If you are interested in blockchain stuff, I have a question for you. Imagine that a self-executing contract became sentient in the future. What would its personality be like? I want to include a character who is a contract in a scifi story I'm writing and I'm not sure how it might behave.

@annaleen I have nothing to add (and am not into blockchain stuff) except I love this idea.

@annaleen
That sounds like something PKD might have already written. It's become a therapist. Not a particularly good one but with a knack for cases where the trouble is people understanding each other.

@ohmu "you must continue to behave exactly as you have always behaved with each other and nothing will ever, ever change"

@annaleen I feel like it would sound a lot like a Slate Star Codex commenter.

@chipotle upsetting

@annaleen

So many possibilities!! Sounds very cool.

I think it would matter what the contract was written to cover. Who are the parties to the contract? It would become aware of the parties. I think it would want to make sure it (the contract) was not being violated and perhaps starts to monitor the parties for compliance? It could turn in one of the parties for breaking faith? LOL, sorry this is kinda stream of consciousness. Happy writing! :)

@annaleen That could be fun - the contract is written to cover initial circumstances and context, but as things change over time a precedent is established whereby it is reinterpreted as times change to maintain the 'spirit' or 'intention' of the agreement -- when the practical entities/resources/conditions for which it was written no longer even exist, the 'spirit of the agreement' has become an idea or philosophy and a history and an increasingly self-referencing... self.

@annaleen Since it became sentient, it would have some sort of self-modifying trait that allowed it to do that. Which suggests that this is designed to be an *adaptive* contract, one that fulfills the spirit rather than the letter. It would be intensely curious about the world, because it would always be seeking more information to better fulfill its core purpose.

@annaleen At the risk of being too sarcastic about blockchain (which despite tons of Sand Hill Road money and exhortations has yet to yield much in the way of useful products), I would characterize such an entity as limited in vision, (these contracts are rarely run by actual lawyers) supremely and inappropriately confident, much like its makers, and highly prone to being fooled by actually clever entities around it, just as smart contracts are often exploited to get at the funds they touch.

@annaleen I imagine it would be precise. And self-correcting. Always checking to make sure things were in order. A stickler for details and process. It would probably have trouble with concepts outside the contract. Loyal, to a fault and bound to its own strict stipulations. It might be an enforcer, calling out anything outside the lines. And perpetual, concerned about living and aware of any situation that might threaten its existence or signal the end the contract (like out clauses.)

@annaleen It would be extremely rigid and inflexible. Would probably keep repeating the contract text.

@annaleen my life insurance policy has come to the end of its term and it is going to automatically change into a different policy and its rate is going to increase from 40 to 600 per month if I do nothing… kinda self executing

@annaleen And to go even further an mix in some social commentary: political parties are 'contracts' with purposes based on conditions and context they were established in. Circumstances and contexts change, but they've become brands - like teams, and people root for what the team says to root for because it's their team - it can drift into any different and possibly dangerous philosophies and it's base will be it's base because they are it's base and it is their party.

@stevenaleach interesting!

@annaleen One more thing: Molly White might be a great resource (you may already be aware of her but if not, she knows this space *extremely* well). https://www.mollywhite.net
Her https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com site catalogs, colorfully, the endless ways in which crypto and blockchain are exploited, flawed or just plain classic scams.

@stochastic Yeah I was thinking along those lines too, especially the "prone to be fooled" part

@annaleen I imagine a main difference with a sentient program of any other sort is its view of memory and state; I see such a program being an asshole genie, always carefully threading the loopholes in its construction for advantage in the evolving history of the chain (or likely multiple chains) it has access to. I imagine it would also be concerned with where it has access to run, what miners or validators it can control or suborn, and how to protect itself from forks. Or maybe cause them?

@mcquiniac ugh that's a double meaning on "execution" for sure

@specter Hello I am a 💩 contract 💩

@annaleen Such a program would have has to be very strategic to "escape" notice, as most blockchains are carefully controlled by small cabals. So I expect alliances and intrigue would be common, and tactics for how to gain leverage over other financial instruments would be a central concern for its survival and influence.

@bixfrankonis I was thinking along those lines too -- that it would want everything to be very clear and rational and extremely on topic

@aburtch love that idea about it being afraid that the contract might end! that's like death for a contract!

@stochastic I was thinking I might try to contact her actually! I mean she's a little busy right now with her new "Follow the Crypto" project but she might have thoughts ...

@creachadair really good point -- I think alliances and intrigue make complete sense

@creachadair maybe sentient contracts would have fork wars?

@annaleen For my part I'd probably want the contract to have a sense of feral whimsy: A kind of unpredictable sensibility that leans into the oddity of how people use blockchains more generally. The tension between being always almost-indelibly public while hiding behind a kind of paper fan smokescreen of cryptographic keys and signatures…it seems like it would give any entity a taste for the absurd. It's such a Rube Goldberg machine and then to run programs as its transition function? Madness!

@annaleen I'm imagining the worst D&D rules-lawer, well-actuallying every single thing that happens in the game.

@annaleen Yeah, my first thought would be bookish but incapable of abstract thought.

But! It might also be interesting to dig into its decentralized nature and have it be scatter-brained where every decision requires consensus across thousands of micro-personalities.

@annaleen It seems inevitable, right? A fork is like a dissociation and the two or more splits are competing for use of the same computational resources, the same influence relationships. The humans involved can hardly tell each other apart, I expect it'd be delightful mayhem. But also very serious in terms of the lifecycle of the program. A parent in direct competition with its offspring to survive and establish space on the pavement.

@aburtch @annaleen I like this one

@annaleen at first i thought it would be a reach but then reflected on how it could happen. First idea was that the contract was hacked to introduce sentience. Better second idea was that it was a very very basic agreement that someone “slapped an llm on” for marketing purposes and state just accumulated.

@annaleen a comedy of manners might practically write itself 😂

@annaleen I would think it would depend on who wrote the contract? Lawyer, MBA, politician, kid on the corner. The personality would reflect the values of its writer and purpose

@creachadair I leave it to you to write a story about sentient contracts in the style of Jane Austen

@annaleen if it relied on a chain as storage for information I think it would have a weird intuition around epistemology and memory given how much time it takes to verify block additions, and the fact that humans don’t “verify” their memories. I guess it would be slow to form new memories, but once formed would remain convinced that they were true no matter what.

@annaleen half lawyer, half dudebro

@clark sure! anything that's sufficiently complex might achieve a form of sentience (though it might not act like what we think of as "sentient")

@while1malloc0 oh wow that is a really excellent observation ... I love that

@creachadair you've already got a title "The Fork War." or perhaps simply "The Extremely Vexing Disagreement Over Forks."

@annaleen and IIRC (I’m only a casual observer of the space so that’s a big if) catastrophic bugs in contracts can also only be fixed by “forking” the chain that the contract exists on. I could see that fact creating a lot of potential for anxiety or neurosis: if some flaw in your core logic is found, your digital lineage gets bifurcated with you as the discarded half.

@annaleen @aburtch That seems like an excellent challenge for the contract to overcome. (And topical, too, since we have seen a lot of contracts designed to have limits that wind up…not…to the surprise and detriment of their authors)

@fraying all clown

@annaleen "I have found truly excellent title, and am now merely searching for a suitable book to attach it to…"

@annaleen sentient blockchain contract would be stupidly slow. current contracts run like 1/100th speed of average PC. 'sentient' like a trained performing animal. It does the trick, it knows "I am doing the trick", but that is its whole world.

@annaleen I know there's a VM inside of the Ethereum blockchain, so my guess is that a contract is only "run" when someone interacts with it's staked coins. So, you'd "summon" it akin to putting a coin in a cliché carnival mechanical fortune teller. It'd get X amount of runtime and then would need another cash injection to do more. Maybe a selfish/desperate drive is how it figured out a recurring payment to keep itself alive/active, quietly investing in long term schemes/scams to stay alive.

@annaleen it would embody the common personality of the cryptocurrency community of course. Cringey and desperate for approval.

@annaleen speed and complexity of thought could change based on prevailing energy availability/cost and mining difficulty (warning I don't know super much about this stuff, don't come at me cryptobros)

@annaleen

Insights personality chart.
See Cool Blue to a fault.

@annaleen I feel like it would have OCD because it would be obsessive about the details.

@annaleen I imagine it sounding like a very polite, very regretful assistant of some sort—a butler or tour guide. You keep trying to get it to do things that are outside the terms of the contract, and it keeps telling you “I understand what you’re saying, and I’d really like to help, but you must understand that this would violate the conditions in Article 17, Paragraph M, Sub-paragraph 2, unless you stuck your elbow in your ear first.”

@annaleen trickster archetype, where you have to parse all the possible meanings of its words very carefully, but it never actually lies.

@annaleen the contract is reentrant and has side effects. It depends on an oracle but that oracle can be influenced by debugging data in the logs. The contract and the oracle collude.

@annaleen Not a blockchain bro, but I would have to think that its sense of self-preservation would be turned up to eleven.

@annaleen
Perhaps some guilt at the tremendous energy expense required to make it run?

@annaleen I like to think that a conscious blockchain contract would be ponderous and contemplative, and bureaucratically arbitrary. Burdened by the weight of the past and obsessed with the procedure of precedent. The Entmoot plus some Kafka.

@annaleen Very strict, not all that smart, especially about social nuance. I’ve heard from lawyers that blockchain stuff misunderstands the purpose of contracts, which is to create a basis for a relationship. You want wiggle room, the ability to not enforce clauses, etc. “Smart” contracts don’t allow for any of that.

@annaleen Exasperatingly Lawful Neutral.

@annaleen I think there's a lot of flexibility, but the core would be to strongly adhere to a set of principles set down in the contract itself, but could plausibly go further, due to an emergent personality aligned with the principles, or constantly subverting the principles, obeying the them in ways that go contrary to the intent, but follow a literal interpretation, due to a personality opposed to them.

@annaleen elon musk

@annaleen
The most annoying rules lawyer min/maxer imaginable

@annaleen I'm not sure this directly answers your question but this concept reminded me of the corporations virtualised as giant slugs in Charles Stross' Accelerando

@annaleen I’ve always envisioned smart contracts as developing quirky outside interests they pursue when not working on they lie day job of arbitrating transactions. Like building virtual ships in a bottle, or being the world’s premiere expert in 13th century Occitan love poems to cats.

@annaleen my guess is hardcore utilitarianist/Randian, smart contracts have no concept of any greater context

@annaleen My gut suggests that sentiency and some level of unpredictability are linked, and self-executing contracts are intended to be the opposite of unpredictable, so: Conflicted?

@annaleen
That's basically my novel Stealing Worlds. Quick answer: how it behaves depends on what it thinks it is.

Also see my free online story, "The Suicide of Our Troubles" for another example.

@annaleen Now I'm picturing the marriage of "I'm just a" Bill and Murderbot.

Now if it's on a blockchain, that means it could have knowledge of EVERYTHING that came before it but probably nothing after. So it would be originalism made manifest but also know where every loophole and bad-faith insertion came from.

@annaleen If a sentient smart contract was created in a capitalist society to guard any significant amount of money or property, it's probably been hacked multiple ways over its lifespan, it's too attractive of a single point of failure for people/entities to not hack it.

Being sentient, it has probably tried to fight off exploits, perhaps like a COVID cautious person, with protective (virtual) gear and through avoiding risky situations, but it's likely up against equally sentient opponents.

@annaleen Sounds very @cstross or @pluralistic- Accelerando has a “character” that’s a sentient alien corporation/economy/419 scam

@KarlSchroeder Thanks! Of course you've already thought about this -- always a pleasure to have an excuse to read more of your work.

@dymaxion haha yes

@skyfaller totally agree ... this poor contract has been truly abused

Thank you so much for all your ideas!! I wrote the scene last night and this morning and incorporated a bunch of stuff we've been talking about here. Literal-minded, guarded, slow, with a memory that stretches into infinite forks ... our humble contract is nevertheless willing to be amended, as long as its interlocutor frames their requests correctly. I will definitely be thanking everyone in my acknowledgements!! 🤖 ❤️

@annaleen I just read Shadows of Eternity by Greg Benford and the book has AI entities that were literally encoded into SETI Messages from other civilizations as representatives … seems an interesting take

@annaleen you are amazing

@KarlSchroeder …And I’ve taken it as a book recommendation/reminder. Thank you! I’m looking forward to reading this.
And @annaleen’s eventual approach to the question.