News
Somi Arian at the London Blockchain Conference: Blockchain must keep pace with artificial intelligence
After two full days of blockchain and Web3 sessions with a bias towards practicality and hands-on experience, the third day of London Blockchain Conference 2024 began on a more philosophical note.
At least the day’s opening keynote was delivered by a woman often described as a philosopher of technology. Somi Ariano is a renowned entrepreneur, speaker and filmmaker. His widely awarded 2018 documentary, “The Millennial Disruption,” explored the impact of the internet and modern technology on the titular generation, while a book titled “Career Fear (And How to Beat It)” was published in 2020 .
In front of a packed audience on the main stage of the conference’s Visionaries Stage, Arian used his diverse personal and professional experience to discuss the changes brought about by Web3 AND artificial intelligence (AI) and the opportunities these changes present.
He began by probing the room with a lively enthusiasm that lasted throughout the session.
“How many here are developers?” A few hands went up. “A lot of what I talk about is up to you guys.”
“How many are owner-operators, in other words builders?’”
Slightly more hands went up. One can only imagine the difficult situation of those in the first category who nevertheless consider themselves builders.
“How many investors are interested in an increase in numbers?” No hands went up.
After taking the census, Arian launched into her speech.
“A lot of people here are like me: I call myself an owner-operator. Someone trying to build in this space.”
Despite this role, Arian said she has been forced to step back from the digital assets industry due to some key challenges she believes are unaddressed. She arian she also believes she is not alone, and for this reason emergence of AI in the public consciousness, blockchain is left in the dust. Our thunder, he beamed, was stolen by artificial intelligence.
However, Arian’s thesis, in line with many of the other visionaries who took to the stage this week, is that blockchain and artificial intelligence they have a lot to offer each other. The reality of the current cultural dominance of AI is that we may need to lead with AI technology that is quietly supported by blockchain technology rather than the other way around.
“In a way, I would basically say that AI needs blockchain more than blockchain needs AI: blockchain offers that level of security and immutability that AI needs. But from a public perception perspective, this is where we most need AI integration to make blockchain more appealing to the general public.”
Such packaging is important because artificial intelligence currently faces similar problems blockchain can help solve.
According to Arian, much of this is due to the way blockchain can do this boost up decentralization and democratization and improve data security and privacy.
“If you think of AI as a centralized force and Web3 as a decentralized force, they balance each other out,” he says.
An easily identifiable example of the potential synergy between these two is that, together, they enable intelligent automation in decision making within decentralized networks.
Consider the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), one of the most exciting new paradigms invited by blockchains. One of the problems budding DAOs face (as perhaps demonstrated by the lack of hands that went up when Arian asked the audience how many DAO members there are) is decision fatigue. As nice as the idea may seem that all decisions are made by the community as a whole, the reality for these decentralized decision makers is that they are bombarded with requests for decisions and sooner or later tune them out.
“It’s the highest level of democracy, but in practice it’s difficult. We only have so much attention and our attention span is being pulled in every direction.
Arian said artificial intelligence can help with this. A suitable AI familiar with your activities across channels and your preferences could make such decisions for you, giving a virtual assistant some level of autonomy to vote on the (presumably) most minor decisions.
He followed this train of thought, comparing terms and conditions. How many people sit down and read the fine print before clicking “accept”? An AI could read and interpret these terms and briefly present them to its master or decide for itself whether to accept or reject them.
Arian looked at other potential synergies: think about the role of artificial intelligence in conducting advanced analytics and machine learning. The use of decentralized blockchains could allow this to be done without compromising data privacy, as well as the more general benefit of having artificial intelligence analyze on-chain data to detect fraud.
“One of the really good examples of the kinds of solutions we can have is federated learning. This trains a machine learning model on decentralized data sources without sharing the actual data.”
“This mitigates one of the main concerns people have with LLMs,” he said. In other words, the outstanding question is where all the data we feed into these models will go and how it will be used.
Ultimately, the goal of combining these two technologies is decentralized artificial intelligence, Arian said. That’s where the magic will happen. It’s a paradigm shift: AI models and data processing on a decentralized network instead of relying on centralized servers.
But one of the main obstacles to realizing this potential is scalability, the mention of which practically rocked the crowd with a wave of audible hand twitching. Arian shared the experience by building a platform that communities would use to create live and on-demand content with collaboration tools. They worked hard to build it and raised money, but the problem is that even though it was token-gate, it wasn’t decentralized yet. That’s because Arian couldn’t find any blockchain that could host the kind of data they needed: all the live sessions, the various collaborations, and so on.
“The truth is that yes, in principle it is a great idea, but in practice there are many obstacles in the way. We don’t have the type of blockchain that can handle the amount of data needed to develop artificial intelligence.”
One could only imagine what a question and answer session starting at that very moment would produce.
In any case, in this sense, he says, blockchain is lagging behind. If we can’t keep up with demand for capacity, eventually people will stop developing for blockchain.
The ultimate point of Arian’s presentation, and the apparent answer to how blockchain can keep pace with artificial intelligence, is that whatever we do, we need to be faster and do it sooner.
For artificial intelligence (AI) to function within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it must integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures the quality and ownership of data input, allowing it to keep it secure while ensuring immutability. of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage about this emerging technology to learn more because enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of artificial intelligence.
Watch: Highlights from day two of the London Blockchain Conference 2024
New to blockchain? Check it out on CoinGeek Blockchain for Beginners section, the definitive resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.