Me and My AI #3

 

One of these things is not like the others

 

The Internet. Smartphones. Crypto-currencies. Artificial Intelligence.

A series of technological …. innovations.

But crypto, despite its massive profile, is not like the others. For two reasons: economy and society.

The internet, smartphones and artificial intelligence have all had an economic impact, bringing down costs associated with economic activity. They’ve all had a social impact, changing the way we engage with each other and the world.

The internet in terms of access to information (and connectivity) – finding information and contacting others suddenly became cheaper and easier by orders of magnitude.

Smartphones for making all that mobile. Suddenly, the power of the internet could be just about anywhere. Work from anywhere anytime. Conduct a social life from anywhere anytime. Arguably, the success of the smartphone hinges to a significant extent on the internet, but it’s had massive impact regardless. If the internet hadn’t pre-dated mobile phones, then SMS would have evolved to effectively covered the same ground.

Artificial intelligence for automation. Ai has been automating our world for decades – the spellcheck on your smartphone, dynamic pricing, social media feeds, etc. – and its already significant impact is growing as automation takes over one task after another.

But crypto-currencies … the hyped era of ‘defi’ (decentralised finance) isn’t upon us. Instead, transferring value with crypto is more expensive and more difficult than a regular bank, and the records of transactions are kept all over the place, instead of in just one. The main benefit of business via crypto is the lack of transparency. Economically, at the end of the crypto boom, it’s just been a transfer of wealth – some people came out of it richer, most poorer.

Some continue to use it as a ‘store of value’ and it does effectively store whatever value people wish to associate with it – subject to change without warning. Coindesk’s crypt of coins displays just how much its various offerings have gone up or down (mostly down) over the preceding 24 hours.

Hopefully, for all that’s been invested in it, someone will devise a more useful application for this particular innovation.

In the meantime, the social categories who benefit are the owners of crypto networks and tech (the ones selling shovels in the goldfields), criminals laundering cash through the crypto-casino of coins and NFTs, and the cyber-criminals harder to track down via crypto transactions. Their victims, not so much. It’s like horse-racing with funny coins instead of funny hats.

The internet, smartphones, Ai – all have significantly impacted economy and society. Imagine a world without the internet or smartphones. Hard to do, especially if you grew up with them. A world without crypto? That would be like, I don’t know, a world without ‘Love Island UK’.

Artificial intelligence has been around a long while. The first serious Ai enterprises date back sixty-odd years, and it’s thirty-odd years since an Ai beat the world chess champion (at chess, duh). Ai has been a far more serious proposition since the early teens, with the onset of effective neural networks. As larger amounts of data and significant improvements in processing power came online, it began to step up and beyond the showcase applications. Five years ago, those who knew knew what was coming. It’s now a year since the generative Ai explosion.

Unlike crypto, Ai has lived up to the hype. It has growing applications and a growing body of people and businesses making effective economic and social use of it. Even in the unlikely circumstance that Ai was to cease developing from its current technological level, it still has millions of technological niches to automate.