The Power of Tau - Scaling the Creation of Knowledge

Ohad Asor, creator of Tau Chain/Agoras, has recently published the long awaited blog post detailing his vision for what very likely is the most ambitious project in the crypto space: Tau.

Tau will accelerate human endeavors by overcoming long ingrained limitations in our collaborative processes; limitations which we rarely even question

The Problem of Social Governance

Take social governance, for example. As individuals, we have opinions over a wide variety of social issues. Perhaps you feel that the speed limit on certain roads is too high, or that programming should be a compulsory subject at public schools, or that everyone would benefit if cryptocurrencies were officially recognized and endorsed by the state.

However, you have no idea how to get these concerns across to the general public. I mean you could try writing a letter to your local representative or signing a petition but ultimately that's unlikely to gain much traction. Meanwhile, the very same issues that seems to have divided the nation over the past decade remain at the forefront of our political debate. Immigration, climate change, abortion, gun control etc. are all important issues of course, but very little progress have been made considering the amount of time, resources and attention that have been devoted to them.

So the problem with traditional forms of social governance, such as democratic voting, is apparent: on the one hand it has difficulty identifying and addressing the wide range of opinions different people hold, on the other hand, even with respect to the small number of issues that do end up bubbling up to the surface, it isn't particularly efficient at detecting consensus.

The central cause of this problem is that current modes of discussion are not scalable. There are inherent limitations in the way we're able to communicate our views across to each other; namely, human ability to comprehend and organize information is the main bottleneck. We cannot possible follow multiple conversations at once, or recall everyone's propositions once there are more than a handful of people in the mix. This is why most collaborative decision making bodies in practice are generally quite small in number: the President's cabinet, Supreme Court Justices, boardroom directions of a fortune 100 company etc.; you just can't have a productive discussion with 50 people. Our entire civilization is structured around this very limitation: discussions don't scale.

Scaling Collaborative Discussions Under Tau

Imagine if we can overcome this limitation; what will it mean for social governance? By using a self defining, decidable logic, the Tau network is easily able to keep track of every user's propositions and detect consensus automatically. Note that making a proposition is exactly the same as voting for that very same proposition: when you're proposing 'dogs should always be on a leash in public unless in a park' you're in effect putting in a vote for such a proposition. This way, countless issues, regardless of how technical or niche, can be assessed through the network concurrently, and social consensus can be detected on the fly. The Tau network can scale social governance by overcoming one of the greatest limitation in human communication of ideas by delegating the task of logically making sense of everybody's propositions to the computer. A simple use case of this will be the rules of the Tau network itself: through a self defining logic, Tau is able to detect consensus among its users from block to block, altering its own rules to conform to the choices of the user base.

The benefits of scaling discussions are not limited to just a more efficient form of social governance. Logic isn't merely about detecting surface level consensus, the network can easily form further deductions from everyone's propositions. If one states 'all men are mortal' and 'Socrates is a man', one can deduce that 'Socrates is mortal.' But deductions can be very deep and non trivial. Imagine if we had a group of 1000 mathematicians all inputting their mathematical insight as propositions. Tau can rapidly detect who agrees with whom on what, and deduce every logical consequence of their combined wisdom; in effect arriving to new truths and insights. In other words, Tau greatly accelerates the production of new knowledge. This will, of course, also work if you have physicists, doctors, engineers, computer scientists, indeed experts in every field working together on the platform. By scaling collaborative discussions in a logical network, Tau is able to scale the creation of knowledge.

When Tau comes into effect, any company, government, and indeed any organization not using this new network will be rendered obsolete. Tau aims to become an indispensable technology.

And this is only the alpha of Tau.

I will talk about the beta in a future posts. The beta will revolve around not just the scaling of discussions and consensus, but the automation and execution of code based of the results of those discussion. For more information on code synthesis and more, please read Ohad's blog. Also, do check out my introduction to Tau here if you missed it.

You can invest in Tau through buying Agoras tokens on Bittrex.

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I am not affiliated or paid by the project. These represent my own subjective views. Tau/Agoras is the only other crypto project apart from Steem in which I see an extraordinary future, and I am merely sharing that with fellow Steemians here.

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Resource:
Ohad Asor's New Tau Blog
Github
Buy Agoras Tokens to Invest in Tau
Telegram Chat
IRC Chat: Where you may ask Ohad himself technical questions
Tau Reddit
Tau Chinese QQ Group: 203884141