Chapter 1 Introduction

Offer Networks is a concept of an alternative economy where Agents (humans, AIs and or more/less simple programs and intelligences) find, negotiate and execute locally and globally beneficial series of not-only-monetary exchanges of goods (tangible and/or intangible). The singnet/offernet project is the continuation of prior research and brainstorming, well summarized by the workshop held at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2015.

The initial motivation is to find conceptual and implementable ways for humans to express and share complex inter-subjective values of exchangeable items in fundamentally richer way than ‘flat’ & ‘one-dimensional’ monetary economy warrants, while still leveraging advantages of it. Conceptually, one can generalize humans to any agents or processes, material / immaterial goods to any items (e.g. data) and by doing this come close to a general concept of ‘distributed marketplace of intelligences’ – which is SingularityNET is all about (only without strict emphasis on AI).

The conceptual (and of course implementational) details of Offer Network are still very much in development (see list of resources to date in References) and both have to advance together with the SingularityNET concept and infrastructure in a ‘simulation modelling way’. The idea is that concept + development + simulations + experiments will co-inform each other and co-develop in the most efficient way.