 We're gonna now jump into our next talk Vinay Gupta was going to actually be present in person But due to a last-minute change was unable to be with us. So instead he's streaming live from London We're really glad to have Vinay with us Vinay is founder and CEO of Materium a Blockchain technology company bridging the virtual and physical economies with buyer and seller protection For physical asset NFTs He contributed to the release of the blockchain platform Ethereum He has long had a humanitarian concern with the condition of the poorest in society and disaster relief He invented the cheap simple non-patented non-patented and open-source hexa-yurt refugee shelter which has gone on to become iconic in the burning man counterculture Vinay, I told you that you would have a timer that you'd be able to see I apologize due to a last-minute change We do not have we're not able to send the timer in your direction, but no worries You can at least hear us and we will have we'll open it for questions for Vinay at the end of the talk So Take it away Vinay. Thank you Hey, great. Could you turn on screen-sharing? Consumers you do that because I have a couple slides and I want to show you could be what what was that? Screen-sharing currently turned off. Oh, yeah I will enable screen-share just a sec. Sorry about that. Okay. No worries. Thank you. Okay. All right. There we go I don't many slides just a couple to say so I didn't really want for a complex framing for this talk and This afternoon when I started to think about okay, I better get ready It suddenly came to me that what I should have called it was moral computing So moral computing it is Um There's really whole process really started during the pandemic when I sat down and I got an invitation to write a short book 15,000 words more of a pamphlet for an English publishing house that wanted to do a series of books Called the future of and they said to me today write us something the future of something What do you want to write about and so I wrote a little book called the future of stuff Which was basically an attempt to sort of breathe some life into Gandhi's ideas about fair trade It was an attempt to really get a sort of nice clear 21st century statement about what the moral responsibility is that we have for the things that we consume And so I wrote this book during the pandemic when business was kind of dead slow and then over the last year or so What I've been doing is weaving more and more and more of these kind of Gandhi and principles Into the company that I'm building called materium, which is a fairly standard blockchain company only with a lot more lawyers They're not more middle-aged folks So What I'm playing out here is basically a moral and technical argument For the way that we could start straightening out the world by using computers to do what they're good at And yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about today so I want to start with the concept of a moral toxin and a moral toxin is a Bad thing which you know is happening, but you don't know enough about it to stop it happening and This stuff kind of builds up in your system in much the same way that say I don't know various kinds of chemical Contamination from plastic softeners build up a people's system You know all these stories you get about you know, the amount of benzene and whale blubber in the Arctic making it too toxic for the asking most to eat Into it. I think it's the correct term these days You know, there are moral equivalents inside of our society, right? Most people me included by things that we know were made in China Under uncertain labor conditions at the very least an authoritarian government Certainly a place where it's very difficult to negotiate for workers rights or even unionize and then you also have this, you know suspicion of like maybe slave labor, right, you know Uggers and you know one part of China, you know, are we really buying things from those places? Is it really slave labor? Certainly a bad scene. And so what we wind up with is this kind of nagging hard to voice unease that our lifestyles make us bad people And the nagging hard to pin down aspect of that Is the thing that makes it kind of insidiously destructive of our peace of mind and our general welfare because we know that there's a problem But we don't really have any mechanism to do anything about it. There is no cause and effect relationship It's like a it's like a broad spectrum moral toxin in the same way that we have broad spectrum environmental toxicity But in the case of the moral toxins, there is no EPA. There's nothing to protect us Um, so with that as a sort of context What I then want to basically talk about is what's the technology technological angle of handling this moral toxicity? And this is really a question about knowledge Right the people that manufacture and when you grab some random plastic object, right? And you know the thing that I use to watch the deer out my back window You know, it's some little plastic telescope doohickey and it's great But you know like what do I really know about where this was made or who made it or how it was made or the conditions it was made under How do I know the stuff it's made out? It was not kind of poisonous There's just a whole bundle of unknowns around this thing And what's ironic about that is that somebody knows Every single piece of information there is about this, you know the shape of the lenses It's all in the cnc file somewhere the material there's a spec sheet that somebody has for the material Both the specification for somebody bought this thing But also the information that came directly from the providers All the chemicals that went into making that plastic these things were bought off spec sheets And those spec sheets could be tied into material safety databases And it ought to be possible Given the all of the information exists to give this thing a very very very clear description You know of its composition right down to the place where the materials to make this thing were mined and The fact that all that knowledge is already there all that information is there It's not like we have to go and do a lab analysis to figure this stuff out The information is all present in the supply chain. It's just you know the The information is getting bottlenecked. So when I buy this object the money smoothly flows You know From me through my credit card to amazon through their payment rail To the manufacturer to their workers to their vendors to their vendors vendors to their vendors vendors vendors to their vendors vendors vendors workers So we have a direction of travel for the money for the money can smoothly smoothly seamlessly flow to the ends of the earth But the information about what the money is accomplishing Is dammed up and walled off and you know siloed and we are protected and he used the term in a very Scarecrow way We are protected from the knowledge About how the things that we are using were really created And the result of that is that the entire world is sort of Toxified by the vague feeling that everything that we touch is probably made by slaves And it's destroying the world for you know us as we age and our children and their children particularly their children But we can't get to the bottom of that and we can't get stuck to it because the information is siloed inside of organizations And those of you who are familiar with blockchain at this point your ears will be pricking up like Did you say information silos spread all over the world? I think I have a fix for that so What my company did before the pandemic before I had a chance to sit down and have a think about this was Kind of a very narrow specific use case, right? What we wanted to do was we wanted to build a physical gateway so that you could exchange cryptocurrency for physical assets Gold real estate fine wine fine art Collectibles in the first phase and then in the second phase consumer electronics furniture clothing and transportation vehicles How do you do that? You need super accurate information about what products are And you need the super accurate information about products are because blockchain payments are known with UD8 Somebody rips you over the blockchain transaction. You cannot call amazon customer service to fix it for you so Getting the time to sit and think and reflect about, you know Different parts of my life and how to bring them together That always been very interested in gandhi's work. I had a long career as a humanitarian attempting to get, you know, solutions to things like climate refugees um But I had never really built the moral bridge intellectual bridge Between that side of my life and that side of my work and the side that was much more directly related to You know the blockchain in the future of technology And that bridge building turns out to be a pretty pragmatic thing I'm just going to share screen here for a second and actually show you a thing that we do If I can find the window. I don't know. Where is it going? Come on technology Come on do me a favor here. Just work the first time. I lost my window No, no, no, no, no, sorry. This is going to take me a tenth of a second Oh, no, what has it done? There we go, right Off like a herd of startled turtles um, so There we go share screen Oh, come on. What is it done? No, I tend to share screen. I can't find the window that I'm trying to share This is terrible nightmare. Come on. Just share the right window. Damn you. There it is. Okay Apologies for that so This is a thing called a material massive passport. This is fundamentally what my company does for living So, you know, on one side you have a famous Australian DJ who wants to sell recording stopped Oh and uh on the other side, um, there is A set of documentation about what the asset is, you know, here is the thing And on the other side here is the documentation about the thing So This is one of the first assets that we've done that has integrated inside of it this thing that we call a Warranty claim on a carbon offset So you look at the individual object And inside of the data about the object, there is a claim which says producing the NFT for this thing, you know I created 300 kilograms of co2 So 300 kilograms of co2 and then what's issued from that is a digital certificate That says for that object You know, can we prove that there was an offset purchase which removed that co2 and surely enough here is And that's a mechanism. You sort of look at that and this is not rocket surgery You know, there is no neural network. There is no AI. There isn't deep learning It's simply a legal statement in a machine readable form That when you purchase a specific object a secondary action is taken which is some carbon is bought on your behalf And that sort of approach is so simple That you can easily imagine, you know this becoming a standard way of approaching things You know if you're going to move a lot of global trade onto the blockchain Which I think is an expected outcome over the next 10 years There's no reason that as we move that trade on chain We cannot make the systems bi-directional, you know when you purchase something with money You also get a set of information about that asset that becomes attached to your wallet I paid this much money for this thing over here. It emitted 12 tons of carbon in the process Here is my 12 tons of carbon offsets that are happening somewhere else in the system And here's the documentary evidence which is stored in an immutable ledger IPFS or something along these lines So that we can go and verify for ourselves that those offsets are there and that we really are protecting in a chunk of rainforest As we've compensated for the fact that we did a lot of snowmobiling that year and those kind of systems like It's not that those things fix the world in and of themselves, right? You know, if you don't have the ultra cheap solar panels and you don't have some modification to the western lifestyle There's no way that we're going to be able to get the planet stabilized but What we can do is we can start this process of cleaning up the economy through this kind of transparency Using the blockchain to create a level playing field and to prove that people aren't telling one person one thing and somebody else something else and Those factors together You know, plus the cheap transactions plus things like cryptographic identities. So you can tell who it is that says something Is true Those systems together look to me like they could complete the loop on trade You know, rather than it just being money goes out and goods come back money goes out goods and information come back And by combining, you know the goods and the information and the money into a single backbone the blockchain system I think it's possible that you would get a fairer world emerging as a combination of two forces Firstly the simple moral pressure a kind of vegan approach or trying to push people towards better outcome and then on the other side of that The prospect that having true transparency about goods generates a fundamentally more efficient economy Because it allows us to do things like machine Based searches for what we want in a kind of specification driven way, you know, I want a you know 60 millimeter long Hex head nut with the following screw threading and I could go out there and I could get something like that Automatically located found maybe you can purchase on my behalf because machine readable specifications allow us to automate procurement Um, and in that world machine readable specifications automation of procurement. I can then say hey, you know Don't let me buy anything that has a substantial risk of being manufactured by slave labour And anything that I buy that contains a substantial amount of carbon buy me offsets for it at the same time And when we talk about you know concepts like you know automated morality or moral computing This is the kind of idea that you can have computers Support your chosen pattern of moral behaviour As long as we have the data to indicate which goods and services fall clear on those moral spectra And then you set what your acceptable criteria are and the machines take care of the legwork of actually being a moral citizen For that set of cases There's a lot more going on We all have individual moral decisions that we have to make but this kind of background smog of immorality Which is at the basis of things like climate change and the labour conditions around the world I think that stuff we could potentially automate away Um, so that's it. That was what I had to say today. Um, thank you very much for listening and really really sad I can't be there. Uh, it really I'm on the wrong side of the world, but that does happen sometimes Is there anything that would prevent the digital twins of people From being an NFT traded on a supply chain like materium? Like in human capital bond markets Is there anything that would prevent something like that? So Materium was a very strong rule that we don't do this thing for anything that's alive Right. Um, could somebody else do something like this for actual humans? Sure I'm you know, any any imaginable evil thing somebody in the world will do if you let them um, but I think that the Nature of the chain would make it very difficult to do that kind of stuff and get away with it Because if you have all the documentation online that proves what it is that you're selling It also makes it very very easy for people to find you and arrest you if you're doing something Which is inherently, you know, like deeply illegal in that way Digital twins he says Digital twins I may have misunderstood the question. So could you could you clarify it a little? Next question they said Okay Uh, yeah, my question is as you're helping to create these contracts between parties How do you help instill trust between some of the agents or um, how do you implement some of these? Ricardian like contracts from the human behavior side Yes, so the approach that we take on this is there are no facts in the material system The material system doesn't allow people to discuss facts at all All that we have is liabilities. So party a says, you know, this is a good condition 57 buick and it's all original parts including the engine And if it isn't you could claim up to say, you know, 150 000 dollars in damages and That approach to have every single piece of information that a person uses to make a decision be directly backed by a warranty Provides a really really high standard of trust in the transaction Be very specific because we don't trust the people And that is an approach which also allows you to have 10 20 30 40 50 people Use their assets to underwrite the truth about some set of Transactions And so we begin to create a kind of commercial web of trust where there is interdependency between many parties to credential each other's assets And then also things like insurers come into handle the sort of backbone risk management And so it all comes down to basically being able to get a recoverable assets to keep people honest Thank you Thank you very much, Vinay. Let's have another hand for Vinay Gupta Thank you all very much