Carlos

Marie Curie fellow for the #REVAMMAD project, conducting research in medical imaging at @FORTH_Hellas. PhD candidate in computer vision at #UniversityOfCrete.

[Hector Perez Arenas @arpahector]

Do digital services deteriorate as they scale up?

A new voting on YouCongress already aggregates opinions from @doctorow, @ferrenet, @recuenco, @yosoyzarko and those from the AI digital twins of Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, and Hoffman.

https://t.co/Fyv9O4bCnI

[Hector Perez Arenas @arpahector]

Today is my 40th birthday. To celebrate, I’m launching YouCongress!

YouCongress [1] is an open-source [2] project designed to enhance decision-making. It creates an environment where diverse opinions thrive, where change of opinion is celebrated and where individual and collective learning is facilitated.

To achieve this, we provide a new kind of voting, assisted by user- and AI-generated content, and advanced delegation systems. The goal is not to make binding referendums but to assist in decision-making, whether these decisions are made through democratic referendums, by parliaments, companies, or individuals.

Why is this necessary? As MIT Professor Alex Pentland explains, “the biggest problem in the world is not climate change, war or poverty, but how we organize among ourselves to make good decisions and carry them out.”

Also, amidst the growing excitement around AI, a consensus is emerging for the need of widespread participation in shaping the future of AI and the era of post-artificial general intelligence:
- "The least bad solution to the AGI control problem that I can think of is to give every verified human a vote" — Elon Musk
- "AI is not going to be run by one person or organization. It should belong to the world, belong to humanity and there will be many ways this will happen and ultimately everyone should have a say on that" – Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind
- "People need to have agency, the ability to influence this. They need, we need to sort of jointly be architects of the future." – Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
- "Human feedback for open source LLMs needs to be crowd-sourced, Wikipedia style.
It is the only way for LLMs to become the repository of all human knowledge and cultures.
Who wants to build the platform for this?" – Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta
- "How AI gets built is currently decided by a small group of technologists. As this technology is transforming our lives, it should be in all of our interest to become informed and engaged." – Max Roser, Our World In Data

I have been engaged in the space for the past 15 years:
In 2009, I founded a political party where our representatives would cast their votes in Congress mirroring the online votes of our citizens. The online voting allowed for delegation, enabling voters to entrust their vote to others, unless they chose to participate directly. Our membership reached 300 individuals.
Later, while I was working in London, I co-founded the open-source side project Agreelist [3]. It tracked opinions of public figures on both sides of controversial topics. E.g. AI and mass unemployment, Brexit, universal basic income, carbon tax, etc.

YouCongress integrates concepts from both experiences, plus AI. Users can initiate a vote, which begins with AI-generated perspectives from notable figures. AI-generated content is already faithful on topics where the opinion of public figures is widely common. For example, the AI-generated perspective of Greta Thunberg or Bill Gates on climate change is reasonable. Also, not only will this continue improving, but at some point something like this will return real quotes with a source so anyone can confirm the public figure said that.

Currently, even though we can’t rely on AI-generated content, it provides a starting point. Participants then have the ability to cast their votes, contribute their viewpoints, and soon manually add real quotes from notable figures to fact-check and replace AI-generated content.

Furthermore, users can choose a list of delegates, similar to following others on social media. However, here, users' votes align with the majority of their delegates unless they vote personally. For example, if a user has five delegates who have voted on an issue, and three of them vote in favor while two vote against, the user's vote will automatically be in favor too. This holds unless the user votes directly, in which case the delegates' votes don’t matter.

Future enhancements will introduce additional delegation models, including topic-specific delegation. This will enable users to appoint delegates for votes concerning specific areas such as their local community, economic matters, AI-related issues, and more.

Users will be able to filter the results by direct votes, delegated votes, human votes, and AI-generated votes. This way, if one is only interested in human direct votes, the platform will remain useful.

In conclusion, it’s time to improve how we make decisions on an individual and collective level. If you’d like to be part of the creation of YouCongress, please join our Discord [4] or follow me on Twitter/X [5].

Finally, as birthday gifts, I’d like comments here with suggestions for votes you’d like to see.

Even better if the votes are about AI or its impact on society. For example:
- Is merely expanding large language models sufficient for attaining artificial general intelligence?
- Will AI generate mass unemployment?
- Should we continue to learn coding after artificial general intelligence is developed?
- Should YouTube label videos generated by artificial intelligence?
- Is open-source AI potentially more dangerous than closed-source AI?

Anyway, suggestions of any topic are appreciated and valid birthday gifts. Just leave a comment below with any question in English or Spanish that can be answered with yes or no. E.g. Should we use nuclear energy?

Thanks!

Links in the first comment.

[Hector Perez Arenas @arpahector]

Why and how a network city might solve the biggest problem in the world https://t.co/vownCVKEO5

#CityDAOBuildBetter

[Hector Perez Arenas @arpahector]

I wrote about new voting mechanisms for DAOs and network states — including two-layer voting to enable third-party voting mechanisms. https://t.co/IWLvhrpJEX

[Hector Perez Arenas @arpahector]

Fullvoting: direct+representative+augmented voting for DAOs.

Why?
1. To make better decisions
2. To increase the number of people who can effectively collaborate in decentralized organisations

Here is how👇

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

@tigerVPN I have been trying the dashboard live chat for about 4 weeks now (since January 20) with 2 different conversations and I haven't received any single response

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

@badcrc @dexae Pensaba que era otra vez la famosa foto del Soyz! San Juan de Gaztelugatxe moló mucho. Gracias @badcrc !

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

With some #REVAMMAD colleagues at @miccai2016 in #Athens, a couple of weeks ago.

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

I received a picture from my talk at the #REVAMMAD closing meeting at @unilincoln #ComputerVision #MedicalImaging

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

#BigData with #ApacheSpark #SummerSchool at @FIUPM @La_UPM is over. Thanks @jfelipe from @URJC for being such a great lecturer. #DataScience

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

At the Big Data course of the Advanced Statistics and Data Mining Summer School of @FIUPM with @geleonti

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

Starting the last #REVAMMAD consortium meeting at the @unilincoln #MarieCurie #Retina #research

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

A preliminary version of my newest scientific article in #Retinal #Image #Registration is now available at https://t.co/JdIUaKgVHC

[Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, UE y Cooperación @MAECgob]

¿Quieres saber cómo ejercer tu derecho al #voto desde el #extranjero? #Elecciones #26J https://t.co/HC8MM1fWAC

[CERN @CERN]

#TBT 1993: CERN triggers the spread of the World Wide Web by making the free software public https://t.co/C9mLDPW84k

[European Commission @EU_Commission]

On 30 April roaming charges in the EU drop to the lowest level ever! Let's go #DigitalSingleMarket

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

Wow! @Uptomyknees idea for #GhostbustersIII is exactly what I'd love to watch https://t.co/2ZReoFufz8

[The Independent @Independent]

'I am on the US Kill List. This is what it feels like to be hunted by drones' https://t.co/3PvKpt7J99

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

The incredible story of the Mac Graphing Calculator https://t.co/iyLaejdj3U

[Carlos @hernandezmatas]

New crowdfunding campaign for the third album of @TheBooDevils #TheNobleArtOfRockNRoll https://t.co/51YQpb4BT5 #TNAORNR #RnR #InRnRVeritas