Farewell to DAOs? DAOs 2.0 & Autonomous Organizations Are Inevitable | Sam McCarthy on Just DAO It!

And one of the reasons why I think DAOs are inevitable, I feel like even A decade later, I think DAOs have been around for about a decade now.

We're still struggling to define.

You'll have for every definition, there's 10 more definitions what a DAO is.

For me, a DAO at its heart really just describes this relationship between humans and technology, right? It's a distributed community of stakeholders with their decisions that are mediated and executed by code, right? It's an interesting relationship to see the relative power that the human actors in the system bring as opposed to the technological actors in the system.

Of course, for DAOs today and DAOs historically, those technological actors have been primarily smart contracts, right? Which automate a lot of this execution within these organizations.

However, increasingly they will become agents.

right? And there will be this new type of technological actor that is going to be increasingly introduced into these organizational systems.

So figuring out how to define those boundaries between the humans and the agents and the relative power dynamics and decision-making rights and abilities, who governs who, like that's just starting right now, that kind of discourse, and it's only going to become louder and louder.

And good for DAOs, this is something that we've been talking about for a decade and actually have really good tech already built, as well as social frameworks and social precedents that have been set to help us navigate this new organizational paradigm as I see it.

Yeah, for sure.

And I'm really excited about the involvement of AI in the Marshall Islands with my DAO.

We already have legislation and we're working on new legislation that defines legally how agents are allowed to be a part of an organization as a manager, as a member.

What are the rights and responsibilities that you give to an AI? And what are the rights and responsibilities that still fall on human beings in a situation where an AI is involved in an organization? So really excited to talk to you about what you're envisioning.

Let's turn to that essay that you wrote.

So the essay says, Again, it was called Farewell to DAOs.

I think if anyone just types that in, it'll come up in their search.

I just highly recommend it.

It was one of these essays that actually I think has kicked off a whole new conversation in Web3, especially in the DAO community.

I mean, group chats where as soon as that was posted, now it's been like weeks of people posting responses and follow-ups.

I used to talk about DAOs V1, V2, and V3 already a year or two ago, but your essay has really reframed things as let's just call everything before DAOs 1.0, and now we need to talk about DAOs 2.0. Why don't you introduce us to what's in the essay for people who haven't read it yet, and what does it mean that we're saying goodbye to DAOs 1.0? What are you thinking for DAOs 2.0?

I think it's important to establish the context in which this essay was motivated.

A lot is going on right now within crypto, within the broader organizational ecosystem globally.

We've been talking for years.

I feel like there's been a narrative that there's been ongoing legitimacy crises with our existing institutions, both from a public but also private standpoint.

and decreasing trust in governments, and then also decreasing trust in private corporations for completely different reasons, but also for reasons that DAOs have been created, right? Private corporations that seem to accumulate the majority of value that is created, leading to grave inequality across the world.