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Preventing the onslaught of spam on the internet using digital ID's:
As LLM's start passing the turing test and beating CAPTCHA's, spammers will soon be able to pass as humans. Right now, people often draw conclusions and whole worldviews from interactions and consensus they observe online. But when bots are indistinguishable from humans, whoever has the most computing power will have the most representation online, and will be able to skew our perception of the world.
To prevent this, I think it's crucial for our sanity and epistemics that we have strong private digital identities so you can see next to a profile whether it's is a person or a bot. In order to protect anonymity, the system could use clever cryptography allowing people to prove that they are a real person but without revealing who they are (for things like whistleblowers etc). Alternatively, these systems could be limited to only knowing that you haven't spammed a certain number of requests in the past few minutes, still while protecting your anonymity.
The internet needs to be conducive to people forming consensus around facts since so many people nowadays base their opinions based on what they see online. I hope people lobby for digital ID systems to keep the internet from devolving.
Prediction Market Manipulation Could Prevent Catastrophes:
TLDR: Risk premia incentivize people to manipulate the underlying events in prediction markets, and prevent large scale risks to markets like wars and recessions from happening.
Match-fixing is the illegal phenomenon in sports betting where an athlete bets on a game they are competing in and then changes their actions to win the bet. Something similar will likely happen with prediction markets despite its illegality. But when it does, there may be an incentive for it to happen in a way that benefits markets overall and prevents systemic risks:
According to risk premium theory, risky stocks which are correlated with the overall stock market are priced cheaper than their underlying value, making them good investments.
Prediction markets could be affected by this theory: betting positions for something like "higher corporate profits", something which is positively correlated the performance of overall stock markets, might be systemically undervalued. This would create an incentive to bet that these outcomes won't happen.
Because of risk premia, events like "recession won't happen" or "war won't break out" would be better bets than their opposites since they are correlated with stock market performance. Therefore, any politician that wants to engage in "match-fixing" would have an incentive to match-fix in the direction that prevents risks.
For example, a politician could be more likely buy a betting position that "climate catastrophe won't happen," a position which is likely positively correlated with stock market performance. And then they would pass a sweeping climate proposal that prevents climate catastrophe. Similarly, a whistle-blower might bet against a presidential candidate who poses a threat to world stability and markets, and subsequently share unsavory information about them to tank their campaign.
Legalizing manipulating outcomes while betting on those same outcomes might seem wrong, but perhaps, like insider trading, it could have some benefits to society.