Sentient NFTs, A New Form Of Life — Part 5: Cyber Life
Life
The astute reader may have observed, at this point, that I’ve mentioned ‘independence’ and ‘autonomous’ quite a few times without really going into depth about its significance other than giving rise to composability for characters in blockchain games. I also promised you that I’ll prove to you that an entirely new category of life has been created. With autonomy and evolution, we have the last pieces of the puzzle we need. But let’s go back to the basics… what is life? Generally, there are 7 properties needed:
- Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature
- Organisation: being structurally composed of one or more cells — the basic units of life
- Metabolism: transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organisation (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
- Growth: maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
- Adaptation: the ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism’s heredity, diet, and external factors.
- Response to stimuli: a response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion; for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism), and chemotaxis.
- Reproduction: the ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism or sexually from two parent organisms.
A New Form of Life
Let’s go through each of these properties and see how an aNPC satisfies each of these:
- Homeostasis: this really depends on what the aNFT does, but in the case of a trading bot, it would adjust its internal trading parameters to keep a stable risk profile. In the case of a monster aNFT in a video game that has health points, it would run away from attackers, or perform some defensive move to protect itself when its health points are low (or become more aggressive when its health points are above some target value, which would result in them being reduced via fighting and therefore approach the target over time).
- Organisation: it depends how we define ‘cells’ in this context. One interpretation would be individual functions in a smart contract, since each function does something unique, similar to there being different kinds of cells. In this case, any multi-function contract (basically all contracts) would count as having multiple cells that are structured together, since the functions are designed to work together to achieve some end goal in all contracts, generally. Another interpretation is that each contract is a cell, and multiple contracts designed to interact together counts as organised structure. In this case, it’s basically the same as with having multiple functions (since there could be a single function in each contract), and actually, multi-contract systems are very common in smart contract programming — typically each contract is designed to achieve a specific goal, like holding tokens (a ‘vault’), whereas another contract does something else, like withdraw and trade with those tokens. In either case, an aNPC with multiple functions or multiple contracts that make it up are trivial and expected to be the case.
- Metabolism: this one is easy — smart contracts consume gas to change either themselves or the environment around them.
- Growth: again it depends on the context of what the aNPC here does. A weaker argument would be to have a variable called
size
in an aNPC that’s some kind of monster, that grows with time, but that’s more conceptual-level growth than blockchain-level growth. One could argue that accumulation of tokens is growth, especially since our definition of metabolism is based on the amount of tokens consumed to fuel actions. As long as the aNPC obtains a surplus of tokens, it’s growing. If that doesn’t satisfy you, it should satisfy that any contract that makes up the aNPC can either store more variables, or deploy more contracts to achieve its goals. These would increase its ‘mass’ by increasing the amount of state storage the aNPC takes up, and the amount of bytecode (logic) it stores on the blockchain, respectively. - Adaptation: as mentioned previously, aNPCs can adapt their logic/behaviour/’mass’ arbitrarily under arbitrary conditions, both for themselves and their children — therefore this is satisfied.
- Response to stimuli: aNPCs can respond to literally any on-chain (and off-chain, via oracles) stimuli and respond with any arbitrary action. In the case of a trading bot, it could change its trading strategy if the market becomes bearish etc. In the case of a monster in a game, it can attack if someone comes into its territory.
- Reproduction: as discussed, aNPCs can reproduce — on their own or potentially with a partner (like CryptoKitties etc) — therefore, this is satisfied.
As you can see, every property of life has been satisfied. But one could argue that Plantoids (or a modified version that includes evolution) satisfy all these conditions, and yet, they’re clearly not life. The key missing piece is autonomy/independence. It’s hard to pinpoint which property this fits in to. One could argue that it’s homeostasis, since it has to be self-regulation. It could also be argued that it fits into growth, since the growth also has to be self-sustaining. I doubt that, at the time scholars were discussing these properties, they imagined a system like a blockchain. I don’t think it fits into either of these particularly cleanly, and is probably best thought of as its own, separate, 8th property — autonomy. When considering biological life prior to blockchains, this property was just assumed to always be true.
Autonomy Network is the spark of life.
It’s the blockchain equivalent of what separates a living organism from a collection of molecules that just performs the above properties under the direction of external actors.
As I’ve described them so far, these lifeforms are equivalent to single-celled, or at the most, simple multi-cellular biological life. In the context of these aNPCs being life forms, we should give them a name to distinguish them from biological cells. As an ex-physicist, I see these as the smallest units of cyber life, so we’ll call each a Quantum of cyber life. A collection of these are called a Quanta.
Thus, a new category of life is born. Not physical, but capable of so much more. Not merely another branch, but an entirely new tree of life.
Creating a new category of life is fucking awesome in and of itself, but we can take this further — we’re still a long way from having the equivalent of a human, or more, on a blockchain. In their current proposed form, Quanta are just pieces of code on a blockchain. We need to make them a little more… familiar.
Table
Part 1: The Roadmap
Part 2: The First Step
Part 3: NPCs
Part 4: Evolution
Part 5: Cyber Life
Part 6: A Face
Part 7: Intelligence
Join The Cause
If this ruffles your Jimmies too, visit our website and join our Discord! Follow us to stay updated. We’d love to meet you guys in-person, and the team will be at these conferences in 2021: Token2049 (London), World Blockchain Summit (Dubai), Liscon/ETH Lisbon (speaking on a panel and at the workshop stage, title same as this article series), Solana Breakpoint (Lisbon), and NFT NYC. We’re also hiring, raising a seed round, and are particularly interested in working with games/NFT artists to launch the first drops of aNFTs/aNPC — so get in touch via Discord if interested!