Integration of Blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence (Part 71)
Welcome to the 71st part of the 100-part series on Blockchain.
Whether you know it or not, you are interacting with AI systems day in and day out. For example, when you search on your favorite search engine or shop online from your favorite e-commerce website, the suggestions you see are based on Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence and Blockchain have been referred to as the major disruptors of the coming decade by many industry experts. In this chapter, let us examine how the interplay of these two technologies can be an irresistible proposition for the stakeholders.
Advantages of Using Blockchain with Artificial intelligence
Rise of Better Data Models
AI requires data and not just data- it requires a massive amount of data. In the current scenario, business models created by AI depend on the data produced by these businesses and their partners. The first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word data sharing is privacy. So quite naturally, when it comes to data sharing by these businesses for the AI system to work, there is always a risk of data breach, abuse, and misuse of the organizational data.
But for AI, the more data you feed, the more reliable insights and predictions it produces. Therefore the requirement for an AI system to work in a business setting is unlimited and barrier-free access to information from the complete business ecosystem.
For granting this uninterrupted data access to the AI system, the required data security assurance can be provided by the Blockchain to these businesses. Blockchain is a safe haven for storing personal and private data of individuals data as the data resides in a decentralized network with no single entity being its owner. Thus, the stakeholders would be more comfortable sharing the relevant data on the Blockchain platform. Data from all the relevant stakeholders and departments can be integrated with a common data mining platform, and then relevant insights can be extracted by the AI analytical tool.
For instance, insights from a smart AI healthcare system can provide an exact diagnosis of your issue based on your medical scans and medical records or the movie recommendations by Netflix or Amazon based on your history.
In these scenarios, the data fed into the AI systems of these service providers is very personal and should remain secure in all possible scenarios. These service providers spend a huge sum of money on securing their customers’ private data, as any breach of this data could wreak havoc for them legally as well as financially. But with Blockchain, the data is stored in an encrypted state. Thus, leading to better security management of consumers’ data by these service providers along with better consumer insights.
Further smart contracts could be implemented to define the way of usage of the shared data. Hence mitigating any chances of data losing its credibility or its value. Once AI systems get access to this uninterrupted, decentralized pool of data, they can deliver smart insights based on the studied patterns, behaviors, and other relevant aspects of the data. This large pool of data will ensure that the insights are closer to reality. Thus, delivering real business value to all the stakeholders involved.
Better understanding of the decisions made by AI systems
AI can assess a huge volume of data with a large set of independent variables, based on their relevance to achieving the desired results. And because of the huge complexity involved, many a times, we humans are unable to understand the logic used by these AI systems to reach a specific result or insight.
But with Blockchain, decisions made by AI will be recorded on the shared ledger on a datapoint-by-datapoint basis. This will make it much easier for us humans to audit the decision of AI systems by looking at the decision trail. This transparency in the decision-making process will increase the level of trust in them and their decisions.
Smarter and Transparent Predictions
AI helps businesses to predict the outcome of various planned and unplanned events before they actualize. Though, many a times these predictions may be incorrect due to faulty data generated by the systems or sometimes due to defective analytical models used by AI systems.
But with the implementation of Blockchain technology, it would be easier to authenticate the data generated, and the working of the analytical methods as the relevant parameters could be regularly monitored on a decentralized system. This increased probability of the availability of error-free data sets will lead to better predictions by the AI systems. For example, in the case of e-commerce and physical retail outlets, AI has enriched the shopping experience for shoppers and monetization for retailers. The smart prediction systems and analytics platform is being implemented by many of these retailers. Retailers can predict the best-suited product for a customer even before the customer walks in the store or visits their online portal.
But there are many grey areas where these AI prediction systems have to work on the unauthenticated or unverified data source to give these predictions. Many times data on the supplier’s product quality can’t be verified in the current scheme of things. Imagine a scenario where the AI system predicts a product from one of these suppliers as best suited for a particular customer or set of customers, and the product quality is not upto the mark. This could lead to a poor customer experience and a bad brand reputation for the retailer.
But with the implementation of Blockchain, claims about the quality and specs of a product from the suppliers can be easily verified as the complete information about the sourcing, transportation, and its production would be available on the shared ledger. This makes the supplier more accountable, which results in only the best quality products available for sale by the retailing companies
Birth of Data marketplaces
The rise of Blockchain will give rise to personal data marketplaces. As the data stored on Blockchain is secure, users will start storing their personal data and preferences on Blockchain.
So quite naturally the adoption of Blockchain would first create a cleaner and better organized personal data. The natural progression to this event would be the selling of this organized data on data marketplaces to be consumed by various companies specializing in AI modelling and insight generation. This easy availability of diverse datasets will lead to a rise of many small players and will neutralize the competitive advantage of tech giants who currently have a monopoly over the users’ data.
Increased Trust on Autonomous Virtual Agents
Sometime in the future AI powered autonomous virtual agents will be able to perform tasks without human intervention. You must have seen many sci-fi movies where machines take over the world of humans. Though that is the extreme end of the spectrum but still a plausible one. To avoid any such catastrophic event, a set of rules, directives, and instructions that are secure, tamper proof, and not owned by a single entity will need to be defined.
Blockchain, along with smart contracts, has the perfect solution for this. With the implementation of smart contracts, predetermined conditions will be defined for these AI systems to operate. This will reduce the probability of any faulty operational outcome by these Autonomous Virtual agents as the whole system would be governed by smart contracts residing on a decentralized and immutable ledger. In such a transparent, secure and controlled system, the probability of things going haywire at any point of time are minimal even without any human intervention.
Therefore we can safely assume that the implementation of blockchain with AI can create a future where instead of imagining those dreadful sci-fi movie scenes, we can imagine a much better and more secure human-machine collaboration.
Scalability concerns
(i) Storing the users’ personal data, business data, data for machine learning, data, predictions, and insights generated by AI tools, etc., on Blockchain is very costly and will significantly slow the processing on Blockchain. Thus, distributed file storage IPFS can provide low-cost off-chain storage to store data, and the hash of the uploaded file is then stored on the Blockchain and accessed through the smart contract. Any modification in the uploaded file would change its hash. IPFS has been explained in detail in Part 18.
(ii) To make the Blockchain scalable for its use in AI, layer 1 (discussed in Part 15) and layer 2 (discussed in Part 16) scaling solutions will be required to be implemented.
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