DAOs unlock a sustainable transition to decentralized economies---that’s the bedrock of Society 5.0 AND cements open innovation.

THE current fourth industrial revolution has been enabled through the Internet of Things (IoT) in association with other emerging technologies, most notably cyber-physical sys- tems (CPS). CPS help bridge the gap between manufacturing and information technologies and give birth to the smart factory. This technological evolution ushers in the Industry 4.0 as a prime agenda of the High-Tech Strategy 2020 Action Plan taken by the government of Germany, the Industrial Internet from General Electric in the USA, and the Internet+ from China. Re- cently, in January 2021, the European Commission released the first edition of their policy brief on Industry 5.0 [1]. One of the most important paradigmatic transitions characterizing Industry 5.0 is the shift of focus from technology-driven progress to a thoroughly human-centric approach. An important prerequisite for Industry 5.0 is that technology serves people, rather than the other way around, by expanding the capabilities of workers (up- skilling and re-skilling) with innovative technological means such as virtual/augmented reality (V/AR) tools, mobile robots, and exoskeletons. Note that while Industry 4.0 implies minimum human intervention due to automation, Industry 5.0 prioritizes augmentation of the human over automation of the human.

It is interesting to note that in [1], the authors also elaborate on the relation between the concepts of Industry 5.0 and Society 5.0. While both concepts are related in the sense that they refer to a fundamental shift of our society and economy towards a new paradigm, Society 5.0 is not restricted to the manufacturing sector but addresses larger social challenges based on the integration of physical and virtual spaces.

According to [2], Society 5.0 seeks to create a sustainable society for human security and well-being, which is aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to create new values by making connections between people and things and between the real and cyber worlds through digitalization. The authors of [2] emphasize that digitalization is only the means and that it is essential that we humans remain the central actors so that a firm focus is kept on building a society that makes us happy. More specifically, the authors of [3] provide the following definition of Society 5.0: “A human- centered society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space, a system which consists of physically controllable technologies such as AI, robots, and IoT integrated into cyberspace.” To better understand the differences between Industry 4.0/5.0 and Society 5.0, the authors of [4] compare them in terms of involved technologies, research areas, power source, motto as well as their underlying motivation. They argue that while the main motivation behind Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 is mass production and a smart sustainable society, respectively, Society 5.0’s main motivation is that humankind live in harmony with nature.

Society 5.0 is an initiative of the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan taken by the government of Japan to facilitate a human-centered approach that puts humans in the loop of today’s CPS [5]. By functionally integrating human beings at the social, cognitive, and physical levels, CPS become so- called cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) [6]. Members of CPSS may engage in a wide variety of cyber-physical-social behaviors. The human-centeredness of Society 5.0 was recently investigated in technically greater detail in [7]. The author of [7] describes the goal of Society 5.0 as the ability to create equal opportunities for all and to provide the environment that helps unleash the full potential of each individual. To do so, Society 5.0 will leverage on emerging ICT technologies to its fullest such that social barriers to each individual’s self-realization are removed.

For illustration, Fig. 1 depicts the transition from past to future societies and their co-evolution with industry [7]. The relationship between Society 5.0 and past societies on the one hand and Industry 4.0 on the other hand was described in more detail in [8]. While the focus of Society 4.0 was on building an information society via ICT for the purpose of increasing profitability, Society 5.0’s main goal is to merge cyberspace and physical space for the purpose of advancing humanity. Society 5.0 seeks to revolutionize not only the industry through ICT but also the living spaces and habits of the public. Society 5.0 focuses heavily on the public impact of technology and aspires to create a supersmart society, thus requiring metrics that are much more complex than those used in Industry 4.0, whose focus centers on minimizing manufacturing costs without taking social issues into account.

Similar to Industry 4.0, Society 5.0 aims at seamlessly fusing the digital and physical worlds by using social robots, ambi- ent intelligence, advanced human-computer interfaces (HCI), embodied artificial intelligence (AI), and various flavors of extended reality including V/AR, in addition to the aforemen- tioned CPSS (see also Fig. 1). Society 5.0 has two specific visions. The first one is human-robot co-working. In this vision, robotics (including social robots) and humans will work together whenever and wherever possible. Humans will focus on tasks requiring creativity and robots will do the rest, giving rise to to the so-called decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). DAO is a unique feature of Ethereum blockchain and heavily relies on crowdsourcing human skills to solve problems that robots and autonomous AI agents alone cannot solve well. The second vision of Society 5.0 is bionics, which studies the smart use of biological resources for industrial purposes to help achieve a balance between society, economy, and ecology. In this paper, we put a particular focus on the so-called Internet of No Things as our CPSS of choice as well as decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and robonomics, as explained in more detail below.

It is important to note that Society 5.0 tries to counterbalance the commercial emphasis of Industry 4.0. Towards this end, the overarching goal of Society 5.0 will be the creation of the world’s first super smart society. Conversely, the focus of In- dustry 4.0 has been the creation of the smart factory that is fully automated and thus requires minimum human presence on-site. More interestingly, Society 5.0 also envisions a paradigm shift from conventional monetary to future nonmonetary economies based on technologies that can measure activities toward human co-becoming that have no monetary value (to be explained shortly in the context of tokenomics) [8].

It is interesting to note that the aforementioned Society 5.0

vision aligns surprisingly well with the far-reaching vision of future 6G networks. 6G is anticipated to be more human- centered than 5G, which primarily focused on industry verticals such as smart grids or smart cities, as outlined in the world’s first 6G white paper of the 6Genesis Flagship Program (6GFP). In fact, 6GFP anticipates that there will be a “transition from 5G engineering to 6G humanity” [sic] by addressing not only productivity in vertical industries, technology enablers, and sus- tainability goals, but also societal challenges, e.g., automation. Recently, we illustrated the potential of CPSS by presenting two prominent 5/6G examples of human-in-the-loop centric systems. The first one is the Tactile Internet, which is widely viewed as one of the most interesting 5G low-latency applications [9]. The second one is the future Internet of No Things, which serves as an important stepping stone toward ushering in the 6G post-smartphone era [10]. Arguably more important, we also elaborated on robonomics, an emerging field in the 6G era, and the role advanced blockchain technologies play in realizing the Society 5.0 vision.

Robonomics studies the sociotechnical impact of social human-robot interaction (sHRI) as well as blockchain technolo- gies and cryptocurrencies—not only coins but also tokens—for the social integration of robots into human society [11]. Re- cently, in [12], we investigated advanced blockchain technolo- gies such as oracles that enable the on-chaining of blockchain- external off-chain information stemming from human users. In doing so, oracles leverage on human intelligence rather than machine learning only. Our empirical results demonstrated that the presence of third parties such as human observers and in particular social robots play an important role in the blockchain- enabled trust game, a cornerstone of behavioral economics. The peer pressure executed by on-chaining oracles and especially the embodied communications enabled by persuasive robots were shown to have a potentially greater social impact than monetary incentives such as the considered cryptocurrency Ether.

In this paper, we aim at driving the bionic convergence of robonomics, DAO, and the Internet of No Things as our CPSS of choice to advance the collective intelligence (CI) of Society 5.0 in the next-generation Internet known as Web3. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we elaborate on the shift from 6G robonomics to nonmonetary tokenomics and explain the enabling key concepts of tokenization, tokenized digital twin, token economy, and purpose-driven tokens in greater detail. Second, given that token design is still in the very early research stages, we tackle the important problem of token engineering and present our CPSS based bottom-up token engineering DAO framework for Society 5.0, including its multilayer architecture and mechanism design. Third, we experimentally demonstrate the potential of the biological stigmergy mechanism for advanc- ing CI in a CPSS based DAO via tokenized digital twins. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate the advancement of CI in a stigmergy enhanced Society 5.0 based on CPSS and token engineering.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section II elaborates on the role of robonomics and tokenomics in Society 5.0. In Section III, we outline our proposed path to a human- centered society and explain purpose-driven tokens and token engineering in technically greater detail. Further, we introduce our CPSS based bottom-up multilayer token engineering frame- work for a Society 5.0. In Section IV, we explain how our proposed framework can be applied to advance human collective intelligence in the 6G era. Section V describes its experimental implementation and highlights some illustrative results. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper.

II. SOCIETY 5.0: FROM ROBONOMICS TO TOKENOMICS

The authors of [11] provided insights into how blockchain and other decentralized technologies have an impact on the interaction of humans with robot agents and their social in- tegration into human society. Towards this end, blockchain technologies can serve as a ledger, where robots and humans may access and record anything of value, such as ownership titles or financial transactions. Further, smart contracts help encode the self-enforceable and self-verifiable agreement logic between a robot and a human. Cryptocurrencies may be used to allow robots to hold financial obligations and enter into exchanges of value with a human, and vice versa.

The shift from conventional monetary economics to nonmonetary tokenomics and the central role tokens play in blockchain- based ecosystems were analyzed recently in [13]. Decentralized blockchain technologies have been applied in a non-monetary context by exploiting a process known as tokenization in differ- ent value-based scenarios. The tokenization of an existing asset refers to the process of creating a tokenized digital twin for any physical object or financial asset. The resultant tokens are tradeable units that encapsulate value digitally. They can be used as incentives to coordinate actors in a given regulated ecosystem in order to achieve a desired outcome. According to [13], tokens have a disruptive potential to expand the concept of value beyond the economic realm by using them for reputation purposes or voting rights. Through tokenization, different types of digitized value can be exploited in an ecosystem of incentives by sharing the rewards and benefits among its stakeholders.

Tokens can represent any existing digital or physical asset, as well as access rights to assets and permissions in the digital or physical world. A token is stored as an entry in the ledger and is mapped to a blockchain address, which represents the identity of the token holder. Originally, tokens were minted by using the underlying blockchain protocols. However, with the advent of Ethereum, tokens moved up the blockchain protocol stack and can now be created on the application layer, giving rise to so-called application tokens. With Ethereum, application tokens can be issued easily and cheaply following the Ethereum token standards (e.g., ERC-20) via a specific type of smart contract, known as token contract.

Tokens might be the killer application of blockchain networks and are recognized as one of the main driving forces behind the next-generation Internet referred to as the Web3 [14]. As shown in Fig. 2, while the Web1 (read-only web) and Web2 (read-and-write web) enabled the knowledge economy and today’s platform economy, respectively, the Web3 will enable the token economy where anyone’s contribution is compensated with a token. The token economy enables completely new use cases, business models, and types of assets and access rights in a digital way that were economically not feasible before, thus enabling completely new use cases and value creation models. Note that the term token economy is far from novel. In cognitive psychology, it has been widely studied as a medium of exchange, and arguably more importantly, as a positive reinforcement method for establishing desirable human behavior, which in itself may be viewed as one kind of value creation. Unlike coins, however, which have been typically used only as a payment medium, tokens may serve a wide range of different non-monetary purposes. Such purpose- driven tokens are instrumental in incentivizing an autonomous group of individuals to collaborate and contribute to a common goal. According to [14], the exploration of tokens, in particular different types and roles, is still in the very early stages.

The token economy plays a central role in realizing the emerging DAO, which has become a hot topic spawned by the rapid development of blockchain technology in recent years [15]. The DAO may be viewed as a social system composed of intelligent agents coevolving into human-machine integration based on real-world and artificial blockchain sys- tems. In the DAO, all the operational rules are recorded on the blockchain in the form of smart contracts. Token economy incentives together with distributed consensus protocols are utilized to realize the self-operation, self-governance, and self- evolution of the DAO. In fact, according to the authors of [15], the use of tokens as incentives is the main motivator for the DAO, whereby the so-called incentive mechanism layer of their presented multi-layer DAO reference model will be key for the token design (to be discussed in more detail shortly).

III. THE PATH (DAO) TO A HUMAN-CENTERED SOCIETY

While a lot of tokens have been issued over the last few years, most of these issued tokens lack proper functionality and mechanism design. In this section, we aim at addressing these two shortcomings by discussing purpose-driven tokens and introducing the important problem of token engineering.

A. Purpose-Driven Tokens and Token Engineering

Recall from Section II that we are still in the very early stages of exploring different roles and types of tokens. For instance, so-called purpose-driven tokens incentivize individual behavior to contribute to a certain purpose or idea of a collective goal. This collective goal might be a public good or the reduction of negative externalities to a common good, e.g., reduction of CO2 emissions. Purpose-driven tokens introduce a new form of public goods creation without requiring traditional intermediaries, e.g., governments. Blockchain networks such as Ethereum took the idea of collective value creation to the next level by providing a public infrastructure for creating an application token with only a few lines of smart contract code, whereby in principle any purpose can be incentivized. However, given that operational use cases are still limited, this new phenomenon of tech-driven public goods creation needs much more research and development [14].

Proof-of-Work (PoW) is an essential mechanism for the maintenance of public goods. Even though the collective pro- duction of public goods can result in positive externalities, it does not necessarily exclude other negative externalities, e.g., energy-intense mining process of blockchains. When designing purpose-driven tokens as a means to provide public goods, be- havioral economics methods, e.g., the well-known nudging tech- nique and behavioral game theory, provide important tools to steer individuals toward certain actions. For further information about our recent work on playing a blockchain-enabled version of the widely studied trust game of behavioral economics with on-chaining oracles and persuasive social robots, we refer the interested reader to [12].

In the following, we focus on the important problem of token engineering, which is an emerging term defined as the theory, practice, and tools to analyze, design, and verify tokenized ecosystems [14]. It involves the design of a bottom-up token engineering framework along with the design of adequate mech- anisms for addressing the issues of purpose-driven tokens. Note that mechanism design is a subfield of economics that deals with the question of how to incentivize everyone to contribute to a collective goal. It is also referred to as “reverse game theory” since it starts at the end of the game (i.e., its desirable output) and then goes backward when designing the (incentive) mechanism.1

B. Token Engineering DAO Framework for Society 5.0

Recall from Section II that for the token design a multilayer DAO reference model was proposed in [15], though it was intentionally kept generic without any specific relation to Society 5.0. The bottom-up architecture of the DAO reference model comprises the following five layers: (i) basic technology, (ii) governance operation, (iii) incentive mechanism, (iv) organiza- tion form, and (v) manifestation. Due to space constraints, we refer the interested reader to [15] for further information on the generic DAO reference model and a more detailed description of each layer. In the following, we adapt the generic DAO reference model to the specific requirements of Society 5.0 and highlight the modifications made in our CPSS based bottom-up token engineering DAO framework.

Figure 3 depicts our proposed multilayer token engineering DAO framework for Society 5.0 that builds on top of state- of-the-art CPSS. While the Internet of Things as prime CPS example has ushered in Industry 4.0, advanced CPSS such as the future Internet of No Things, briefly mentioned in Section I, will be instrumental in ushering in Society 5.0. As explained in more detail in [10], the Internet of No Things creates a converged service platform for the fusion of digital and real worlds that offers all kinds of human-intended services without owning or carrying any type of computing or storage devices. It envisions Internet services to appear from the surrounding environment when needed and disappear when not needed. The transition from the current gadgets-based Internet to the Internet of No Things is divided into three phases: (i) bearables (e.g., smartphone), (ii) wearables (e.g., Google and Levi’s smart jacket), and then finally (iii) nearables. Nearables denote nearby computing/storage technologies and service provisioning mechanisms that are intelligent enough to learn and react according to user context and history in order to provide user-intended services. The basic technology layer at the bottom of Fig. 3 illustrates the key enabling technologies (e.g., blockchain) underlying the Internet of No Things. In addition, this layer contains future technologies, most notably bionics, that are anticipated to play an increasingly important role in a future super smart Society 5.0 (see also Fig. 1).

Above the basic technology layer, there exists the governance operation layer. Generally speaking, this layer encodes consensus via smart contracts (e.g., voting) and realizes the DAO’s self-governance through on-chain and off-chain collaboration (on-chaining oracle). Further, this layer includes nudging mechanisms via smart contract (nudge contract), collective decision making, and knowledge sharing among its members. The incentive mechanism layer covers the aforementioned to- ken related techniques and their proper alignment to facilitate token engineering. Next, the organization form layer includes the voting process and membership during the lifecycle of a proposed DAO project. Note that, in economics, public goods that come with regulated access rights (e.g., membership) are called club goods.

Finally, the manifestation layer allows members to take simple, locally independent actions that together lead to the emergence of complex adaptive system behavior of the DAO and Society 5.0 as a whole. Due to its striking similarity to decentralized blockchain technology, we explore the potential of the biological stigmergy mechanism widely found in social insect societies such as ants and bees, especially their inherent capability of self-organization and indirect coordination by means of olfactory traces that members create in the environment. Upon sensing these traces, other society members are stimulated to perform succeeding actions, thus reinforcing the traces in a self-sustaining autocatalytic way without requiring any central control entity, as explained below in Section IV.