What a time to be alive as a technologist. In history the most ground breaking innovation always came from a combination of several disruptive technologies. We are about to witness another one of these moments that will have fundamental impact on humanity.
Crypto and AI are revolutionary technologies on its own, but the combination of both will give birth to a new era of prosperity through new concepts of data utilisation and sharing incentives. In this article, I share my view on why Crypto is the most important puzzle piece in ensuring that AI will work in sync with humanity’s prosperity and will describe five thought provoking ideas that we might see in the future.
The Mass Adoption of AI
The advent of AI has been talked about a lot over the past years but in my view nothing is better than showcasing – “show me, don’t tell me”: The recent reveal of mainstream AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Synthopia left no doubt that Artificial Intelligence is providing significant disruption at your fingertips. Not tomorrow, today!
Among many other things artificial intelligence will empower anyone to 10x their capabilities in:
- Writing essays, articles, research documents, presentations
- Writing and improving code
- Creating visuals and audio
- Researching and problem solving
- Managing tasks and activities
Generative AI will not only boost productivity but it will fundamentally change business and job profiles. The change will be so rapid and quick that many businesses will be overwhelmed. It took ChatGPT only 5 days to reach 1 million users (for comparison: it took Spotify 5 months to reach the same). It is a fascinating development but at the same time we need to ensure that there is a protective technology in place that ensures trustworthy sources and an inclusive and fair rise of AI for the benefits of organisations and individuals. The technology that will go hand in hand with AI in this development is Crypto.
Crypto x AI – the Lock and the Key
The source of power for AI comes from data. AI needs to access data in order to train and enhance its capabilities. Where is this data coming from? From all of us – from individuals, organisations, machines and assets! And this is where Web3 comes into play. Through the ability to bring data ownership back into the hands of the owner, manage access rights and pricing, Crypto becomes the heart and soul of a new data economy that works together with AI. One of the missions of Web3 is to demonopolise the current Web2 power structure and with that also break up the data silos of GAMA. Soon, organisations and individuals will have their own data wallets that will allow them to publish and monetise their data in a self-sovereign way. That could be data about purchase history, energy consumption, transaction data or any intellectual property.
Data wallets are the perfect counterpart for AI – a win-win situation: AI will access data that is high quality and validated, while owners of the data will be compensated for it through micro-transaction in the form of tokens or stable coins, which furthers increase the willingness to share relevant data. In addition, for sensitive data it is possible to not share the entire data set but let the AI run an algorithm over the data set and only feedback the results – this is the compute-to-data feature from the folks at Ocean Protocol
The grade of disruption that these two technology can bring together is yet to be seen, but if we assume “sky is the limit”, then the following ideas are not only very much possible, but in parts are already in implementation:
I. The Rise of Professional Avatars:
You will be able to train your avatar to an extend where it can replicate your skills, whether it is a professional service like advisory or consulting, giving a presentation, having conversations or replicating your e-sports performance. The advancements in video and speech AI will even make your avatar visually and acoustically indistinguishable from your real on-screen persona. This would mean that professional services are not bound to the available working hours per day and are not limited to timezones and locations. For certain tasks you (presented by your avatar) will able to be in able to be in multiple places at the same time. A Crypto-based digital identity wallet will ensure that the avatar has access to your data and 3rd parties can verify that this avatar belongs to you and is not a deepfake. Your avatar will be paid in Crypto tokens for his services and work while you are busy with other topics, are on vacation or sleep.
II. Democratisation of wealth management:
Professional wealth management today is only available for high-net-worth individuals as it requires volume and dedicated attention for processing data and customized strategies. In addition over 2 Billion people do not have access to basic financial services.
AI and Crypto will change this. AI’s are building wealth management strategies through processing data and learning market movements. They do this through a variety of data, e.g. media sentiment, technical analysis, fundamentals analysis. They AI will be able to learn, predict and therefore create wealth management strategies at marginal costs. As a significant amount of financial trading today is already driven by bots, patterns and trade data can be analysed efficiently by the AI.
Whats the role of Crypto here? Wealth management services will be available for everyone on the planet – and it will be Crypto powered. Not only is Crypto allowing anyone to connect to these wealth management solutions by simply downloading a wallet, individuals and organisations will be able to dedicate funds to digital wealth managers according to their risk profile and preferences. These AI wealth managers will trade tokenized real-world and native digital assets and will return the benefits straight into the users wallet – auditable on the Blockchain. In addition, it will open up opportunities for the best traders in the world to connect their algorithms to such a platform and be able to put their strategies to work for larger pools of funds and therefore increase their income.