Empowering the Future: Private AI Agents and the Decentralized Revolution
In an era where technology increasingly governs every aspect of our lives, the need for privacy and control over personal data has never been more critical. This post explores the transformative potential of Private AI agents in this landscape, particularly through the lens of Web3 technology.
The Challenge of Choosing Careers
Every year, millions of people make the incredibly difficult decision of what to study at university, a decision that will shape the rest of their lives.
Today, this decision is often influenced by external pressures and distorted perceptions shaped by media and societal expectations. You’re under pressure from your parents, friends and teachers, who have different interests and opinions. You have your fears and fantasies to deal with. Your judgment is clouded and manipulated by Hollywood blockbusters romanticizing the idea of being a lawyer, trash novels selling the dream of being a pilot and sophisticated advertising campaigns trying to create the next generation of computer scientists.
It is a tough decision because you do not really know what it takes to succeed in different professions and don’t necessarily have a realistic image of your own strengths and weaknesses. What does it take to succeed in law? Can I fly for 14 hours straight? Can I spend late evenings coding? How do I perform under pressure? Am I a good team player?
The Vision: If We Didn’t Have to Choose
Presently, we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Google Maps to choose whether to turn right or left. Now, imagine a scenario where a Private AI agent, profoundly personalized and understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, could guide you in making a choice that truly aligns with your abilities and aspirations. These agents will not just handle trivial decisions but will be entrusted with navigating the intricate mazes of societal, economic, and ethical challenges. From where we should live, whom we should befriend, to even whom we should marry.
Private AI Agents in Healthcare
We can easily imagine another intimate extension to this — the advent of an AI agent doctor. This AI would delve into the core of our biological and psychological makeup, analyzing our genetic data, lifestyle choices, and even emotional states to provide bespoke medical advice. Such an agent could predict potential health issues with startling accuracy and suggest interventions tailored to the individual.
The problem with Big Tech
It should be clear by now that what we’re actually talking about is not an AI agent but rather a Private AI agent. One that knows us better than we know ourselves. One we can entrust with our innermost secrets and every piece of data we have on ourselves.
This key insight quickly integrates decentralization and Web3 into the solution.
Let’s consider the current world and the obvious and absolute convergence of big tech markets around a handful of companies. I’ve been interested in this phenomenon for a while, and no matter where you look, you’ll find a small group of providers dominating a particular big tech space.
Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo dominate search, with a few Asian competitors. Facebook, X, and a couple of others dominate social networks. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon dominate the cloud.
The convergence of big tech markets around a small number of companies is driven by several universal economic principles. Network effects are pivotal; as a service garners more users, its value increases exponentially for everyone involved. This dynamic fosters a competitive environment where the largest players gain disproportionate advantages as they can leverage user data to enhance their services and lock in users.
We can already see this happening with AI, with a handful of companies beginning to reach the scale that unlocks this phenomenon.
But with AI, it’s different. And if you’ve made it this far, it’ll be immediately apparent why. We will defer our every decision to these AI agents, who will have so much data that they’ll know us better than we know ourselves.
This piece started by suggesting that we’re already influenced by Hollywood, novels, and peer pressure. What happens when we’ve given up everything?
Think about this. Through Android and its other products, Google knows more about you than your friends. We give Google data on our health, where we like to hang out, what we like and dislike, where we spent last weekend, and where we’re going for holiday next. In fact, on any given day, we provide Google with data on how fast we walk to work or the gym, which could easily be correlated with our current mood — are we ready to take this to the next stage and give Google everything? Big tech will know exactly how to manipulate every emotion, and our lives will be ultimately handed over to algorithms we don’t know anything about. Are they acting in our best interest? The interest of the shareholder? Something else?
I wrote a piece over a year ago comparing a utopian and a dystopian future based on how we continue to develop blockchain technology. My thesis was that privacy was the only path to a utopian future.
Now, I’d extend that with the only path to a utopian future, where blockchain + privacy + AI converge to give us genuinely private AI agents.
Enter TEN
At its heart, TEN is a permanently decentralized computer where anyone can run anything. No single entity controls it, so it’s entirely democratized, and its economic incentives are aligned purely with adoption and usage.
TEN’s decentralized, encrypted nature disrupts Big Tech's monopoly by enabling private, user-centric AI operations that safeguard data against such monopolies and unlock new AI use cases in Web3.
Private Querying
Imagine you’re approaching the last day of a much-loved colleague who has spent the past 15 years dedicated to your company. What would the perfect send-off gift be? Do you ask their partner or friends? Do you rely on the information you already have on them? Do you really know people that well at work?
What if it’s a lot simpler? What if it’s simply a case of you instructing your Private AI agent to interact with their Private AI agent? Your AI agent would request permission from their AI agent to query a specific data set to help it make the perfect decision. Of course, approval would come from the owner. Still, they’d be safe knowing that their data won’t go anywhere else and is guaranteed to be operated as my agent outlined.
And just like that, the perfect send-off gift will be worked out. Now imagine extrapolating that to any scenario: You could be planning a night out with a huge group of friends. All your AI agents query privately, compute privately, and collectively determine the optimal plan for the night.
TEN provides this technology — which guarantees privacy over data and how that data is used while in an encrypted state — something that no other technology can do at scale today.
Private Communications
Let’s revisit the idea of your private AI agent also being your doctor. Now imagine, if it wasn’t this way, and AI doctors were just one system; what would happen if that system gets corrupted in a particular way or becomes unstable — potentially, it could end up making decisions that kill many people.
If such a system instead were isolated and computed in a space you control, you could potentially restrict the chances of this happening. Now you may think, hang on, doctors talk amongst themselves in the real world; they deliberate, speculate, and theorize on what the problem may be with a patient (watch an episode of House). In other words, you want the benefits of individuality without losing connectivity.
Each doctor operates individually while being connected to a network of other doctors. This is precisely the model you’d want with Private AI agents.
Hopefully, you’ve arrived at the self-evident conclusion that this cannot be in the open. You don’t see doctors broadcast their theories on a patient’s symptoms on Facebook for other doctors to opine or shout from the rooftops.
TEN enables this. Private AI agents can interact, share data, communicate, and compute the required outcomes together, all without revealing anything to the outside world.
Private Spending
But why stop there? Why not collectively have our AI agents book the tickets we’ll need for the night out, arrange our fair share of the travel, and buy us an outfit to wear, all without the need for our interaction? Whether we realize it now or not, Web3, particularly DeFi, offers the greatest interface with which AI agents can interact.
There are no human interfaces to work with, no broken APIs, no intermediaries, just direct, peer-to-peer transfer of value from one agent’s account to another.
There is no need for access to credit cards and no need for an agent to have an ID or receive an SMS. It is just pure machine-to-machine transfer based on the wallet technology and public key cryptography we complain about needing to be easier to use today.
TEN already has the rails available to facilitate this transfer with the complete privacy required. After all, do you really want the world to know how you spend your money and what tickets you just bought without explicitly choosing to broadcast it? If you’re still undecided, a read of ‘A Day in the Life of a Blockchain-enabled Future’ will convince you.
Private Data Processing
When it comes to AI, centralized systems are often more efficient than decentralized systems because machine learning works better with more information it can analyze. Collecting and analyzing data from billions of people makes better decisions than training on the experiences of just one person.
But immediately in doing so, you disregard privacy concerns — except when you employ the specific type of technology that TEN employs — the ability to provide confidential computing. This was key to our technical decisions when designing TEN.
We wanted to build a system that would allow a future world to take advantage of the power of collective data processing, the power and necessity of individuality, and the safeguards that decentralization provides.
Conclusion
TEN offers a decentralized framework that enables the type of AI agent discussed here to be built. And you may be thinking that this is years away, and you’re probably right. But it's these moonshot ideas that led to the development of Bitcoin and Ethereum in the first place. It's these sorts of ideas that have seen AI improve tenfold over the course of a single year.
With the right infrastructure in place, we can begin to build out these ideas and make them a reality. Those who do will be supporting technological advancements that prioritize ethical considerations, privacy, and decentralization over all else. By engaging with and promoting these technologies, we can ensure a future where AI enhances human agency rather than diminishes it.
Find out more
Join the TEN community on Discord and follow on Twitter to discuss these sorts of ideas and learn more about the power of encrypted dApps.
