E. Glen Weyl

Generative AI, Web3, blockchain and the metaverse – how is your organization best utilizing these innovations (and replacing old ones)?

How can these automations be more effectively interrelated? And what does your competition know that you still need to learn?

You may have the systems and the staff in place, but how do you maximize their potential and develop opportunities for your business?

How do you sync up your technologies and transform them into one true force? In other words, how do you completely own it?

Glen-Weyl- ( Web3, Metaverse, AI, Blockchain)

Sample Talks

Welcome the shapeshifters.  Using the digital traces you left behind, “generative foundation models” (GFMs) can now replicate your likeness, voice and personality, fooling your bank, work and even family.  At the same time, you can harness a “stunt double” to increase your productivity by a factor of 100.  Can we secure the opportunities these technologies offer without destroying the social fabric or imposing authoritarian control?  As Founder of Microsoft Research’s Special Project the Plural Technology Collaboratory, the Plurality Institute, Harvard’s GETTING-Plurality Research Network and the RadicalxChange Foundation, I am on the front lines of answering these questions in collaboration with the leading AI labs (like OpenAI) and most advanced governments in the world (like Taiwan).  In this talk I will describe the fundamental organizational and social changes we will need for pluralistic societies to thrive in the age of GFMs.

The next wave of generative foundation models (GFMs) succeeding ChatGPT and DALL-E, will make indistinguishable and arbitrarily manipulable simulation of human content (e.g. video, voice, documents) ubiquitous, liquidating much of the foundation of social cooperation and trust.

Maintaining trust and collaboration will require a revolution in verification and dramatically expanded applications of cryptography. Luckily Web3 ecosystems like Ethereum and countries like Taiwan have been coping with similar threats for years now. In this talk, I will draw lessons from these experiences to help individuals and organizations of all sizes survive and thrive in this disruption.

I am the co-inventor of Quadratic Funding, the hottest new approach to supporting social entrepreneurship and cross silo-collaboration within companies, I am Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist and Founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation. 

I will explain how QF works, how it has been mathematically proven as the optimal way to support public goods and how it is transforming open source software, the blockchain, media and social service provision.  Whether you’re looking to tap the wisdom of your employees to catalyze new cross-company entrepreneurship or catalyze effective charitable giving, QF is one of the most powerful tools available today and there’s no one better to learn about it from than its pioneer.

As a former professor of economics at the University of Chicago, I developed the economic theory behind many recent advances in antitrust policy, from the 2010 US merger guidelines to the use of antitrust to protect workers.  As Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist, I am today at the forefront of technology competition and regulatory policy. 

My talk will cover some of the most innovative approaches to addressing the problems of technology monopoly platforms, including treating data as labor, forming collective bargaining institutions such as data coalitions, the democratization or utilization of platforms and the use of new open protocols to facilitate meaningful portability.  Today every company is a digital company and we all depend on the infrastructure controlled by a few dominant technology platforms.  Here is a clear glimpse into the future that will determine the fate of your business and how you can shape it.

Democracy and technology are increasingly at loggerheads, with technology undermining democracy and democracies neglecting and constraining technology.

The reason for this conflict is our choice to invest in directions for technology (artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies) that are fundamentally antithetical to democratic pluralism. But a different path is possible and has been pioneered in the world's most advanced digital democracy, Taiwan. In this talk, I will describe Plurality, a vision for the future of technology rooted in the history of the internet and personal computers and matured in the Taiwanese geopolitical forge that focuses on empowering collaboration across social differences. I'll show how this new vision goes far beyond politics to transform media, productivity, health and more.

Reviews

Andrew Fai
Andrew Fai
CEO (Asia Blockchain Summit)
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"Glen opened my mind to the importance of data integrity and ownership under the lens of a truly democratic spirit.”
Antonio Zappulla
Antonio Zappulla
CEO (Thomson Reuters)
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“We were delighted to have Glen speak on our panel titled ‘Digital rights’ at this year’s Trust Conference. His thought-provoking point about data production being a form of work is paradigm-shifting and will form the basis of many future discussion we host”
Dirk Jan van Vliet
Dirk Jan van Vliet
Councilor (D66)
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"A big thank and many, many thanks for a very inspiring evening. I heard many great reactions from the audience."

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Sarder Author
Talks Topics: Technology

Glen is exclusively represented by ProjectSpeaker
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If you and your staff are grappling with the complexities of new and rapidly evolving advances like these, you may have questions that address both the micro and the macro of your adaption:

  • How will my company benefit from the coming decentralization revolution?

  • How will we strengthen rather than replace our social institutions?
    What, if anything, will be the long-term impact of the latest Internet bubble?

  • Where will the real solutions be found for current blockchain ecosystems and centralized platforms? And what are the implications for business and governments?

  • How will I address the problems of technology monopoly platforms, including treating data as labor, forming collective bargaining institutions such as data coalitions, the democratization or utilization of platforms and the use of new open protocols to facilitate meaningful portability?

Hint: Like the original internet, real solutions are likely to come from multi-stakeholder collaborations and interoperability. It’s just a matter of fitting the puzzle pieces together.

A Microsoft advisor, I can sort out for you how these systems will work much better than both current blockchain ecosystems and centralized platforms. I can also do a deep dive into what the implications will be for business and governments.

I founded and co-chaired the world’s largest Web 3 research group and have engineered a leading digital decentralized ecosystem. My social technology, Quadratic Voting, has become the gold standard for democratic innovation.

I have written (along with Vitalik Buterin (Founder of Ethereum) and Puja Ohlhaver) the 2022 paper “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.” This work is one of the 30 most downloaded papers of all time, according to the Social Science Research network. I’m also the co-author (with Eric Posner) of the 2018 Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.

I’ve also written dozens of scholarly and popular articles in journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Economic Review, the Harvard Law Review, the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation and the New York Times.

I am currently working on an open, Web3-based collaborative book project with Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Audrey Tang: Plurality: Technology for Cooperative Diversity and Democracy.

Other notable achievements:

  • One of the 10 most influential people in blockchain by Coindesk
  • One of the 25 people shaping the next 25 years of technology by WIRED
  • One of the 50 most influential people by Bloomberg Businessweek
  • Valedictorian of his Princeton undergraduate class in 2007
  • Earned his PhD in economics from Princeton in 2008