Why is Web3 facing an identity crisis?

By RICHARD SMITH

Anyone who has interacted with ChatGPT will have this unsettling question in mind: "Is this thing a human or a machine?"

Essentially, this problem is the long-awaited failure of the Turing test.

For decades, we've been using the Turing test as a proxy for online identity, unknowingly. Taking this test will give us a clear idea of whether we are interacting with humans or machines online.

However, with the advent of ChatGPT and generative AI, we can no longer rely on the Turing test to prove "I am human". And digital personalities ultimately need a way to tell if we're dealing with real people.

Web3's vision of digital personality relies on decentralization and the Turing test to be able to say, "I am human and I control these digital assets." When ChatGPT breaks the Turing test, it shows us that decentralization alone is not enough to achieve digital personality.

If we are serious about digital personhood, then we should be serious about digital identity.

**Humans, why are they human? **

Many may be surprised to learn that there is a Satoshi-like figure in the digital identity movement who wrote the definitive white paper on digital identity a full seven years before Satoshi's famous Bitcoin white paper.

In 2005, Kim Cameron published the landmark paper "The Laws of Identity" (The Laws of Identity), which articulated the concept of identity management.

Although Kim is not as mysterious as Satoshi, his work on digital identity is as decisive as Satoshi's work on decentralization.

Kim presents a problem statement about digital identity that is as simple, clear and concise as Satoshi Nakamoto's problem statement about decentralization. It is instructive to compare them side by side.

Kim's Identity Problem Statement (2005): The Internet was built without a way of knowing who you were connected to.

Satoshi Nakamoto's Decentralization Problem Statement (2012): Commercial transactions on the Internet rely almost entirely on financial institutions as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.

Although these two issues are distinct, they are inextricably intertwined. We must know who we are connected to online (Kim/Identity), and we must be able to do so peer-to-peer without intermediaries (Satoshi/Decentralization). This holds true in the digital world as well as in the real world.

In a post-Turing world, however, the question of identity becomes more pressing as machines are increasingly able to mimic humans. We will not be able to fully enjoy the fruits of decentralization without making digital identity a top priority.

In the final stages of his life, Kim gives us another way to think about the challenges of digital personality. In our online lives, he said in a speech, "content is who we are, it's part of our identity, but we don't own it, we can't keep it, we can't control it. We lack a A digital sanctuary with the same basic privacy."

In short, we are homeless in the digital world.

** Just as homelessness in the physical world can damage personality due to lack of privacy, digital homelessness in the digital world can also damage digital personality. **

Digital personality requires a digital home—a digital place where we can decide when and how we share which parts of our digital selves with others. The digital home is inextricably linked to our digital identity.

**Decentralization is not the only solution to digital homelessness. If we don't architect for digital identities, we'll never know who we're interacting with online, and AI will overwhelm humans. **

Before, we could rely on the Turing test as a proxy for our human identity. However, with the advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, those days are gone.

Kim Cameron is dead, but his Law of Identity lives on. All those longing for a true digital personality should remember that Kim came before Satoshi, and identity came before decentralization.

As Kim puts it, in the online world, “content is us.” Now that generative AI has made content nearly free, it’s all the more time we make sure we have an alternative way to assess and identify personality in the digital world.