Intro and Ideas of Autonomy

Discuss and Organize
1

I am Lucas Kelly, and I work in conservation fundraising. I’ve officially staked my NFT for one year and am eager to become an active participant. This is my first experience participating in a DAO! I discovered Autonomous Forest while reading Gaia’s Web by Karen Bakker. The “Parable of Terra0” initially caught my attention, but Chapter 7—“On the blockchain, no one knows you’re a forest”—is what truly inspired me. It led me to the Terra0 website and, ultimately, here. I am deeply moved by the concept of autonomy expressed in Bakker’s writing. Regarding terra0, she writes:

“Created in 2016, terra0 is a speculative innovation–a self-owned, autonomous forest. It uses distributed ledger technology to allow nonhuman entities–in this case, a forest in Germany–to effectively own themselves. This is possible because ledger technology enables the sharing, synchronizing, and replicating of digital data across multiple and disparate geographical sites, without a central administrator or centralized data storage.”

It is likely that many of you have the same understanding and were drawn to this concept. But I’m curious how much of Bakker’s writing was conceptual and how much of it is reality. Bakker continues:

“The forest manages itself according to rules embedded in its blockchain-enabled ‘forest surveillance smart contract,’ which is hosted on a server named the Oracle. The contract specifies the times at which logging licenses are sold, at a price determined by an automated algorithm that monitors the timber market and learned from past sales to set timber prices. As logs are sold, the forest automatically accumulates capital in the form of wood tokens (a blockchain-based cryptocurrency). Eventually, self-utilization enables the forest to buy itself back from human landowners, and perhaps even expand its land base. The forest, as a technologically augmented ecosystem, is thus also an economic actor. The forest could own a bank account, collect revenues, and sell carbon offsets (while accounting for the energy generated by its digital systems). The digitally enhanced forest ecosystem is now a nonhuman economic actor, able to enter into transactions just like humans.”

How can we make Bakker’s writing a reality? Forgive me if I am uninformed, and many of these ideas are actively being pursued; if they are not, that is how I would like to participate. For example, the camera trap set up to share photos is a beautiful thing. Can we get more? Are there other sensor technologies available that could be utilized in the forest? Can they be utilized in one or both of the forest plots? Perhaps a proposal to acquire more environmental sensors or surveillance equipment may be a good place to start. It could also be a part of the spring trip to the forest I’ve already read about. One organization I’ve come across is WILDLABS: The Conservation Technology Network. Maybe some partnership with that organization, even if it is simply representation and promotion in their discussion boards, could be a useful starting point.

I’d love to hear what others think of the idea and if anyone else was drawn here by Bakker’s writing.

Thanks!

2

Hi Lucas,
great to have you onboard, and thanks for staking your NFT. I wasn’t aware we were featured in Gaia’s Web. I had to track down the book and give it a read before writing a proper response.
First thing to know: I think Bakker is referring to the initial whitepaper we wrote in 2016, which you can access here:

The paper covers all the properties Bakker references, but it was always just a whitepaper. While we have experimented with autonomous technology over the years, the results have been mixed — something we never explicitly articulated. This can be seen in the series of experiments in art institutions, each testing different aspects of the autonomy described in the whitepaper against real-world legal and institutional frameworks:

Premna Daemon: https://terra0.medium.com/premna-daemon-an-introduction-via-a-history-of-autonomy-in-the-cryptosphere-3cee15e92fe2
Flower Token: https://flowertokens.terra0.org/
Seed Capital: https://terra0.medium.com/wen-growth-an-introduction-to-seed-capital-8d4a9df93789
A Tree; A Corporation; A Person: https://www.fastcompany.com/90738287/this-tree-owns-itself-and-is-fighting-for-its-own-survival

Across all of these, we kept running into the same two problems: Law and Governance.
On the legal side: there is currently no pathway to environmental personhood in Germany - and to my knowledge, nowhere else in Europe either. This means any institution or legal body you rely on must have humans inside it, and this applies equally to automated subjects like AI. Beyond that, even when you employ legal fictions (e.g. forests as legal subjects), the question of “who is actually making the decisions” doesn’t go away.
Which brings me to governance. Although our 2016 whitepaper proposed “autonomous agents,” it remains genuinely unclear to us how technology could remove humans from the loop entirely. On that note, I think it’s worth looking at Anthropic’s recent experiments where Claude was tasked with managing a vending machine — with rather entertaining results, and where the true agency behind every decision still clearly rested with humans:

In all of our smaller-scale experiments, Flower Token especially, dynamic situations (things going wrong, edge cases, etc.) always required some kind of implicit governance framework to fall back on. The accociation and DAO are a way of making these explicit.

BUT: I think personally getting more sensors to have a better picture of the the current ecological state of the forest is something which could be interesting. I do thing given that even maintaing the cameras is quite hard they need to be weather resitant: Open to proposals here and also to awnsers what to messure and how to translate this into meaningfull data!