A prince and a politician walk into a…

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Jul 25, 2022 View in browser   By Ben Schreckinger Presented by Comcast With help from Derek Robertson Bückeburg Palace. | Wikimedia Commons A prince, a politician and a bunch of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, walk into a palace in Germany. It's not the set-up of a very heady joke. It's what happened earlier this month when representatives of the past, present and possible future of human organization came together at Bückeburg Palace in Lower Saxony, some 170 miles west of Berlin. The two-week DAO incubator organized by Heinrich Donatus, Prince of Schaumberg-Lippe, brought together about three-dozen people to figure out what DAOs can do and speed up their adoption. In the end, it remains unclear what, exactly, DAOs might be good for, according to Germany's former vice chancellor, Philipp Rösler, who paid a visit to the gathering and said he, nonetheless, remains intrigued by their possibilities. "It's an additional way of decision-making," said Rösler, now head of strategy for the World Economic Forum, which released a report last month to acquaint policymakers with DAOs. He added that the process of comparing DAOs to existing models of organization was just beginning. "Only at the end," he said, "will we know if it's really better than the classical ones." DAOs grant governance powers to holders of blockchain tokens, an organizational structure that proponents say can create better incentives and allow for more nimble operations. By allowing people to easily pool risk and trade ownership rights, joint stock corporations, which took off in 17th century Europe, enabled the pursuit of more risky, complex and long-lasting endeavors. DAO proponents think their innovation could be just as important. But what if DAOs are just a solution looking for a problem? Schaumberg-Lippe, 28, whose family owns the palace, said that existing DAOs skew "highly utopian" and should do more to engage directly with the real world. He suggests that DAOs might make it easier for people to organize and pool resources for purposes like insurance and lending in parts of the developing world that lack social infrastructure. Right now, many DAOs are focused on blockchain-based decentralized finance. Another early focus has been online crowdfunding: MoonDAO has raised millions of dollars to send two people to space on a Blue Origin voyage, and ConstitutionDAO, which had a member at the palace, raised $47 million in a failed bid to buy an original copy of the U.S. Constitution late last year. As I mentioned last week, more than a dozen DAOs now own land , and dozens more are looking to acquire it, many with the intention of forming new DAO-governed communities. Incubator participants concluded that some DAOs are more centralized than they let on, and that many DAOs serve redundant purposes, so there is already a need for a framework for combining DAOs. The prince, whose family ruled the area around the palace until the early 20th century, said that the experience showed DAOs could learn from one aspect of the royal-palace model of governance: To organize something, it helps for people to get together in one place face to face, even if DAO members then scatter to the four winds. Next, he wants to form DAOESCO — a play on UNESCO — by setting up more incubators in other underused cultural heritage sites. While DAO creators figure out how to make themselves useful, he figures, they can at least bring some energy and economic activity to rural areas. A message from Comcast: Help Americans make the most of the Internet. Digital Navigators are an important part of broadband infrastructure. Learn why Comcast supports funding these guides who are teaching digital skills in communities across the country.   Applied AI A doctor interviews a patient. | Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo There aren't many fields with higher stakes than health care, which means that AI applied to health care comes with a particularly high level of scrutiny. That resulted in some good news last week: As POLITICO's Ruth Reader reported for Pro subscribers , three new studies show that an AI model developed by the startup Bayesian Health is remarkably accurate in identifying potential cases of sepsis, a potentially deadly reaction to the presence of bacteria in the bloodstream. (Bayesian Health's founder, Johns Hopkins University computer science and health policy professor Suchi Saria, is an expert on AI for the FDA, whose work in the field we noted last week .) Crucially, Bayesian Health's AI is good not just at spotting sepsis cases, but also at avoiding false positives. That means that doctors ended up responding to nearly 90 percent of the alerts given, an especially important finding given high-profile cases like that of the health software giant Epic, whose sepsis model was found last year in a study to have accurately identified just a third of sepsis patients and produced a massive number of false alarms — something Steven Lin, executive medical director of Stanford's Healthcare AI Applied Research team, told Ruth was a "wake up call" for both the health care and AI industries. — Derek Robertson afternoon snack Who doesn't appreciate some free advice? …on second thought, don't answer that: Yesterday a viral Twitter thread from a crypto-world influencer offered some unsolicited ideas for how some of the world's biggest companies could apply Web3 principles to their business, including: Amazon "decentralizing" to allow users to store goods for delivery in their backyards Converting Starbucks reward points into NFTs Creating new Monster energy drink flavors through a decentralized autonomous organization These ideas might sound sort of outlandish — especially in the impenetrable-to-outsiders crypto jargon by which they're presented (and they certainly earned their author her share of opprobrium ). The thread reveals two truths about the crypto community: it sees hyper-ambitious blue-sky thinking as a virtue in its own right, and is convinced that blockchain technology can be a powerful tool for transforming or supplanting existing institutions. For those ambitious transformations to take place, however, it helps if people are actually dissatisfied with existing institutions — while the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street largely fueled Bitcoin's growth, there aren't exactly mass street protests demanding an overhaul of Starbucks' rewards program. — Derek Robertson   A message from Comcast:   the future in 5 links Listen to the story of how crypto firm Celsius failed in a manner fairly similar to the banks it sought to supplant. Unglamorous, non-meme-producing AIs still comprise the majority of the tech's actual footprint . The team behind Meta's failed crypto project is raising big VC money . Roblox is preparing to expand its platform beyond just the world of gaming. Some experts are skeptical of maximalist claims about advances in Chinese chip-making. Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ( bschreckinger@politico.com ); Derek Robertson ( drobertson@politico.com ); Konstantin Kakaes ( kkakaes@politico.com );  and Heidi Vogt ( hvogt@politico.com ). Follow us on Twitter @DigitalFuture . Ben Schreckinger covers tech, finance and politics for POLITICO; he is an investor in cryptocurrency. If you've had this newsletter forwarded to you, you can sign up here . And read our mission statement here . A message from Comcast: To compete with the world in the 21st century, Americans must be connected to high-speed Internet at home. Digital Navigators are an important part of broadband infrastructure. A new Boston Consulting Group study, supported by Comcast, discovered that Americans are finding better jobs, healthcare, and housing online after learning digital skills from these guides. Learn how Digital Navigators are helping connect our nation – and why we must fund their efforts.     INTRODUCING POWER SWITCH: The energy landscape is profoundly transforming. Power Switch is a daily newsletter that unlocks the most important stories driving the energy sector and the political forces shaping critical decisions about your energy future, from production to storage, distribution to consumption. Don't miss out on Power Switch, your guide to the politics of energy transformation in America and around the world. SUBSCRIBE TODAY .       Follow us on Twitter Ben Schreckinger @SchreckReports Derek Robertson @afternoondelete Konstantin Kakaes @kkakaes Heidi Vogt @HeidiVogt   Follow us

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