Can Artificial Intelligence be trusted?
At TokenAI, we are are fortunate enough to get to work with the two most amazing technologies of the future, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
AI is pretty amazing from our perspective, we use it daily in our algo analysis work of the cryptocurrency markets, and it even helped us personally identify some coins that we’d have never even looked at right before they took off (e.g. 42x on a currency over a few days a while back).
But AI could also have it’s dark sides… Elon Musk is crying himself to sleep every night thinking about how terrible it can be and we all know what happens when Skynet went online…
So can you really trust AI?
I’ll tell you a little secret, you’re already trusting AI and using it every day.
I live in the US, close enough to the Canadian border to make a drive to Montreal in a few hours. I have no idea how to get to Montreal from my house, and no idea how to get around the city once I’m there, yet I managed to find my way over pretty easily and navigate to my favorite spots (PM me for a yummy poutine recommendation…)
How did i do that? I used Google Maps, an AI powered application that finds the best and fastest way for you to get from one place to another in many places around the globe.
I’m old enough to remember road trips where you’d have to take a map, figure out the different waypoints and directions and in many cases, stop at a gas station to find out where you are.
Then there was Mapquest, you’d print out directions on paper, and try and figure out if they are leading you to where you want to go or to an early grave in a ditch by the side of some backroad.
Then came GPS, and we let it tell us where to go to a point of danger and loss of life. (https://theweek.com/articles/464674/8-drivers-who-blindly-followed-gps-into-disaster)
Now we have Google maps, and the level of trust is pretty much absolute. I know some people who use it to drive to work every day, the same route, over and over again, and they would be lost without it…
Compared to the days of paper maps, this is awesome! I can now relax, not worry about getting lost or driving off a bridge and spend time enjoying the ride and time with my family and friends.
This is the scale of trust in technology, we slowly take small steps and increase our trust in it until we hand over an entire task to it and feel happy with the results.
I’m writing this today because I recently took the next step on the scale of trust with something that we all have issues with - Money.
I don’t remember the first time I bought something online, it was too long ago, but it was an historic moment for me, stepping into the world of e-Commerce and trusting my money with someone that I don’t see.
I do remember the first time I bought something on a mobile device, another personal moment of taking the leap and trusting a new technology with money. (it was a camera lens I bought on a really poorly designed website (mobile websites weren’t much of a thing back then) while eating lunch at a restaurant in Chicago). Now I was spending money outside of my comfort zone, just at a random place in the street over a wireless connection that I didn’t control.
Yesterday I took another step trusting technology with my money. I let an AI algorithm make multiple purchases of cryptocurrencies without asking me for permission or even telling me what those currencies are before hand.
This is equivalent to getting into a car with Google Maps. From this point on, I don’t have to worry about trading anymore. I have an AI to do it for me.
When I did my own trading, there was a lot of fear and stress involved, also lots of uncertainty and self doubt. Surprisingly, letting a machine make these decisions for me was a very calm and relaxing experience. It took away all the fear and emotion from trading and left me with trust. I’ve seen what this AI could do in the past, and I trust it implicitly.
So can you trust AI? So far, I’d say yes. Killer robots and time travelling governors of California? That’s for another post.
If you’d like to learn more about how AI and the Blockchain can be used to create a decentralized crypto platform visit www.tokenai.io.
