Can blockchain supply the guardrails to keep AI on course?
Some believe that hybrid blockchains with both private and public aspects can solve AI’s black-box problem. Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain are emerging digital technologies that have captured the public imagination but also raised serious concerns. So it bears asking: Can AI and blockchain be integrated in a way that benefits humanity? There are reasons to think so. As far back as 2016, Vitalik Buterin wrote that both the crypto economics and AI safety communities were “trying to tackle what is fundamentally the same problem” of how to regulate complex and smart systems with “unpredictable emergent properties.” Both rely for control on essentially “dumb” systems “whose properties once created are inflexible,” after all. Once a smart contract is implemented, it can’t be changed, for instance. The two communities “should listen to each other more,” he concluded. In the past year, with the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, worries are growing that AI may be...