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The last few years cryptocurrency have gained a lot of traction. Its pioneer, bitcoin is reaching a market capitalization that is getting closer to the 100 billion mark. Furthermore, institutional investments are becoming more prevalent and while some countries have a very negative stance against cryptocurrency in general it seems like many countries want to regulate and innovate with it.

On the back of bitcoin, countless and countless of cryptocurrencies have been created, many clones without use cases or the required security to be viewed as a secure asset and a few that have some distinguishing features. You have Dash for micropayments, Monero and Zcash for complete anonymity and so on and so forth.

One of the more popular cryptocurrencies that gained notoriety is Ethereum. This is because it tries to do more than be a decentralized payment protocol. It attempts to decentralize other industries by allowing code into the transactions which only happen if certain conditions are met, so-called Smart Contracts. A simple analogy, would be a vending machine, you throw in a couple of euros and only if you have met the required amount of money, you get your drink, if not it gets returned to you. In essence, this is what Ethereum is.

On top of the Ethereum protocol, many different initiatives are being created, not in the least because people throw money at these ideas like there is no tomorrow. You can not open a cryptocurrency news source without seeing the word bubble written somewhere, often more than once. This doesn’t mean that everything that is being built upon the Ethereum protocol (which are called ERC20 tokens) is useless. Below I will list three industries that could benefit from having no trusted party and full decentralization.

The first one is storage applications, different entities in the cryptocurrency industry are attempting to solve storage applications by making them decentralized. No more taking down of megaupload or losing your files in the cloud because a certain company goes bankrupt. Furthermore can storage solutions create great incentives since many different individuals have more than enough storage space left on their devices which you can rent in many of these applications. Several groups who are working on this are FileCoin, SiaCoin and Storj and no doubt many more in the future. This is a real use case where decentralization can work.

Another industry that would fair by decentralization is online gambling. There are many different companies that will commit fraud, go bankrupt, not pay out because of opaque reasons and so on to find online. This can is currently already being solved by decentralized gambling outlets. Etheroll (DICE) provides a decentralized casino build upon the Ethereum protocol with a provably fair game where you can gamble with your Eth. Other examples are Edgeless and FunFair who are also trying to develop several diferent games. Regulation concerning these protocols could be a problem that needs to be addressed eventually but it  eventually could render online casinos with unfair practices and higher consumer costs obsolete.

I encourage you to look further into Ethereum and its possibilities of creating decentralized applications, commonly called dApps. Several issues need to be addressed to really get mainstream adoption of which scalabilities issues is one of the biggest ones. However, in my opinion it is an exciting and new technology that could disrupt several industries pretty severely. Which ones is obviously the question, only time will tell!

References:

Coinmarketcap (2017). Cryptocurrency Market Capitalizations. [online] Available at: https://coinmarketcap.com/ [Accessed 23 October 2017]

D’Anconio, F. (2017). Is Blockchain Technology Really the Answer to Decentralized Storage? [online] Available at: https://cointelegraph.com/news/is-blockchain-technology-really-the-answer-to-decentralized-storage

Davies, J. (2017). How blockchain is decentralizing gambling. [online] Available at: https://www.techinasia.com/talk/blockchain-decentralizing-gambling [Accessed 23 October 2017]

Github Ethereum (2017). Ethereums White Paper. [online] Available at: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper [Accessed 23 October 2017]

 

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Artificial intelligence has the potential to change a lot of aspects of our lives, in fact it is already doing that at rapid increasing rates.  Applications, using AI are seeping into our lives, think about voice applications like SIRI, suggestive searches, targeted advertising and autonomous vehicles. These applications will only continue to grow as is shown by mankind fixation on improving everyday life by the use of technology. It will likely become more advanced, smarter and faster than many would anticipate.

Where in the past computer scientists believed that computers will never understand human speech, it now has the ability to answer questions like what the weather is or how your favorite football team performed. These are examples of Artificial Narrow Intelligence, one of the three types of AI. It is the weakest form of AI, a non-sentient artificial intelligence focused on one narrow task.

A big step from ANI is AGI, artificial general intelligence. This is a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal in many of the artificial intelligence. Several tests need to be completed to reach the requirements of AGI like the Turing Test, as well as being able to reason, plan, learn, communicate, sense and see. Computer based systems that exhibit several of these requirements do exist but not as plentiful as required or at human level standards. A step further is ASI, artificial super intelligence. This means that the capability of a computer will fully surpass humans on every level,

You can see it as a mega-brain with perfect memory and unlimited analytical power with an unmeasurable IQ. It is hard to explain what the potential possibilities are as soon as an ASI is created since it thinks beyond the scope of what humans can. What is clear is that it is an armsrace towards full AGI and ASI where the step between AGI and ASI is very small. This is because the recursive improvement systems can learn many magnitudes faster than humans as soon as there is an artificial intelligence that can be classified as AGI.

That is the clear downside to the rise of powerful AI, when it becomes too powerful. Several different entities are competing with each other over a new market space and thus the competition is fierce. Currently, Uber, Google, IBM, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and many more industry giants are working on AI capabilities. This means that at some point one of the other could very likely either make a mistake or willing to leap the boundaries of their research which can have unforeseen effects. It might seem far fetched, but when not proactively  combat these problems like Elon Musk with OpenAI is trying to do, you will be reactive. That is something that most certainly will not be enough against ASI systems and the outcomes could be catastrophic. Aggregated results of  surveys among experts in the field suggest that 10% think human level AI will be possible by 2022, 50% thinks it will happen by 2040 and a staggering 90% by 2075, so while it might feel unrealistic, it really isn’t.