What’s the Relationship Between Crypto and AI? Is There Any?
The last six months have been a watershed moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI). Image processors like Mid-journey and text generators like ChatGPT have piqued the public’s interest and sparked heated debate.
Unlike the promise of self-driving cars, these applications appear to be ready for real-world commercialization.
This could be a problem for tech entrepreneurs working on public blockchains and distributed computing.
For the foreseeable future, artificial intelligence will be a major competitor for investment funding, especially given the reputational damage inflicted on cryptocurrency by various scammers and fraudsters over the past year.
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There are also significant differences in the structure and ethos of blockchains and artificial intelligence. Until now, AI training has effectively required large, centralized data caches, which could contribute to the kinds of privacy and security risks that the crypto and blockchain communities are strongly opposed to.
Furthermore, AI’s reliance on data caches makes it vulnerable to capture by large, centralized corporations. This is currently taking place: Microsoft’s massive $10 billion bet on Open AI and ChatGPT is clearly predicated on the technology’s limited deployment in corporate products.
AI that can be assembled
However, there is another approach to AI that could help address this inherent undemocratic bias.
Aside from digital currency, one of the most obvious viable applications of blockchains is for managing distributed computing resources.
Blockchains can be used to coordinate and verify network services, with tokens rewarding contributors. Blockchains have previously been used to incentivize and manage distributed cloud storage (Filecoin) and distributed high-end graphics compute (Render Network).
BitTorrent is another interesting example, as it began as a nontokenized peer-to-peer file-sharing network. However, researchers began theorizing in 2017 that tokenizing the network could improve it for all users by rewarding users with the fastest connections.
In 2018, Tron founder Justin Sun purchased the service with the intention of doing exactly that (though I cannot vouch for the technical specifics of the BTT implementation).
A number of blockchain projects have applied tokenized distributed computing logic to artificial intelligence. SingularityNET, founded in 2017 by veteran AI researcher Ben Goertzel, is likely the most significant.
Goertzel has been working on artificial intelligence since the late 1980s, is the author of over a dozen academic books on the subject, and is credited with popularizing the term “artificial general intelligence.”
Goertzel frequently summarizes SingularityNET’s approach to artificial intelligence in the words of pioneering computer science researcher Marvin Minsky, who saw AI evolving as a “society of minds.” SingularityNET, according to Goertzel, is an open architecture for connecting various “narrow” artificial intelligence, such as language processors, navigators, and image generators, that are each good at something specific.
A SingularityNET user can request a specific combination of network services, which can be created and hosted anywhere in the world and freely linked to the network. This is fundamentally similar to how financial services on a smart-contract platform like Ethereum can be linked together to form larger packages, a concept known as “composability.”
Goertzel contends that a programmable AI network could democratize AI development in the same way that cryptocurrencies and smart contracts have democratized finance (though, as we’ve seen, this is a double-edged sword).
However, Goertzel goes a step further, arguing that a recombination environment for AI development, in which each module develops independently, may be a better path to artificial general intelligence – that is, human-like digital minds.
One technical point should be made clear: artificial intelligence cannot run “on” a blockchain. At the very least, given current technology, this would be inconceivably slow and costly. SingularityNET and similar projects are committed to using blockchains to manage off-chain resources, which entails some technical risk because it necessitates multiple layers of verification to ensure good inputs and outputs to and from the network.
AI vs. crypto philosophy
Goertzel’s approach to AI stands in stark contrast to the implied beliefs of Sam Altman, AI’s current mainstream poster boy. Altman is the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, but he is also the driving force behind Worldcoin, a project aimed at creating unique digital identities for global citizens by scanning their irises.
On the surface, Altman’s Worldcoin project appears to be despicable for its willingness to collect extremely sensitive biometric data from vulnerable populations.
However, its implied relationship with AI may be even more sinister.
Many social and economic theorists predict that AI will lead to extreme inequality. It will, according to some, render jobs such as truck drivers and cashiers obsolete. Because AI is more likely to be centralized, those wages will instead be converted into profits for large corporations.
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin is specifically designed to implement the main solution offered by Silicon Valley to this conundrum: universal basic income (UBI).
The idea is that once AI eliminates all jobs, a government or similar entity will have to tax the few centralized AI administrators at a high enough rate to redistribute wealth to the common people. The eyeball-scanning orb of Worldcoin is designed, above all, to ensure that no one can defraud that imagined future system by collecting multiple payments.
I’m a leftist who believes that some wealth redistribution makes society more stable and productive. This Silicon Valley UBI vision, however, is an authoritarian nightmare that combines the worst aspects of bloated politburo communism and grasping monopolist capitalism.
It would be a future in which the many rely entirely on the generosity of a few. A techno-elite would run an artificially intelligent Company Store of the exploitative type lamented in traditional coal miners’ ballads.
That’s the future that people like Sam Altman and Peter Thiel seem to be looking forward to. While it is not yet a complete alternative vision, distributed AI projects such as SingluarityNET do provide a glimpse of a more democratic technological future.
READ ALSO: FTX: Collapsed crypto giant recovers over $5bn of assets
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