Why AI Needs Blockchain – Rolling Stone

Damir Khabirov – stock.adobe.com

This year, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly overtaken many of the other technological advances trying to capture our attention, and as a result, the conversation has rapidly changed. In 2022, headlines were dominated by how blockchain and cryptocurrency act as the keys to a trustless, inclusive financial system. But now there is a greater focus on how ChatGPT and other AI tools and frameworks are our best hope for increasing productivity and innovation.

AI is meant to free up human capital by automating monotonous, mundane tasks – similar to how calculators automate basic arithmetic, but with far more complex capabilities and the ability to adapt over time. A calculator will always tell you that two plus two equals four, but an AI bot, through machine learning, should pick up different patterns of behavior. For example by observing when that the user tends to ask the bot to perform a certain equation or predict Why the user asks the question in the first place, it can suggest a more efficient path to the solution. In the face of the overwhelming AI media narrative, it may have become easier to dismiss blockchain’s capabilities, but the reality is: AI need blockchain to scale and maintain integrity.

Why Blockchain Is Struggling to Catch On

Sometimes the hardest part of initiating innovation is raising awareness of the problem. Consumers do not often see a clear reason for a solution to a given problem. When asked what led to his (then) inconceivable invention of the automobile, Henry Ford eloquently stated that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. In other words, sometimes the greatest inventions are things that live in the realm of incomprehensibility, and blockchain is quite similar in this sense.

We live in the age of the technological renaissance. Our phones, cars and homes are getting smarter, while our financial system has suffered relative stagnation since the invention of the credit card. Crypto influencer Mason Versluis describes crypto as “smart money” positioning it as the natural successor to existing financial technology. Unsurprisingly, there has been skepticism and resistance – but this has been the case with all major technologies introduced over the past century. When personal computers hit the market, they first attracted the attention of a niche group of hobbyists, and the wider public wondered what the purpose of a PC was. Decades later, most of the planet now has access to the internet. With this initial skepticism towards distributed ledger technology (DLT) and lack of mainstream education on the subject, there is a lot of cynicism. It’s quite easy to fall prey to the narrative that blockchain and crypto are scams, but it’s crucial to find out why you might have believed this narrative in the first place.

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Regulators around the world are divided on crypto’s value proposition – a handful see it as our only hope for creating a fair and inclusive financial system, while others see it as just another tool to enable illegal activity. While education on the matter has continued, giving newcomers the skills to identify and avoid fraud and illegal activity in the space, the negative sentiment remains. In part, this is because the concept of decentralization is a source of anxiety for governments and financial institutions around the world. Taking that power and spreading it to everyone fairly is a process that limits how many slices one party can take from the community pie. So naturally, those who are negatively affected are quick to speak out against blockchain.

A mutually beneficial relationship

You can say that AI has already left its mark on history. It took just five days for ChatGPT to amass 1 million users. For context, it took Instagram 2.5 months and Netflix 3.5 years to achieve the same feat. ChatGPT’s capabilities are so extraordinary that we’ve seen software engineers go viral on TikTok to show how it can write complex lines of code to build a trading bot. That said, we have also seen cases of ChatGPT giving misleading and/or malicious responses. While AI has its limitations, blockchain can help solve some of these problems.

While blockchain can potentially improve AI in the long term, it is equally the case that blockchain can greatly benefit from AI integrations to scale. An example would be the use of artificial intelligence to streamline the smart contract experience from initial coding to deployment. Because smart contracts are immutable, human error is quite punishable. So using artificial intelligence to eliminate human error can drastically increase the practicality of smart contracts that are used and trusted by large enterprises around the world. Another use case could be AI’s implementation in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to help them make informed decisions, while the history of all actions taken by the DAO can live forever on the blockchain.

Conversely, because blockchain operates on the premise of complete transparency and community maintenance, Web3 frameworks are ideal for hosting data that cannot be compromised. To apply this to AI, blockchain can help protect the integrity of sensitive data sets that AI relies on to function. Additionally, the collaborative nature of Web3 technology provides the necessary portability for AI to grow smarter and add value outside of the current silos (or applications) it lives in. In other words, instead of using Google’s AI tool Bard while he is in the Google ecosystem or ChatGPT in the Microsoft universe, blockchain gives both AI tools the freedom and flexibility to live in both worlds simultaneously. Overall, the synergies are quite large.

Cautious optimism

While we are still in the early days of AI, we can already see how it can always improve our quality of life. However, a number of considerations require that we all incorporate solutions, such as blockchain, that make AI’s adoption practical. While the media quickly replaced one with the other, always be sure to do your research – you might just find yourself early to the next big thing.