With the recent Ethereum and The DAO issues that have thrown arguments on the credibility of autonomous systems, Synereo which proposes itself as a semi-autonomous system will make available the Alpha release of its decentralized platform in September.
Synereo says that its platform will offer all the layers necessary to create dApps in the emerging decentralized economy. It will create fully distributed protocols and applications that would be truly scalable by being rooted in process calculus, a mathematical approach developed specifically to reason about distributed and parallel computing.
Those behind the platform believe the human element is necessary in working autonomously as machines and programmes are not sufficiently advanced to get things completely right.
“The issue is: if you build a public economic censorship resistant compute infrastructure, in other words you store the state of a global computer on a blockchain in such a way that nobody can actually take it down then as you build programmes that run on this computer, they also can’t be taken down,” says Greg Meredith, Synereo’s Chief Technology Officer, in an interview in episode 75 of The Bitcoin Podcast titled Attention Economy.
He adds:
“So they have a kind of autonomous agency and if we then hand over to those programmes missions critical digital assets such as the ability to start a car via Internet of Things kind of thing or drive an entire fleet of vehicles or move a large amount of funds around the globe, these are really serious issues and kind of scary.
We are giving these programmes a kind of autonomy that we have to really think about very hard. One of the reasons we have to think about them very hard is as I said in a recent interview on EtherReview we really can’t know what programmes do. I don’t think people understand that. We cannot know what programmes do.”
The hosts of the podcast say Synereo’s formally-verified smart contracting language would have prevented the attack on The DAO. They also said they have had positive response from many conversations they had about the sharing of Synereo’s “DAO attack-preventing” code and interest in working with the platform and utilizing their smart contracting framework has risen.
According to the CEO of Synereo, Dor Konforty, the first decentralized application of Synereo will be a social layer, which is part of a larger platform that would make required tools available for developers including designs and features to create fully decentralized applications. It “would underlie a completely new type of economy that is decentralized in nature where any agent on the net could connect with any other and communicate or exchange value directly without any type of middle man, knowing that by just mutually agreeing to use a protocol, they’re covered; the transaction is trustable.”
