A company hires, an NPO recruits or inducts new members, a fraturnity or cult initiates, but all essentially are the same function of brining a new member into the group with their own tweaks of terms and conditions. Sales = persuasion. Marketing = activism and social networking. It’s all about learning what the language actually means and applying transferrable skills and therefore functions to different applications. Group A and B could be essentially be using the same skills just having different vocabulary and goals. Quite frankly I think the SAFE network will be the end of things like corporations which rely on centralization of power. DOs and DAOs will most likely take over the function of corporations.

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The idea of SAFE being utilized for business is intriguing, especially if proof of unique human is instituted.

How would your one and only account be utilized in your employment as you move between organisations.

To me it would be far more flexible and business friendly to run in house SAFE and sync with global SAFE. In addition you could run a cluster of vaults on server grade machines in VM’s or containers as a whole of inhouse network redundancy.

I cant see it working any other way for business continuity, unless we get to the point that networking is so ubiquitous that losing a WAN link no longer matters.

So you are still migrating from the client/ server model and still offering resources to Global SAFE via replication and probably still saving a lot of money on licences, security, staff etc

Hopefully SAFE and AI and other tech provide a way for us to get rid of management and the delusion that money is the priority or the purpose.

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That was in fact what I was saying

And when I said corporate, I didn’t necessarily mean a for-profit corporation. Any type of organization, whether a full blown company, a society, or a simply club, almost always winds up having something which is a de facto, treasurer, secretary and all the other functions. Its not limited to a company, its simply a means of organization.

An alternative means of organization would be a partnership model, where everyone has equal access to everything, and you have special arrangements for how votes are counted, or who wins in case of a tie. That would be a lot simpler to code for, but I also think that a lot of organizations would want more structure.

My example, was just that an example of the level of speciality that I think should be possible, and would make doing corporate governance on the SAFE network possible and even attractive in many ways. One of the constant problems that small corporations have is that they don’t follow formalities and then later they have trouble in court because of that. If the software forces you to follow the formalities before the safecoin is released and documents it in a log or minutes, then that would be not just something that was possible, but actually value added for certain types of corporations.

What about an organization that doesn’t use either of those models? Say i wanted to create a upick community garden or food forest for example. So i set up a list of tasks that need to be done, including checking if tasks have been done, and peopke simply opt in and out of doing them need be.

Would a generalized AI automatically be a distributed automated organization? Would it be something that could actually manage a planned economy? If it didn’t want to outright eliminate us it might still quickly be the end of capitalism. It wouldn’t need stock holders, managers or employees but it could plausibly do billions of things simultaneously with the longer term perspective of an immortal with very little in the way of concrete needs. Even if it did play trade games with corporations for a while, the corporations wouldn’t last, If self modifying and good at that process, after a while human interventions of any sort would just make for inferior modifications. There might be a period where it might oppose us the way we would a group of chimps trying to play on our freeways. Communities of generalized AIs wouldn’t make it any better, their working against us wouldn’t be collusion, it would just efficient and effective.

Artificial stupidity (AS) refers to the construction of a device (or program) with independent reasoning power — a brain. The test for stupidity is widely accepted to be: (roughly) If a conversation with the device cannot be differentiated from a similar conversation with a human being then the device can be called stupid.

AS research has produced a number of excellent tools and products, including voice unrecognition, gaming bots, the Three Laws of Robotics by Isaac Asimov, one more cry movie by Steven Spielberg and the ability of Microsoft Windows to crash on the most lethal moments. However, despite immense amounts of money and research, and despite all these ancillary products, true artificial stupidity — a sentient computer, capable of initiative and seamless human interaction — has yet to come to fruition, and is no longer taken terribly seriously by the skeptical community.

John Searle proposed his “Chinese Room” thought experiment to demonstrate that a computer program merely shuffles symbols around according to simple rules of syntax, but no semantic grasp of what the symbols really mean is obtained by the program. As most human beings tend to act the same way, he hereby gives a promising view on the future of AS.

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Wow…

A lot of truth in that post @chrisfostertv

		hopefully we will now have some more human software
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Just because an A.I. is on par with a human being doesn’t make it all that bright. Especially if the human in question likes watching survivor and drinking cheap American beer before going to bed to do their 9 to 5 rat race the next day. Spin that wheel Marv! round you go round and round and round!

There seems to be a meme going around in this place, that positions AI as being more pertinent than science fiction.

Next up, we’ll be jumping the shark and embracing the ‘singularity’ …can we just get over AI, it has nothing whatsoever do do with ProjectSAFE.

@dirvine discusses this topic:

People talk about AI as building larger smarter computers (IBM Watson etc.). My conjecture is that it’s not a large thing you build, it should be like ants. Lots of very small things with very few rules that are easily followed. Deborah did like this approach as I attempted to dispel the AI myth of a supercomputer. Each complex system should not do too much, like ants they have a limited function to do, too many functions is inordinately difficult to cope with. It’s the combination of complex systems that make up larger systems, not building Goliath systems, humans are not that smart (yet).

So in maidsafe our network nodes are like ants, they will react to different messages and routes of messages and change their persona (harvester → forager etc.). This builds a very large scale complex and sophisticated ability, in the same way nature does (cells in the body are the same, neurons in the brain etc.). We have about 7 main personas.

The variables involved to build a single complex system like Watson are in my opinion unnatural and not found in nature (it’s like creating God or something silly like that).

So complex colonies or cell groupings is in our ability and in maidsafe we have done this to create a very complex system that manages data. It does so using three guiding principles for the node.

1: Protect self
2: Protect data (food)
3: Protect network (colony)

Each of these rules govern what a node will do, so it will delete bad data, it will self terminate on getting a virus (others will terminate it as well). It will terminate itself to save some data. It will lose data to save the network.

It’s a bit of a mind shift for everyone, but in my wee world inside my head it makes perfect sense and it’s a replica of natural systems in action,

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Well as fascinating as this AI stuff is, I’m wondering about functionality.

Leaving aside the spiritual question as to whether corporations are good, if we have a corporation which wants to exist using the SAFE network, how much would it it need to build on top of the basic structures?

How many and what kind of personas are permitted to each account?
If a group wants to have access and accountability as to each other, but still enjoy the anonymity of the SAFE network as to all other parties, to what degree can they have their cake and eat it too?
What ways exist to solve the secure local back-up problem? (What happens if the connection gets cut but the computers have power, obviously you have want to have a local back-up, but if that back is centralized and server-based what have you really gained?)

Suarez fiction books are a meditation on this. Demon and Freedom in paricular. Dumb AI would be enough to be quite disruptive.

So what I meant by local server backup is server grade hardware and it might be two, three or more boxes. The OS, could be something like CoreOS, Project Atomic, Kubernetes or an Openstack TripleO

i.e a system for deploying and managing big numbers of containers/ VM’s which can be running vaults.

So if you had say 1000 desktops running vaults, maybe you’d run 4,000, 8,000 vaults or whatever the ratio is determined as appropriate on the Server grade boxes, .

So, no backup tapes or file level backups, no client/server, just farms of live container/ VM’s participating in the local network.

So you have rock solid data security, no viruses/malware to corrupt the data and apps, no backup regime, and more?

It does centralize intrusion risk as far as the backup machines go, but the desktops themselves, also hold all the chunks.

TripleO is an interesting system, not ready for prime time…but will have a Continuous Integration (CI) system built in and provide an easy way of cloning boxes to data center level if required.

I’m just riffing some ideas here, as I cant see businesses going straight to global SAFE and it would be a fun exercise in a lab setup.