Blockchains for Artificial Intelligence » Brave New Coin

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have finally cracked problems that they've worked on for decades, from Go to human-level speech recognition. A key piece was the ability to gather and learn on mountains of data, which pulled error rates past the success line. In short, big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level. Blockchain technology could transform AI too, in its own particular ways. Some applications of blockchains to AI are mundane, like audit trails on AI models. Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself -- AI DAOs. All of them are opportunities. This article will explore these applications. Before we discuss applications, let's first review what's different about blockchains compared to traditional big-data distributed databases like MongoDB. We can think of blockchains as "blue ocean" databases: they escape the "bloody red ocean" of sharks competing in an existing market, opting instead to be in a blue ocean of uncontested market space. Famous blue ocean examples are Wii for video game consoles (compromise raw performance, but have new mode of interaction), or Yellow Tail for wines (ignore the pretentious specs for wine lovers; make wine more accessible to beer lovers). By traditional database standards, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin are terrible: low throughput, low capacity, high latency, poor query support, and so on. But in blue-ocean thinking, that's ok, because blockchains introduced three new characteristics: decentralized / shared control, immutable / audit trails, and native assets / exchanges.