Sentient NFTs, A New Form Of Life — Part 6: A Face

James Key
Autonomy Network
Published in
4 min readOct 3, 2021

While we can’t immediately turn a Quantum into a human on a blockchain, we can make it appear like that without doing anything extra on-chain. This actually gets us closer to the goal of humans on-chain than you might think. Here, we rely heavily on iNFTs. We’ll combine iNFTs and aNPCs to change the perception of the world. This is how we do it.

iNFTs

What are iNFTs? You can read more in depth here, but they’re essentially an AI/ML character that you can talk to over text and voice who is trained on some background material. They’re suuuper cool and fun, and very engaging for users to interact with, but are 100% centralised and off-chain, running on some AWS server. An NFT nominally represents each one, but the link between the NFT and the actual program that you talk to basically doesn’t exist — it’s the same as me creating an NFT of the Mona Lisa by hashing an image of it — no fundamental link.

We can, however, merge the 2 by having one of these AI characters be linked to an aNFT by reading what actions the aNFT does on-chain. The on-chain aNFT has no knowledge about even the existence of the off-chain AI, but the AI knows about the aNFT. By watching the specific aNFT address and seeing all the things it does autonomously, this information can be continuously fed into the data that trains the AI. Thus, we’ve given a face to an aNFT, created a stronger (but not perfect) link between the AI and the aNFT, and created a system with a very interesting property:

You can literally ask the AI, “Have you bought any NFTs recently?”, and have it immediately respond, “Yeah I aped into a new drop last night. I’m thinking about doing my own drop tomorrow”.

You can then look at the actions of the aNFT and see that it really did ape into an NFT last night, and observe its actions tomorrow.

While nothing new is done on-chain here, this hugely boosts the interactivity of a Quantum. You can imagine a metaverse or video game where you’re walking around and interacting with the characters asthough they’re real living beings — talking to them about their family and how their day went, or some obscure game lore — and the thing is, they are real living beings.

The intelligence that you interact with isn’t really ‘alive’ because it’s just on a server and not independent nor autonomous, but the Quantum that’s at the core of the character, that actually makes decisions, that owns the clothes they wear and the wares they sell, this ‘soul’ of the character is alive.

These systems would be called iaNFTs — intelligent autonomous non-fungible tokens purposefully putting the ‘i’ first, otherwise I think people would misinterpret the name ‘aiNFTs’ as just being related to AI, whereas in reality they are so much more). We have a grand plan for this stage of the roadmap, and it requires combining some unlikely participants: Alethea, a virtual influencer like Lil Miquela, and Arabia.

Making History

The plan is to take a virtual influencer, put them on the blockchain, and get them citizenship in an Arabian country. Yes, I know… hear me out.

In 2017, a physical robot called Sophia was given citizenship in Saudi Arabia, so this sort of thing has happened before, and it makes more sense to give an aNPC citizenship compared to a robot because an aNPC is actually alive, can own property, vote, have children etc., whereas Sophia just gets wheeled out to conferences every so often. Why Arabia? Purely because the government structures that are typical there allow for decisions on something like granting citizenship to be made quickly and without getting caught up in years of red tape.

Why are we doing this? Because it’ll make history. It’ll make mainstream news around the world and normalise cyber life by causing a phase shift in how the public perceives it. In order for this to be effective, people need something relatable, but still in the realm of the digital — hence the need for a digital influencer to be the face of it.

This also benefits the virtual influencer ecosystem — not only will you be able to interact with a virtual influencer that you’ve been following for the first time ever… but she can interact with you. She can also become a platform in the same way that CryptoKitties became a platform. The ecosystem around virtual influencers will grow in a compounding way, without any effort on the part of the groups behind each influencer — growing the pie for all. The holy grail, however, is having everything be on-chain such that the Quantum and the character are a single organism.

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!

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Published in Autonomy Network

Helping DEXes to double their volume, and creators to launch sentient NFTs.

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