A just-published Magazine by Cointelegraph article, “How to control the AIs and incentivize the humans with crypto,” is positing crypto frameworks for developing and more fairly distributing the benefits of AI.

The article details initiatives for developing AI via open source and decentralized web3 and crypto powered communities, and rewarding participants and developers.

The Trends Journal forecast and advocated for crypto as a means to more fairly develop and distribute the benefits of AI technology long before this latest article, or the explosion of generative AI systems like ChatGPT into the mainstream. 

Dating back to 12 July 2022, in “AUTOMATING OUT OF WORLD CRISIS?” we posited crypto technology as a way to democratize development and rewards from AI and automation, including via DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and decentralized tokenized crypto networks.

In that article, we wrote:

“with automation and AI technology, come serious questions about who benefits, and who gets left behind.

“Could crypto-based blockchain technologies not only power responsible automation and AI advancement, but provide a basis for a fair and wide dispersal of the economic benefits?

“It’s something that should be on the agenda of forward-thinking policy makers and crypto communities looking to build an age of ‘crypto’ utility.” 

We detailed projects like DeepBrain, a project building an artificial intelligence neural network that was decentralized and distributed over the mass nodes of the whole world through blockchain technology. 

And we outlined how DAOs could be brought to bear on AI development and governance:

“crypto technology can also potentially more widely disperse the rewards of efficiencies and capabilities that AI and automation are producing.

“Projects like DeepBrain Chain have crypto tokens in which anyone can invest.

“But DAOs offer an even greater potential for widely disbursing benefits. DAOs not only can replace many aspects of a traditional business with automated processes. They offer people an ability for communities to participate in the governance and operating structures of the blockchain based organization.”

In “CREATIVE CONTENT INFRINGEMENT OF DEEP LEARNING AI HAS MONUMENTAL IMPLICATIONS” (7 Feb 2023) we pointed out that crypto technology offered a way to protect the content of human creatives, and reward them for use by AI systems.

And in “CAN CRYPTO TECHNOLOGY DEMOCRATIZE THE AI AND AUTOMATION REVOLUTION?” (21 Feb 2023) we noted:

“Radical changes being spurred by AI, robotics and related automation call for radical re-thinking of who these systems will be controlled by, and who these systems will benefit.

“The answer isn’t to be content with a UBI (Universal Basic Income) check and watching VR porn, as Goertzel has stupidly suggested.

“No, the answer is to democratize the overseeing and participation in the entities transitioning and carrying out large-scale AI and automation systems.

“These companies, built of the knowledge and data of humanity, should be considered resources and engines of humanities.

“Let technocrats and synthetic biologists continue to innovate, with guardrails democratically voted on, concerning limits that humans decide, regarding what is progress, and what has the potential so lethal that it does not represent progress. (See “WOKE ETHICS WON’T SAVE US FROM THE SINGULARITY.”)

“But let their bosses and overseers be the citizen participants of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).

“DAOs are showing themselves as an innovative way to democratize the running of projects and enterprises. Decentralized permissionless blockchain crypto networks, and their smart contracting features can automate business processes, implement transparent voting and participation, and automatically calculate and distribute fractional tokenized profits.

“Let’s decide that humanity deserves to democratically direct and benefit from the revolution, while cutting down the corrupt mediation of politicians, megalomaniac elites, and titans of technocracy.  

“Crypto technology can dispense with these endemically corrupt middle players, as certainly as AI driven automation dispenses with the need of our human labor.

“And we should demand nothing less.”

The Cointelegraph article quotes Humayun Sheikh CEO of Fetch.ai, and former founding investor AI lab DeepMind, urging crypto solutions to oversee development and rewarding from AI technology:

“The entire premise behind crypto is the democratization of technology and access to finance. Rather than having one monopolized entity have the entire ownership of a major AI model, we envision the ownership to be divided among the people who contributed to its development.”

The article also outlines how DAOs can foster a decentralized governance of AI development, again quoting Sheikh: “blockchain technology is only one piece of the puzzle. Rules and standards, as we see in DAOs, are always going to be needed for trustworthy governance.”

Emphasis on the Human?

AI is inextricably bound up with transhumanism, as is also evidenced by some of what the Cointelegraph article covers.

For example, it details the decentralized data gathering and incentivisation model of SingularityNet spin-off Rejuve.

The project is tokenizing and crowdsourcing bio data contributions from humans, and utilizing AI to examine and cross-match that data with genomic info from other organisms in the hope of determining which portions of the genome may help us live longer. 

The article notes about the project: “It’s an AI-driven, Web3-based longevity economy. Open science should be paid is the thought and data depositors should be rewarded for their contributions.”

The Cointelegraph article has much to say concerning tokenizing contributions and management of data sets used to train AI, including incentivizing contributions of human genomic data, a prize of concern to transhuman questers.

The article mentions the thoughts of transhumanist and AI singularity proselytizer Ben Goertzel concerning using crypto technology to incentivise “good data sets” for further research:

“This could mean making users pay for AI access via a subscription model, [Goertzel] says, but tokenomics are a natural fit. So, why not incentivize good data sets for further research? ‘Data analysis pipelines’ for things like genomics data could be built by crypto firms. LLMs could do this stuff well already, but ‘most of these pre-processing steps could be done better by decentralized computers,’ says Goertzel, ‘but it’s a lot of work to build it.’”

Companies like Ocean Protocol, meanwhile, have built platforms that tokenize data assets, so individuals can publish important data as NFTs and tokens, keep them in wallets, sell them on data DEXs, and administer them in data DAOs. 

Many see these kinds of data initiatives as being an essential component of a decentralized and crypto incentivised AI web3 development model.

Google Employee Sounds Alarm Over Open Source AI Competition

The Cointelegraph Magazine article coincided with news this past week concerning worry at Google that open source AI projects were advancing and competing with tech giant projects.

An internal assessment by Google software engineer Luke Sernau that was unofficially distributed within the company before being made public, argued that Google had overlooked advances of open-source AI technology, while focusing too much on competitors like OpenAI and ChatGPT.

The document, titled “We Have No Moat, And Neither does OpenAI” said:

We’ve done a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI. Who will cross the next milestone? What will the next move be?

But the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.

I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today. Just to name a few:

LLMs on a Phone: People are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 at 5 tokens / sec.

Scalable Personal AI: You can finetune a personalized AI on your laptop in an evening.

Responsible Release: This one isn’t “solved” so much as “obviated”. There are entire websites full of art models with no restrictions whatsoever, and text is not far behind.

The full document can be read here.

TRENDPOST: The recent Magazine by Cointelegraph article offered an extensive survey of and argument for how crypto innovations could broaden the benefits of AI, while mitigating at least some of its darker potentials.

But the article also uncritically covered disturbing aspects of transhumanism which to some extent are bound up not only in AI technology, but related genomic technologies where AI is being used more and more to design genetic “improvements” for humans and other organisms such as as agricultural products.

And the article glossed over or entirely ignored other serious questions surrounding generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and AI imaging systems like Dall-E, Midjourney and others.

One major question involves rights of human creatives whose works, including visual art, and writing and journalism, and even audio and videos,  were undoubtedly used to train and provide a data “knowledgebase” for AI systems to then resynthesize as “new content.” 

Even more broadly, the ability of deep learning neural AI networks to swallow whole fields of knowledge, and interact with human-like conversation, with access and retrieval abilities beyond any human’s ability to match, has put AI savvy tech companies in a position to render millions of human jobs obsolete and replaceable by AI.

AI interfaces like Bard and ChatGPT also can substantially function as “AI search engine result synthesizers” that directly answer questions and perform job tasks involving creating and returning content, cutting out knowledge content websites as superfluous middle players.

Then there’s the fact that the predominant AI powered content creation platforms, which are also being integrated with legacy productivity software like Microsoft Office, Adobe and others, are configured to limit what can be written, envisioned and created with their assistance. AI is effectively being rolled out as a filter and “thought and content control” censoring agent.

But even that doesn’t begin to fully describe the enormous consequences and transformations of the AI revolution.
For more on our coverage, assessments and predictions regarding AI, see “INSIGHTS ON THE TECHNOCRATIC ASCENDANCE, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR HUMANITY” in this issue.