Rise 2018: From Artificial Intelligence to Blockchain

The highest number of skyscrapers. The most expensive square meter of property. The most Rolls Royces per capita. All of this is Hong Kong, once a British colony, named for its fragrant harbor, later the first of the Four Asian Tigers, today one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Among other things, Rise, the most important tech conference in Asia, takes place in this center of the East. This year’s edition took place from the 10th to the 12th of July and attracted more than 15 thousand business attendees from all over the world to the Hong Kong Exhibition Centre.

Hong Kong, also known as the ‘Pearl of the Orient’, is the largest plantation of skyscrapers. A whopping 317 buildings stand taller than 150 meters, which is considerably more than in New York (257) and Dubai (177). Each night the largest light show in the world is put on and accompanied by a symphony befitting the wealth and glamour of the city. This is the view from the Avenue of Stars, the place of the famous statue of its honorary citizen, Bruce Lee.

Knowledge and Ideas, Not Lasers and Cleavage

Rise isn’t a conference in the vein of CES in Vegas or IFA in Berlin, where masses of regular visitors crowd the alleyways between black and white appliances. The impression is quite disappointing, since instead of lavish pavilions, filled with hardware and scantily-clad booth babes, the visitor is welcomed by unremarkable stalls and unknown logos. There’s almost none of the giants of the industry to be found here and the same goes for end-products such as high-def TVs, household robots, self-driving cars and smart drones. The event is of a different nature with mostly business-to-business software solutions or startups seeking investors on display. The purpose is similar to the European Web Summit: businessmen networking, discovering potential and presenting ideas.

Thai startups, a Chinese transportation company, an Indonesian bank, a Singaporean gaming service, an Indian programming house, a Serbian ICO, an Australian airline, a Slovene blockchain developer … A broad list, and yet Rise is no fair. Its 15 thousand attendees, who paid a thousand Euros a pop for their tickets, are there for a reason, not to feast their eyes.

More than a hundred firms from all over the globe found their space in the hall, most hailing from the Far East. Despite the glitter-free facade and corporate content, curiosities abounded. A couple of companies were showing ways to explore your genealogical roots and figure out the state of your body by taking saliva samples. An Indian startup featured an AR solution for car salons and real estate agencies. IBM took us into the world of virtual reality with their Star Trek-style spacecraft simulator Bridge Commander, where their tech takes care of voice recognition. A tabletop robot, another talking household assistant, was brought from Korea. A Singaporean firm was demonstrating a service called GameCloud, used for streaming games from your PC to your mobile device …

Many of the dozens of conferences with wildly varying themes also held a wide appeal. We found out about a revolutionary Chinese electric smart car Byton which is meant to take on Tesla on a global level. The owners of sex-begging app Tinder and the funny-pics bulletin board 9Gag told their own stories of success. The charismatic CEO of Daimler, Dieter Zetsche, boasted how the three-point star gained exclusive rights to test autonomous vehicles on the streets of Beijing. A representative of Lego talked about the digitalization of the company and its product, a NY Times correspondent discussed fake news and Kara Wisher, a US journalist, got the most enthusiastic response with her talk on the need for tehnologic regulation. She reprimanded the politicians for being stuck in the 90s, which is why the world is led by corporations with more wealth and information than most countries. She openly called Facebook an enormous machine for vacuuming and selling personal data.

Visionaries is a platform that aims to put augmented and virtual reality into car salons and real estate agencies. Interactive, 360-degree tours of the insides of apartments and cars go without saying, but what’s really exciting, is viewing cars with a phone or AR glasses. The buyer sees their cross-section while the mechanic can view all the components and instructions for disassembly.

This is DeskBot by Seoul company Rocky Robots. In addition to possessing skills we’ve seen from talking personal assistants in the vein of Amazon Echo and Google Home (notifications, calendar, playing music …), the device should function as a natural speaking partner, who addresses and asks questions on its own. This enables it to truly get to know the owner, all the while promoting physical activity via other devices.

Unfortunately Mercedes didn’t bring any conceptual four-wheelers. Their boss Dieter Zetsche only talked at length about autonomous cars in general. He claims that in certain cities we’ll be riding in commercial autonomous vehicles no later than three years from now. He also mentioned flying cars for the first time. Is Mercedes the first of the car manufacturers to be considering this direction?

Smart Code and Chains of Blocks

Not counting the breadth of what was being shown and talked about, which includes geodesic drones, popular Chinese video social networks, logistics systems and countless apps of a more local nature, there were two prevalent trends: artificial intelligence and blockchain. AI was omnipresent along with all the lingo that goes with it, including phrases such as deep learning and big data. IBM was peddling the brains of the Watson service, advertising and shopping are starting to use AI, algorithms can determine the damage of a crashed car from a photo a thousand times faster than a human could, the established personal assistants Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa are getting more and more competitors, cameras are starting to recognize facial mimics and feelings, diction is getting more human all the time … The crucial takeaway here is that these aren’t pre-programmed skills, but rather self-learning, based on constant analysis of new data.

The rapidly-developing field of smart machinery is of course a cause for concern, which was the main talking point of Microsoft’s CEO Brad Smith. Who has the right to create AI? Should programmers make a vow to work for the good of humanity, similar to medical doctors? Regulation is undoubtedly necessary. This is what the consortiums Open AI and SingularityNET are working towards, as they strive to democratize technology. Artificial intelligence and machine knowledge should not be privatized, but rather made into public goods, accessible to users as well as developers. This is where blockchain steps in as a decentralized, public ledger. This technology would make the database of what the machines have learned visible to anyone and all the entries into it would be reliable. Perhaps the existing chains of blocks aren’t yet ready for such a project, but this is bound to change in time.

Ben Goertzel proudly presented the android Sophia, the most well known product of his organization SingularityNET, which connects artificial intelligence with blockchain. The robot that was built by the Hong Kong firm Hanson Robotics, is meant to serve as a receptionist, teacher or nurse. Apart from natural conversation it excels at reading and mimicking expressions.

The world needs to prepare for its AI future. We need to set up laws and guidelines, which is one of the great challenges of humanity, opines Microsoft’s Brad Smith. The question is how we go about creating a sort of global, multicultural ethics of machine behavior. We know that the ways of thinking vary from one part of the world to the other, as he demonstrated with the pictures of Socrates and Confucius.

Slovenes Educate and Service

There were countless blockchain projects on the conference. Even though there were many crypto exchanges and affable systems for paying with crypto present, the fintech segment was far from being the only one based on the new technology. The public register is getting more and more use cases. There were systems for managing personal documents … A Serbian team showed ReviewNetwork, which tokenizes web descriptions of products and services in hope to combat the problem with fake comments … Aggregion is a project that introduces a blockchain standard for intellectual property and would simplify end-user film, books and software distribution … The example set by crypto cats is followed by CryptoCarz, an app that enables virtual cars to be stored indefinitely and to used in games …

In line with the trend there were also companies that code blockchain solutions and help with gathering funds via initial coin offerings. One of these — and quite probably the only one with a fully-realised development, consultational and marketing offering — was the Hong Kong Amotion Labs and Slovenian venture group #BlockchainIT connection. The four representatives of the latter made a good impression on the visitors and educated many a seeker of such services. We also took part in a debate, where we clearly stated that blockchain is much more than just the technology that powers it. It’s an idea and a social movement that is only going to gain in standing. It’s going to take a couple years for it to distill itself and gain traction with a wider audience, just like with anything new and fresh. But the old centres of power will need to brace themselves for a new era. We agree wholeheartedly with Joseph Lubin, co-creator of Ethereum, when he says that “when it comes to privacy, blockchain is going to save us from dystopia”.

The conference saw some big names from the crypto scene. The most famous was undoubtedly Joseph Lubin, co-creator of Ethereum. Together with the other speakers he agreed that we are still in the early phase of cryptocurrencies, that blockchains aren’t yet scalable enough and that a new chapter will begin once the financial institutions enter the field. At this point, 98% of investments come from natural persons. The billion dollar question remains: how will the crypto land look in five years?

CryptoCarz is a platform of digital car ownership. Users will soon be able to buy them, perform unique modifications and own them completely. They will be able to view them in virtual reality or speed down racetracks in multiplayer games. The car models aren’t going to be licensed but rather made up, based on the 20 biggest cryptocurrencies.

We are already familiar with cloud computing, based on purpose-made server farms. But now a Singapore based company Sonm is introducing fog computing, a service used for hiring computational power from anyone. Whoever has an idle computer, server or in the future even a console, can offer their hardware capacities to a network of people searching for it, similar to Airbnb. Users will pay less for rendering an animation or predicting the weather than they would with centralized services and the owner will be rewarded with tokens. The service is of course based on blockchain.

Rise is a Hong Kong-based gathering of business tech ideas for startups. Its European equivalent is Web Summit, while the US has Collision. The most common areas present were artificial intelligence and fintech, mostly in tandem with blockchain.

The slovenian brand #BlockchainIT was showcasing its offering via a local partner Amotion Labs. Even though the team was numerous we could barely keep up with all the interest in blockchain solutions. Among those that were curious were financial institutions and startups seeking funds via ICO.