Aside from the technological contributions of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, both industries are expected to contribute trillions of dollars to the global economy over the next decade and beyond.
When the technologies combine, companies expect to experience enhanced security, a usable peer-to-peer network, and better and simplified processes, according to Hacker Noon. Companies like SingularityNET, Neuromation, DeepSee, and doc.ai are already partnering with either AI or blockchain companies to simplify and create better security around their businesses.
Blockchain technology is nearly essential in the AI community for the following reasons:
- Enhanced security and encryption. When AI is created on a centralized platform, it must be secure in order for developers to depend on the platform and trust in its stability. Take for example a healthcare patient record company; this information is highly sensitive and held behind an encryption technique that requires the highest standard of security to unlock it.
- Transparency and accessibility. Information processed through blockchain is uniquely secure due to its transparency. Without intermediaries, the network is guaranteed to be secure. Transparency and accessibility also comes into play when looking at what AI actually does — as AI deciphers data and tells the humans what to do, blockchain makes it easy for humans to audit the findings of the AI program to ensure accuracy.
- Global processing. Both high-level researchers and analysts and lower-level professionals are needed to improve AI technology; the former for developing new AI products and the latter for being the data driving machine learning capabilities. With blockchain, anyone anywhere can access the network and know that all activities performed on it are secure.
- Financial accessibility. As noted, workers in developing countries are essential to performing tasks that enhance AI technology. Since many financial institutions are unavailable for the average person in these developing countries, blockchain and cryptocurrency are easy and safe ways to manage compensation to these workers.
Conversely, AI has the potential to make blockchain technology, previously the sole dominion of programmers and coders, accessible to a broader audience and more efficient, which should enable wider adoption. For example, MATRIX AI Network is a global open-source, public, intelligent blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
MATRIX is designing Intelligent Contracts (as opposed to Smart Contracts) that leverage natural language programming and adaptive deep learning-based templates to auto-code and has also developed an AI-based detection engine for transaction model identification and security checking, and a deep learning-based platform for dynamic security verification and enhancement. The integration of AI learning into blockchain transactions can help reduce the risk of fraud and outright theft of tokens that has frightened mainstream Wall Street banks and institutional investors away from the nascent industry.
AI can also help to better process blockchain. For example, blockchain requires a large amount of processing capabilities, which many computers are unable to quickly and efficiently accomplish. With an AI program to weed through the data encryptions, the process to unlock data held within a blockchain can be accessed much faster.
“The surge of AI development comes from three primary factors: first, the improvement of social digitalization allows us to collect data at an unprecedented scale and speed; second, the improvement in computing capabilities, especially the emergence of image processors, has enabled many computationally intensive AI applications to complete training and inference in a time people cannot; third, the development in machine learning and neuroscience over the past six decades has made deep neural networks and other algorithms more advanced,” explains Dr. Steve Deng, Chief AI Scientist at MATRIX AI Network.
As the most advanced minds in the world continue to debate the marriage of blockchain and AI technologies, it is clear that a common ground could benefit both industries. As Professor Steven Miller, Vice Provost of Research at Singapore Management University stated in a panel discussion titled "When Blockchain and AI Come Together: Possibilities & Impacts": "In a way, blockchain is about certainty and transparency; a permanent and publicly verifiable way to record transactions. AI, on the other hand, involves making probabilistic statements and in that sense can be said to be about uncertainty."
The convergence of blockchain and AI – that delicate balance between “certainty” and “uncertainty” --promise to revolutionize business and consumer interactions and contribute to exponential growth globally. In transportation, finance, advertising, e-commerce and healthcare, we are already seeing a wave of innovation thanks to these emerging technologies, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down.
About the Author:
Tamar Lyla is a freelance technology writer based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
