AI Assistants could Transform Governance: Buterin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says artificial intelligence could help create more efficient decentralized governance models and enable users to make better-informed decisions.  

Buterin said in an X post on Sunday that one of the main issues with democratic and decentralized modes of governance, like DAOs, is the “limits to human attention,” because of the many decisions that can require a wide range of expertise or time, which most don’t have.

“The usual solution, delegation, is disempowering it leads to a small group of delegates controlling decision-making while their supporters, after they hit the delegate button, have no influence at all,” he said.

It’s estimated that average participation rates in DAOs are between 15% and 25%. This can lead to issues such as the centralization of power and ineffective decision-making. Worst-case scenarios can result in governance attacks, where a bad actor acquires enough tokens to pass a damaging proposal without other members noticing.

AI-powered assistants that vote for you

Buterin proposes that personal assistant large language models (LLMs) could help solve the “attention problem” by providing users with the relevant information needed for a vote.

“If a governance mechanism depends on you to make a large number of decisions, a personal agent can perform all the necessary votes for you, based on preferences that it infers from your personal writing, conversation history, direct statements,” he said.