I've been very busy in the last couple of weeks. I was very honoured to be invited to give a plenary presentation at very prestigious meeting called "The Future of Human Civilization in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" at the EuroMed University in Fez, Morocco. The meeting was attended by 2000 participants from 75 different countries, and organised primarily by Professor Abdelhak Azzouzi, who is the President of the United Nations Chair for the Alliance of Civilisations.
When he first invited me to talk, I told him that I had two topics that I could talk about - ExaBrain (energy-efficient symbolic AI on a single Mac) and IOUNet (mutual credit at planetary scale). Both topics really need about 30 minutes each. I had imagined that Professor Azouzzi would choose one of them. However, he asked me to talk about both! With a limit of about 24 minutes, it was a real challenge to get everything covered. But I worked very hard to generate a clear presentation for a general audience, and was very happy with the result. The talk went very well, and I got a lot of very positive feedback.
The whole conference was streamed live on Moroccan television and they had simultaneous translation into French and Arabic. It's available on YouTube with this address.
But I have also been working very hard to improve the IOUNet Website which can be found at iou-net.org. You can even go directly to a page with links to the two talks.
One of most impressive aspects of both parts of the presentation is the fact that I did several live demonstrations on my Mac - both of ExaBrain and IOUNet. For IOUNet, you can find links to the demos on the website's start page.
IOUNet has evolved very rapidly since the 9th March 2027 when I realised that cancelling debt in IOU networks of arbitrary size does not require cancelling loops - as I had believed for over 12 years. You only need to know the net positions of everyone in the system. If you know those numbers, it is possible to implement what I call a Jubilee, where all the users with net negative positions do things for people with net positive positions. The IOUs that they receive in return enables all the debt in the system to be eliminated. No debt, no interest charges.
One of the demos shows a population of 5000 users exchanging IOUs in return for cooperative actions, with jubilees every few seconds. Click on this link https://iou-net.org/jubilee_animation to get the demo to run on your computer or phone. The code is incredibly efficient and will clear around 20,000 IOUs every second. Watch the total about of cooperation, measured in minutes of human time, increase very rapidly.
In another demo, which you can find here https://planetary.iou-net.org/planetary, you can see the progress made my a MacStudio that I have been running from my home with a simulation involving an incredible 10 billion users - more than the number of humans on the planet. The simulation has been running continuously since the 17th March 2026, and has simulated billions of years of human cooperation. Every two hours, you can see the simulation enacting a Jubilee that cancels out all the debt in the system - In two minutes the total number of active users drops from 10 billion to zero before starting up again. It's quite fun to watch. The highly optimised code running on my MacStudio handles around 20 million IOUs per second. There is enough processing on my single machine to handle a substantial proportion of all the economic activity on the planet.
There's a lot more to explore in the IOUNet website, but hopefully this short presentation may be enough to whet your appetites. I would certainly recommend watching one of the talks to get an introduction to the key ideas.
I'd love to know what you think. So feel free to leave comments below.
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