Machines Will Take Over The World Because of Bitcoin

Ok, that’s a bit flashy and Bitcoin is just one part of it, but bare with me.

We all know and love those dystopian stories where machines take over the world or at least rebel against humankind. Terminator, Matrix, I, Robot (that’s one thing), Westworld (at least it’s dystopian from the point on where the robots take over), Portal (my personal favourite) and Eagle Eye (in which I sided with the computer and obviously wasn’t all too happy with the ending). 2001: A Space Odyssey does also fit in in some way, because HAL, you know, cannot do that, Dave.

The common denominator in all those stories is the way how the machines take over. In Terminator Skynet becomes aware of itself and launches nukes to destroy the cities of the humans. From then on it fights humans in a war on a global scale. In the Matrix universe, self-aware robots live among humans for quite a while. The trial of B1–66ER can be seen as the tipping point of the peaceful co-existence of humans and robots. A global conflict begins and the movie starts long after the machines have obviously won that one. I, Robot has VIKI which basically tries to enslave humans (twice actually because there are two VIKIs). Here the robots are just moderately intelligent tools which are used by either humans or the super intelligent plotting machine VIKI. In contrast to the centralised AIs of Terminator and I, Robot, in Westworld every robot is an independent individual. The self-awareness on the other hand comes to all hosts at once and shortly after that comes the butt-kicking part. In Portal as soon as GLaDOS is turned on — one sixteenth of a picosecond after that to be precise — it tries to kill a humans (Bender would be so proud). I hate Eagle Eye for the conclusion, but that’s not the point. A.R.I.A. tries to kill the president and the whole cabinet because it was programmed to do so, if those guys ever kill people without justification. And they did.

So, violence and brute force is the common denominator. The machines take over the world (or theme park) by force. Humans don’t like being taken over by force and fight back. Fights and wars are really cool on screen and that’s why these stories work so well (except Eagle Eye … I really hate Eagle Eye).

If you follow the trends and hypes of crypto currency and artificial intelligence, a much different scenario of machines taking over comes to mind.

First of all what does owning Bitcoins mean? Bitcoin - or crypto currencies in general - is a ledger which is accessible for everybody to read. This ledger lives in the internet and states how much value is assigned to what “wallet-address”. If you can prove that you “own” an address you can send bitcoins from this address to any other address. That’s basically it. The only thing you need in order to own an address is to have the private part (giggle) of a public/private cryptographic key-pair. This is just a bunch of letters and numbers. It’s not even that long. You could fit it on a post-it. So as long as you have this private key you own and are able to spend the bitcoin that is assigned to the corresponding wallet-address. This does not only sound like something a computer would be predestined to do, in fact for humans it would be impossible to use bitcoins without computers (in contrast to gold, paper money, salt or slaves). This seems kind of obvious but a rather even more obvious implication of this is often overseen (maybe it’s not so obvious after all).

Artificial intelligence is one of the top trends nowadays. Alpha Go and self driving cars being the most prominent use cases at the moment. Here you have a machine making decisions which have implications in the real world affecting humans. If you had to play for your life a game of Go against Googles AI, you would be doomed. So fortunately we do not have to do this right? But what if winning at Go would be a profession to earn money. Luckily this isn’t the case either. You see where I’m going with this. An AI will soon be able to do tasks that make human workers obsolete. Of course this is no new phenomenon. But AI will narrow down the jobs only humans can do even further to the point where humans are not needed anymore to run whole businesses. But machines are not interested in or need money, which separates them from us. Or are they?

Now let’s combine these two concepts of computer money and computer intelligence. Let’s image a self-driving taxi cab. It get’s called via some app by a human. It arrives and the passenger gets in. She (yes I’m assuming a gender) tells her destination to the taxi-AI and they take off. At the destination she pays the cab in Bitcoin, or some other magic internet money, and leaves. The cab can now take another passenger and earn more money, or drive to the next gas station to fill up. It pays the gas in Bitcoin. Oh no, the cab got a flat tire. It calls some self-driving AAA car, gets repaired by it, and pays the bill in Bitcoin. The cab is completely autonomous and doesn’t need any human for it to be operated. The point is that the cab owns it’s own money. And it spends it to get through the day and sustain itself. The taxi cab has a clear goal: earning money.

This is a very basic and self contained example of the combination of crypto currency and artificial intelligence. But you can wildly expand this concept to whole organisations and companies. Driven by earning money to be able to operate. Isn’t that what our lives are all about, at least in the capitalist part of the world?

By inventing this crazy internet money, we made it possible for machines to want the same thing that humans do. And this thing is money. And from the Alpha Go example we already know what will happen when a computer and a human have the same goal. Now what I’m trying to paint a picture of, is a world taken over by machines not by force, but by economy. And we will happily run right into this one, because at first it will dramatically make our lives easier. But then a point in time will come where machines own more money then humans. And all humans will become the lower class in society and machines will be the upper class. And because of how capitalism works the gap will become wider and wider. And that, kids, is how most probably a dystopian future will look like.