Our social-technical breakthrough vision back in 2015
Back in September 2015, we conceived, coordinated and submitted the first R&D proposal outlining a vision and novel scientific breakthrough for what we call today the Trustless Computing Certification Body and Seevik Net.
We were able to aggregate around such rpoposal unique R&D global parners in a R&D proposal for the EU R&D program FET-Open H2020. It still fittingly details the scientific underpining of our project and vision, as it is asa evolved till today. Find pasted below the opening sections of the document linked above:
“1.1. Targeted breakthrough, Long-term vision and Objectives
1.1.1. Breakthrough
The ever increasing influence of technical systems on humanity since the industrial revolution, has led in the 1960’s to the creation of a new branch of science, the socio-technical science, which reframes our understanding of formal (organizational) and informal (social) collective human systems, including all of humanity, as interdependent human and technical systems.
In recent decades, such influence has been accelerating due to the explosive advancement and pervasive adoption of computing services, which to-date overwhelmingly mediate, and increasingly shape, all human communications and relations.
The average western citizen spends half of its waking hours in front of a screen increasingly mediated by connected computing services. Such services also crucially mediate nearly all critical organizational communications, outside the family, in their governance and operations. The term “critical” is applied here to single organizational or computing components - as well as to entire organizations and end-2-end computing services - whose substantial ineffectiveness in achieving their goals or unexpected behavior would likely result in grave harm to the computer user, organization members or other humans.
The targeted breakthrough is the definition and validation of innovative socio-technical system paradigms and certification governance models that will enable an independent organization to achieve far-beyond-state-of-the-art, resilient and self-reinforcing levels of trustworthiness of critical computing services and levels of effectiveness of critical organizational systems.
A key intuition is that the trustworthiness of critical computing systems is best measured through a complete and dynamic modeling of the effectiveness of all significant organizational processes critically involved in the system’s entire lifecycle and operation.
In turn, the effectiveness of all critical organizations today is primarily dependent on the levels of trustworthiness of the computing systems critically involved in the system’s critical operations and governance. Their transition to computing systems - with rare exceptions - has gravely reduced their effectiveness in many crucial regards, such as organizational resiliency to external and internal attack and manipulation - for all organizations - and overall democratic efficiency and accountability - for democratic organizations.
The main goal of any critical computing service is to maximize the trustworthiness that it will respond to inputs or external actions with expected behaviors.
Such systems have vital roles in protecting citizens, states, critical infrastructure, and democratic institutions but, over the last decade, an increase in complexity, and extremely active sabotage at the lifecycle level, have rendered nearly all commercial and high-assurance computing services used in critical human communications, and infrastructures, highly vulnerable to critical malfunction or attacks by state and non-state actors in highly-scalable, mis-attributable and often undetectable ways.
Furthermore, by understanding critical organizational processes is their evolutionary constituent nature, the project aims to cognitively reframe the life-cycle and operation of both critical organization and critical computing systems as complex computing-based ever-constituent socio-technical systems. In the process of validation of the breakthrough, the project will create new Trustless Computing paradigms, certification requirements, certification body, an initial compliant service and critical IT technology set, and a post-project open consortium and ecosystem.
1.1.2. Long Term Vision
Key to the long term vision of the targeted breakthrough - and its ability to realize a resilient short-to-long term actionable path towards an explosive potential to grow and expand in other domains - is a Binding MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) Agreement, formally approved by all participants, which includes the Preliminary Paradigms and ensures, among other things: complete verifiability, open licensing, and very-low long-term overall IP royalties of all critical SW/HW components; high-level of protection from any patent claims; forbids participation of participants to a go-to-market of overall results outside post-project consortium, bound by resulting certification body. Here follows our short-to-long term vision; in Section 2.1 we detail how the breakthrough will warrant them.
In the short term, of an initial compliant computing service (CivicIT) with about ten thousands of client device units (CivicPods), and related onion routing and server infrastructure, will be marketed by the post-project consortium. It will leverage unprecedented and constitutionally-meaningful levels of trustworthiness, as well a its portability and usability, to respond to a huge market gap for meaningful levels of assurance in a preliminary set of selected fields, among which, government-related end-2-end computing,. It will contribute to restoring the digital sovereignty of the EU’s institutions, citizens and Members States. It will reposition the EU in the exploitation of the value chain of emerging high-assurance IT sectors, as supplementary to the market for leading commercial devices. In the medium term, its low costs and open ecosystem will enable independent parties to increase the assurance, reduce the cost and improve the User Experience (UX) of the resulting platform, and well as to create derivatives for more diverse and progressively more complex domains, such as banking trust services, sensitive business communications, wide-consumer market, and/or state security and defense sectors. It’all also fill a huge market gap in the security for narrow AI (artificial intelligence) applications (e.g.robots, drones, self-driving cars, data mining).The CivicPod form factor and usability, combined with its very low cost at scale, will enable wide-market business and consumer deployments with an enhanced user experience. The inclusion of resiliency and availability will enable the offering of a unique proposition for mission military communication systems and critical infrastructures.
In the long term, derivative of the results will spur ever more trustworthy IT systems in ever more numerous domains and wide market applications. Even more crucially, it is hoped that the results will provide a sufficiently trustworthy low-level computing base, standard and a governance model for large democratically-accountable advanced narrow and strong AI projects, in critical sectors for the economy and society, to substantially increase their safety, robustness and “value. “