Meet the DAO chief who wants artificial intelligence to take his job

Word on the Block | Forkast.News

A recent US$40 million-plus bid for a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution by 17,437 virtual strangers may have failed to win the prized historical document, but it thrust the decentralized autonomous organization that united them into the spotlight.

ConstitutionDAO’s audacious campaign, which raised the money for its auction bid within a week, catapulted not only itself but also the entire DAO phenomenon into the public consciousness.

A DAO is like a virtual flash mob — a leaderless group of like-minded people working together toward a common interest. Governance is achieved through the use of smart contracts and votes among members who use tokens instead of ballot papers.

If this novel fusion of a leaderless organizational structure with decentralized technology can work to get auction bids up and running, who’s to say it can’t be applied in the finance arena?

Not Marcello Mari, the CEO of SingularityDAO — which is using SingularityNET’s artificial intelligence technology to handle the complex tasks of data processing and crypto asset management in decentralized finance.

“Imagine an AI that can do price prediction for you, analyze the different market trends, and make suggestions for you on your crypto investments,” Mari told Forkast.News in a video interview. “People can just invest in this basket of tokens in these portfolios, and then the AI will do everything else for them.

Yet even in an organizational structure that appears as democratized as a DAOs, the issue of power concentration persists: the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” is critically compromised by the fact that those who hold large proportions of issued tokens command a commensurately large share of votes.

“My vision is to have DAOs that are actually managed by artificial intelligence delegates,” Mari said. “What we want to see in the future is AIs that are able to make decisions based on the community vote.”

Despite this decentralized ideal, Mari’s position as a DAO chief remains a contradiction in terms. So SingularityDAO has its sights set on complete decentralization over the next five years to phase the leadership role out as its users become accustomed to its artificial design.

“If this happens in five years’ time, I’m done. I’m out. I don’t need to be the CEO of the DAO anymore,” Mari said.

Watch Mari’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about how DAOs work, how AI will shape DAOs and DeFi and where ConstitutionDAO went wrong.