Incentives and Innovations

Published in

TuringNet

4 min readOct 10, 2018

As I talk to and learn from more people who are either new to the blockchain space, I’m getting many great questions that lead me to deeper thinking, especially in regards to what underlying economic value our project is creating for the society and the public. Blockchain itself is a undefined ledger technology until it proves its capability of boosting various industries, such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, education, or others. And what about TuringNet?

How do economic incentives affect technological advancement?

Looking back at the history of economic development, the waves of economic growth undoubtedly tie to breakthrough technological innovations. I couldn’t help but wonder how do economic incentives affect technological advancement?

We all know that one’s personal income can be influenced by many different factors, such as economic structure, government policies, market value, etc. In most cases, income is determined by the market value of one’s productivity and skills. Market value is driven by supply and demand, and it is part of an ever changing process of adjusting to a changing equilibrium. And incentive plays a critical role here, as it is what’s pulling people between supply and demand.

Startup incentives?

For example, startup entrepreneurs choose to take up calculated risks of assembling and weaving together productive resources to make something new that will add value to the economy. One important incentive is profit. Potential profits lead entrepreneurs to be willing to bear the risks, long working hours, financial risk, and risks caused by unstable environments.

In Silicon Valley, we have tons of entrepreneurs generating brilliant ideas to advance technology, creating new innovations to generating prosperity and raising the stand-of-living. Of course there are some that are simply fascinated by the new technologies themselves, while others focus more on solving actual problems. There are so many challenges. In addition, if one domain gets too crowded, this may discourage new folks from entering that domain unless they have an incentive provided by a killer idea to disrupt all existing solutions.

In the case of the blockchain…

The same scenario applies to the blockchain community. The crypto market has cooled down, and we are actually really glad that it did as there’s no better way to drive out unsupportable projects and minimize incentives for them to try to make quick gains. The cooled environment should help good projects to survive, so they can better focus on actual technological development. While this is still a very young technology, and it’s got a long way to go to solve its own bottlenecks in terms of scalability, speed and security, we strongly believe that it will be able to promote economic incentives for progress by facilitating efficiency without the need for trust (i.e., in a trustless environment), and shifting this power to the public for true democracy.

What’s TuringNet’s incentive?

And that’s exactly what’s incentivizing us to create an open and trustable platform for AI. I receive many questions from time to time asking us why do we need the decentralization element to disrupt today’s AI industry, what values can decentralization create for AI, and what incentives are there for people to eagerly participate in order to crowdsource the improvement of AI? To learn in-depth answers to these questions, you can read our previous blogs or join our Telegram group and discuss further.

There are many projects that are trying to combine AI and the blockchain, with great intentions to free the current AI models from centralized organizations, and make AI development more efficient. Our motivation is not simply driven by the technology itself, it’s not about decentralizing everything just for the sake of decentralization, and it’s not about the hype or potential financial rewards we will gain by joining the hype.

Artificial Intelligence has been increasingly creating real value by assisting humans to accurately perform various tasks and process data, one example is machine translation. And we can also foresee how AI will replace humans to perform dangerous or risky tasks, or even come up with rational predictions and preventive recommendations to improve human lives. We expect AI to be embedded in every aspect of our lives, boosting productivity and increasing efficiency, so that humans will be able to free themselves from such tasks and create more value elsewhere. But data has extraordinary value, and is a form of our extension, and we cannot rely on private and proprietary models that manipulate these data to come up with biased output. Private and proprietary models are simply not efficient methods for AI to continue to develop, and unless we do things differently, those models will hinder development.

“The story of AI is not just about tech innovation and breakthroughs, but also how we as humans learn to co-exist with AI to make our lives better.”
David Ku is the CVP, AI Core @ Microsoft, CTO, AI+R @ Microsoft.

After decades of hype, AI is finally starting to contributing real economic value. And it took blockchain about a decade from being completely unknown to becoming one of the hottest technology and investment opportunities for many. It’s a critical time for us to further decentralize AI, as we increasingly rely on AI empowered information distribution, AI influenced decisions, and AI assisted lives. Our team is determined to help make this happen!

About TuringNet — World’s First Open and Trustable Platform for AI

TuringNet is the world’s first open and trustable Artificial Intelligence platform to solve the black box problem of AI. Our patent-pending technologies are designed to empower a self-governing ecosystem that develops verifiable and trustable AI models, at the same time incentivizes the public to participate in scalable and collaborative model training and prediction. The open platform will significantly lower the entry barriers for enterprises to adopt AI. Also, our verifiable and decentralized model (DModel) opens endless possibilities for AI to be applicable to various scenarios, including the improvement of the blockchain technology itself.