Digital Gaia is creating an autonomous system for retroactive funding of regenerative public goods.
The traditional paradigm for climate and environmental action is not up to speed with the needs and challenges our world faces.
We unlock the value of the regenerative economy by helping stewards optimize and monetize their projects' impact by creating trust and accountability for investors.
We give Mother Nature money and let her spend it.
Our question is, "if Mother Nature had money, how would she spend it?"
We're giving Nature a fund and building her a brain to deploy it.
It's not a metaphor. It's literally what we're doing.
Right now, we're wrecking Earth (us, humanity 👋), and she's laughing bitterly because the way we're trying to "help her" is by selling carbon credits to "offset the global effects of CO2."
The truth that Nature knows, the truth that makes her laugh bitterly, is that those carbon credits are not enough to save her. There are two reasons:
- The carbon credit issuers have the same incentives as Fannie May & Freddie Mac back in 2007. These issuers are supposed to validate that the credits are reliable, but they're also paid when the credits are validated. Remember how that incentive mix treated us in 2008?
But there's a much bigger concern.
Who cares if Carbon Credits are worthless if they're actually detrimental? That's right, we said it, shockingly obvious fact coming your way: 2. ⭐️ Reducing CO2 in the atmosphere isn't enough ⭐️
Just as investors hold a diversified portfolio, Nature has a diverse set of risks to hedge against.
If Nature had a voice she would say, "Sure, thanks for the CO2 scrubbers, but right now I'm just slightly more worried about how the UK has already lost up to 92% of its seagrass in the last century due to fertilizer runoff. And seagrass is, you know, the lungs of the sea."
But it doesn’t matter she can't say that; even if she had a voice we wouldn't listen. We need to give her money. Humans listen to money.
"Oh great, another 'save the earth token,' don't we have enough of these?" Yeah we definitely do. We're not here to create a token that promises to donate some money to save whales. Gregarious megafauna is so web2.
This grant is not about a token, but rather about charting a credible path to actually making a difference.
Gaia is the Greek Goddess of Earth. This digital brain we're building for her, however, is not mythological.
We're here to fund the development of a sense and response system for Earth's regeneration. We call it the Natural Intelligence Claim Engine. It's nice.
What makes this Claim Engine natural is its core technology, Active Inference, an approach to Artificial Intelligence based on how organisms learn and act in natural systems.
You probably want to know how it works. Here's the sketch of its components:
- An incentive system that rewards people for providing data and contributing models.
- An Active Inference based scoring system for evaluating accurate models and rewarding impactful projects.
- An open forum where proposed projects can find funding based on their NICE score, and where investors and stewards can be rewarded by selling tokens to the Voluntary Carbon Offset Markets.
- (Endgame) An algorithmic trust managed by the NICE to which investors loan money. This flips the script so Nature herself can invest in the projects that she thinks are best.
Instead of CO2 captured, our measure of success is the reduction of free energy. Free energy is an integrated, context-specific measure of efficiency that is fundamental to our Natural Intelligence engine. Free energy can be calculated for any system with active inference agents as an indicator of the healthy trajectory of the system. The lower the free energy, the healthier the system. Some even argue that free energy is the value that Nature herself seeks to minimize; and that symbiosis of economy and ecology is possible in its pursuit.
That’s why the token returned is a Free Energy Reduction Numeraire: a $FERN.
Here's what we need to do:
- Architect the Natural Intelligence (NI) engine.
- Partner with academic researchers to input their domain models (like climate, agriculture, forestry, soil, etc.) as engine building blocks.
- Partner with experienced nature stewards, farm and forest managers, and indigenous people to develop and vet initial templates based on our building blocks.
- Run field tests with our partners, like Santa Fe Farms, to improve regenerative farming outcomes.
- Design and test tokenomics protocols that retroactively fund public goods.
Fund us so we can do those things. Also, you probably would have fun with our team.
Our initial team includes experts in the climate business, as well as the inventors of Natural Intelligence.
- Rafael Kaufmann - Mathematical physicist, expert in systems modeling, Active Inference and collective intelligence.
- Casper Hesp - Leading researcher in Active Inference. Former CTO of Nested Minds Network, the first company to build and commercialize Active Inference-based solutions.
- Ned Harvey - Former Managing Director at Rocky Mountain Institute, a leading energy transition NGO.
- Christian Wiesenthal - CorpDev specialist with extensive experience in carbon markets, climate finance and compliance, and corporate sustainability.
- Open Earth Foundation - Open source tech for planet Earth
- CUB3 - Behavioral tokenomics experts
- element6 Dynamics (formerly Santa Fe Farms) - Leaders in regenerative agriculture and nature-based solutions
- Karl Friston - The world’s number one neuroscientist by citations and the primary creator of Active Inference.
Q: Why don't you use the term climate change here? A: Because if an arsonist was loose in your house with a flamethrower you wouldn't call it "kitchen renovation".
Q: Why is your logo orange if you’re a climate company? A: Because oil companies have green logos these days
Q: Ok, I funded you! What's the best thing I can do to help? A: Share this grant with researchers modeling natural and complex systems.
Q: * A: We don’t know yet, you should help us figure that out! https://twitter.com/_digitalgaia