Awesome. Hi. Thank you for that introduction. I'll talk about something very mundane if it works and devastating if it doesn't, which is electricity, and the general notion of universal basic affordances. So just to contextualize sort of this conversation, I wanted to remind everybody that we are in the middle of post hurricane Ian power outages. There's an enormous amount of sort of power around the world is subject to instability that's a result of climate geopolitical strife. And in Bangladesh, a glitch, apparently, which plunged the entire country for over thirteen hours into darkness. And so these days, to talk about blackouts is kind of like a misnomer because it's not only the lights that we have to keep on. We have to operate critical infrastructure. We have to refrigerate our vaccines. We have to make sure that, water filtration systems are operating. And Florida is encountering this in a very sort of big way. So instead of talking about universal basic income, which in any case typically would be spent on, things that, are affordances, shelter, electricity. I wanna talk about how can we make universal basic access to enough electricity to charge your phone, communicate with your loved ones, evacuate from a nuclear fallout zone, and so on. A reality a practical reality. And by doing so, we have to solve a rather complex problem that is spanning both the cybernetic sort of angle, the the the cyber system and the physical system as well, plus the political systems that are involved in it. So I wanted to give you a brief walk through through PlurGrid, which is a project that I started this summer this past summer to address some of these issues. You can find us on Twitter at Plurigrid, and I I'll often ask to describe Plurigrid in one sentence. And I have concluded that it is impossible, but it is quite easy to describe it in one equation. And so, the equation is very simple. It's this for an operation of a microgrid inverter. There is this function, right, that is designed to take in the current configuration of your inverter, observe environmental sort of element values, and then up make an update to the configuration of the inverter for the next time step. And it's pretty sort of a low level detail, but that's pretty much this f here is what Plurigrit is about. This too is Plurigrit. Right? So it it finds itself in a more complex set of data series about inverter measurements that you find in a series of distributed energy resources. And so in this case, I wanted to mention that everything we're building has been addressed in a rather general setting by NREL, National Renewable Energy Lab, which has produced enough sort of information about how to operate in a perfect world, a grid of distributed energy resources, which turns out is an optimal model for operating a grid because of information distribution and sort of trust as well. But we'll talk about trust later. Simply, if you take a perfect g r world, there's a way of operating autonomous energy grids in this sort of, like, decentralized setting. It's a nice visual here showing that you have your solar fields, you have your wind farms, your households with solar panels in Ukraine where, you know, the grid is destroyed by artillery strikes and so on. And the problem that they always sort of point out is that there is absolutely no clear set of incentive structures that seem to lead to this perfect world where these energy resources are well balanced, distributed, and organized. And so what we're solving is precisely that problem, which is the bridging of the cyber physical sort of component of this system to where efficiency is gained in a mesoscale sort of fractal of multiscale grid systems combined together in through the interoperable protocols and incentive structures to collaborate on the inverter function specifically, and I'll touch on that in a second, lead to a world where we can design strategies. This is our stack. You're currently looking at it a lot with Julia, A lot of simulation. And as as you can see, a lot of the simulations come from this NRL sort of world. We just combined that with, like, more specific public goods for both the strategic component, which is the open game engine enabled by CatLab. J l, relies on the very esoteric sort of piece of category theory. And then a more practical pragmatic approach that is CatCad. J l, which allows you to have sort of generalized dynamical systems and allow for configuration trajectories. Like, what is the possible set of configuration changes to that inverter that leads to an outcome that is balanced? A lot of this work is documented in the meta gov execute, exit cortex. This is our knowledge graph, certain knowledge measurement system. So I encourage you to play with this and then import this into Obsidian Roam, whatever you use. It's it is it is complex. But why indeed do we care about inverters so much? Well, an answer lies in this paper. It's called the impossible energy trinity energy security, sustainability, and sovereignty in cross border electricity systems. And, of course, you know, we can only have two. Sovereignty in this case comes from the fact that when we provide electricity now and we want to balance out the grid, a lot of time optimizing demand side as well as supply side is necessary. It means that the energy you have stored in your battery and in a stable part of the grid might be useful for balancing the grid downstream where, you know, they have an outage because of the heat wave. In fact, that happened recently in California where the heat wave led to the situation where for a period of time, generation, which means, you know, battery based generation from storage has exceeded the amount of electricity supplied by nuclear power. Right? So a lot of narratives right now center around let's make nuclear a thing again. Well, in fact, we have sort of passed this Rubicon where we have enough renewable energy resources on the way, and we can meet the demands of our grids simply by using more efficient storage. Tesla is doing that with MegaPack. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this project product. It's a powerful battery, you know, that comes from their innovation of battery technology that allows you to effectively generate power and allows you to have flexibility in a very sort of renewable world where, you know, the wind may die, like it is the case now in Germany, or the cloud may, you know, cover the sun. Inverters in that case allow for that sovereignty to exist in a sense that when you have an inverter in your sort of bigger circuit of your grid, it allows you to have control and responsibility as well over the voltage and configuration parameters of a microgrid, which allows you to sort of compose grids at multiple scales from having an inverter in your house to having an inverter in your neighborhood or your kibbutz. You know, it's very much a very flexible system. And so the impossible energy trinity becomes possible if you think of sovereignty in a new way, which doesn't involve sort of narrow way of thinking about nation states as the only sort of custodian of sovereignty. So we are all sovereign in the sense of any one of us is able to take a risk of, you know, generating our own electricity. And if we treat sovereignty in nation states as the union of sovereign sort of microgrids, we then which is the case in places like UAE where, you know, the nation state simply tells you, here's the, you know, mega grid. Do whatever you gotta do, you know, locally. And what we provide is a product that's kind of like an Android to a Tesla MegaPack iPhone, which, allows you to bring your own inverter, your own battery, and simulate that, inside of the power systems, framework together with incentives, together with simulation, to where we will maintain a set of components and allow for this open source public good of composable protocol. Pardon me. That's I'm outside right now. I'm sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so it's a little loud. To where, you know, your your transformers, your inverters, dynamic inverters can be, simulated and configured to the point where, by using our smart grid, you know, your software, an open source industrial control system, if you wish to see it that way, and collaborating with others using sort of private training of models that allow you to understand what is the optimal way for you to operate your inverter that integrates sort of this political component. We can, for the first time, create a cyber physical system that bridges sort of the scientific understanding of negative externalities, which in this case are risk. Right? Because everybody's offloading risk into the grid by taking the most sort of revenue maximizing or self serving outcome like happened in Texas.

I'll have

Yeah. I would just say, you know, sometimes we are failing when left to our own devices incorporating, like, it happened in Texas in 2021. In California, where I used to reside back then, we have succeeded because by getting a text message from the government, you know, we disabled our disabled our ACs and reduced our power consumption. So there's a lot involved in operating the grid, but power to the people is our motto. We want to make make it so that you own your grid. So yep. Thank you. That's it.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for asking the question. And, yes, that is a great sort of observation is that while we use a lot of metaphors like flow and, you know, downstream, in fact, it's a force. Right? And so there are sometimes situations where people are paid not to generate electricity, to not overwhelm sort of transmission stations. So in our case, we indeed are very much optimizing for the sub five millisecond latency where we have the need to predict capacity and demand and adjust these, inverters, in close to real time. The there's two fold sort of, approaches in that sort of direction. So we have the ability to run codes quickly, and we translate a lot of work from Python to Julia, so which is a compiled language and runs in the sort of lower levels, run time. So that's why we're sort of reimplementing, several components in Julia right now. The second one is just having better models allows for predictions to happen quicker. And so we're using multiparty computation for a broader set of contributors to the training set. So training with private inputs allows us to have and these models are not complex. It's linear regressions mostly. Like, line goes up, power spikes, power line goes down. Whereas predicting a broader trend in electricity is something that it has historically not been done. And most of these models will allow us to understand sort of predictive maintenance and sort of anticipate dynamical system changes. But yeah. So I would say that this twofold approach is very fast, sort of multiscale modular design. You hear about a lot about this right now in sort of this world of, I guess, blockchains. In that case, we see it as a replicated state machine. It's not public. It's private, permissioned, but it has sort of data availability layer, which works with sensors and oracles. And that's really fast transmission of data to fast execution environment that's specialized for that in a very fast consensus layer that's using direct specific graphs. The second component, of course, is the modeling of an overall trend for all for various scales to allow for us to see when this sort of spike or drop in capacity would have take place. But we are very new, and so we're in simulations. And a lot of this stuff will actually play out in production, so I look forward to connecting to see how we can connect you to the program. Thank you.

So you mentioned in the talk about the the economic and political systems as distinct from the physical systems. And for for for example, kinda like, Bea said, I I had an experience where I was trying to put in solar panels in my place in in Phoenix. And due to the policies of my local grid provider, I lived, like, a few miles away from the part of the local grid where that would be actually effective because the the service provider was not offering good policies with respect to generation despite the fact that, it was Phoenix. So, like, the the potential benefits of, generating, power through solar are pretty high, at least in terms of production capacity. And so when you sort of talk about this, these two systems, right, the or even three, the political, the economic, and the physical, sort of how do you see PlurGrid helping to sort of solve this sort of fundamental mismatches in those systems or at the very least to bring some more power to the the consumers or the participants, us, basically, humans and households, into that to that sort of universe of of policy making?

Absolutely. Thank you so much for asking. And, yeah, while they are distinct, they're causally linked. Right? So that's the issue. If you can run simulations of either each of them, you can very easily run three simulations alongside each other and say, hey. We've solved this. Results are good. That's that's we have to really have some way of composing different ontologies, different sort of universes inhabited by these different domains. And so as a result of our work on sort of composable ontologies, and that's a very sort of esoteric way of saying that sometimes we not only have to talk about the same things, we have to find a way of talking about them in the same way. So we we hope to bring this sort of relation of political into the into the operation of the grids. In in in that case, there are there are quite a few approaches, and I it's a lot of these things have to be sort of tested in production. But for instance, labor is one of the important factors. And so we've discussed how to do zero knowledge bargaining by labor unions of electricians in Philadelphia if they want to be able to strike in ways that are not detrimental to the consumer demand. Like, that's a very, like, specific example. More broadly, I think focusing on this sort of mesoscale composable nature of these grids, you can operate a number of sort of open games that revolve around observing specific political events, representing these political events, and seeing the impact of them in simulation, which is why before we go to production in any of these systems, we hope to very definitively provide for causal linkages between these different domains. But yeah. So it's it's it's it's a very simple sort of thing to see working. It's very difficult to arrive at the concrete solution, but I think that's sort of the PluriGrid's approach. Another important aspect of that is value pluralism, which is what Pluri and PluriGrid stands for. And this notion that there's any number of value systems out there, we will always disagree about something. But there has to be a neutral sort of layer on which we can specify our intent, which is at the very basic level that the power stays on and can allow for preferential sort of financialization of outcomes for your grid consumption. It it's very hard to switch from, like, you know, I'm gonna take my wire and wire from into nuclear now that, you know, coal is dead, you know. And in fact, what we have to do is similar to what carbon offsets have to do, which is to financialize a portion of your consumption, a portion of grid participation, and then allow you as a consumer to direct your flow of value towards something that is a bit more aligned with your outcomes and capture that intent through sort of intent matching and the list of predicates that check for whether that's met. But yeah.

I need to keep up with chat as well. Sorry about that. I saw the twenty minutes just now. So and and hey, Eric. We recently hung out at the Rick's student, Brooklyn client center here at Cambridge. So in the a lot of folks I know from Deep Webcamp as well. Yeah. Transactive energy markets precisely. Yes. There's actually a lot of research on this. And, yes, indeed, nationalizations or disasters. Like, in France right now, the grid is nationalized. One of the largest energy producers are nationalized. And then there are private companies like Enel that transcends sort of pro state boundaries. And so this transactive energy market effectively is post state. You have international corporations engaging in this sort of new post Westphalian world order where you no longer have to refer to a nation state authority. And, in fact, we hope to provide for cross border grids. We are in discussions now to start the first cross sort of Pakistan, India border grid. And in in Ukraine, where I was born, does not have and hasn't had, like, an actual scale private grid ever, which has led to a lot of corruption as well. And so so bringing from disaster to a political domain almost immediately to where, like, state acquisitions process, if you're a larger state operated energy enterprise, at least to, like, you know, dissolution of, like, civil society undermines the rule of law. And so having a private grid there as well can help with with participation. And, yeah, please feel free to ask in the chat. I have it open now. So any additional questions, if you if you feel shy, I can answer that way.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And thank you. That is a fantastic point. Exactly. So, like, similar to, like, the grid, there is the problem of availability over the Internet. And so a lot of these cyber physical systems our approach can be generalized towards almost any sort of public good or essential affordance, that that's out there. And what you see now in Florida is, like, press releases where DeSantis goes and talks about Elon Musk supplying Starlinks. You know? And Ukraine had to face that almost immediately after the beginning of the war, to where, yes, the disaster sort of breeds innovation, and, unfortunately, it messed kind of the silver lining. But, yeah, my only regret is that we're not in Florida right now on the ground handing out solar panels. Right? So that's that's that's the speed of things. But I think for that, we are hoping to work with sort of the common space public good funding model to allow for sort of experimentation at multiple levels. Like, well well, we do think in San Francisco and, you know, a lot of places around The US, I think, ultimately, the beneficiary of this will be the global South, will be Ukraine, places that may never have had a smart industrial control system in the first place. And, at the same time, face sort of pressure not to industrialize and grow along the same dimensions we have done in the global North. And so, well well, yes, we can sort of address challenges here and work with consumers in The US. What we're hoping to deliver is the open source public good that sort of the entire world can use. And in many places, we are encountering almost, like, zero existing regulatory backlash. And, like, if we go to to do sort of developing nations or so called developing nations, we can have a lot of success there. In The US, this per consumer model has sort of limitations and, like, we want our models to work in bear markets and want our models to work in the complete absence of the existing infrastructure as well. So that's a fantastic point. And I also put point out in chat, there is a if you are growing a grid from scratch, which is kind of a nice thing, I'll very briefly share it. Sorry. I have to probably seed floor to the next speaker at some point. But there is this book called The Grid, The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future that I highly recommend. But if you're starting from scratch and you are not letting some of the haphazard ecology of the energy to to to to take its place with within socioeconomic systems with, like, thoughtless thoughtless approach, if you had like, a thoughtful approach, NREL has provided you with a scalable integrated infrastructure planning model. So whoever is building a new grid, I highly recommend checking this out. And indeed, simulation is sort of a big portion of that as well. So yeah. Thank you for the question.

Yes. We have unabashed

self promoting, of course.

No. No. I I thank you. I appreciate that. But I'll be reaching out to to Barton as well to see if maybe there's some some way we can collaborate a little bit on our work.

Absolutely. It's a common sense of planetary scale public goods, so it's already yours. You're just learning about it today. So, definitely, let's connect. I'm on MetaGuff's luck.

Beautiful. Thank

In the chat. I'll start to summarize. So I was asking about the accountability and rewards being in the same bucket here, and then my little dissertation is just about, like, breaking apart some of the concepts. Like, the notion of roles is a sort of policy making thing. The notion of how one oversees those roles are sort of measures whether people are doing their jobs in order to hold them accountable separate from the notion of rewards associated with the sort of those observations about whether someone is doing their their role or doing it well as separate policies within a policy agenda. So I'm basically asking if there's a particular reason that all that stuff is bundled into one bucket since in practice, it's difficult to govern if it's all jammed together.

of the way one of the ways we

Yeah. For sure. I really appreciated the presentation. I learned a lot. I was just gonna ask about when hats are assigned, does the the owner of the DAO, like, a multisig, do they have to sign a transaction each time a new role is assigned in order to transfer the NFT?

Got it. That really helps. Thank you.

It would probably be fun to try some, try some interoperability tests with the execute badges. We've got some test contracts deployed already, and we've been we've been playing around with the badge structures. So figuring out the, hats protocol, sort of interoperability would would be a nice little, like, work session at some point.

Cool. We coordinate in the meta gov Slack, I think. Just maybe drop a message and say hi in the in the institute channel.

Cool. Yeah. I suppose we kinda dealt with delegation. I was interested in conflicts, like conflicts between well, either between kind of delegated roles, like, within a particular, like, within a particular tree of a delegation, but also conflicts between roles kind of across the across the heterarchy. Like, it feels simple if what's what's being delegated is, say, control over funds, and then it's obviously, there's only there's only so many funds to go around. And if part is delegated, then it's no longer available to be delegated or else you can't really have the same kind of conflict in that way. But as soon as it's as soon as it's, like, rolls with scope, we start to get maybe the same scope has been defined in different places and in fact overlaps, and we'll get conflict. And so you have well, I mean, a lot you know, different different governance schemes will have their their different approaches to trying to avoid that. But, yeah, I'm just interested what what what conflict looks like.

Cool. Yeah. I'd love to talk about that more.