Alignment Is Intelligence: AI Digital Twins & the Future of DAOs with James Young

Описание: In this closing session at ETHBoulder, James Young challenges one of crypto’s most persistent assumptions:

Coordination is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

After years of working with MolochDAO, Collab.Land, and over 60,000 tokenized communities, James argues that DAOs don’t fail because governance is broken; they fail because alignment decays.

Markets coordinate assets.
Communities coordinate meaning.

This talk explores why DAOs stagnate, how Goodhart’s Law has distorted incentive systems, and why Ethereum solved “hard trust” but not behavioral alignment.

James proposes a bold new direction:

AI digital twins inside DAOs.

Instead of humans voting directly, AI agents model your revealed preferences over time, building a “coherence score” that allows autonomous delegation once alignment is proven.

Topics covered:

• Why DAOs lose momentum
• Goodhart’s Law & broken metrics
• Hard trust vs behavioral trust
• Tokenization as a bootstrap event
• Digital twin agents & coherence scoring
• AI as a prediction market for human values
• ZK proofs & private preference modeling
• Delegation via ERC-4337 & EIP-8004
• Semi-autonomous 24/7 DAOs
• Scaling culture through coherent AI networks
• Why culture, not TVL, determines longevity

The thesis:

If Ethereum solved coordination through cryptography,
AI may help us solve alignment through coherence.

ETHBoulder isn’t just about scaling blockspace.
It’s about scaling culture.

https://ethboulder.xyz/
https://x.com/ethereumboulder
https://x.com/jamesyoung

Timestamps

00:00 – From coordination to alignment
01:00 – Ethereum as a coordination breakthrough
02:00 – Why DAOs feel uncomfortable
03:00 – James’ background (MolochDAO, Collab.Land)
04:00 – Why DAOs decay over time
05:00 – Markets coordinate assets, communities coordinate meaning
06:00 – Goodhart’s Law & broken DAO metrics
07:00 – Hard trust vs behavioral alignment
08:00 – Tokenization as a bootstrap event
09:00 – Introducing digital twin agents
10:00 – Coherence scoring & prediction market model
11:00 – Delegation via AI agents
12:00 – Scaling coherence across DAOs
13:00 – Culture as network effect
14:00 – “Put the A back in DAOs” & closing