Table of Contents

• What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• The synergy between artificial intelligence and blockchain
  • Artificial intelligence can enhance blockchain capabilities
  • Decentralization Digital Economy
  • Decentralized Supercomputer
  • Artificial Intelligence for Better Decision-Making and Auditability
• Summary

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence is the ability of computer programs to learn by themselves. It can also be called the science and engineering of intelligent computer programs. These algorithms understand instructions without human instructions and use large amounts of data to solve problems. Artificial intelligence programs analyze external input data, learn from it, and use this knowledge to perform tasks to achieve specific goals.

Essentially, there are two types of artificial intelligence: weak artificial intelligence and strong artificial intelligence.

Weak AI targets specific or limited tasks, such as facial recognition, spam filtering, or chess playing. Strong AI, on the other hand, can handle a wide variety of tasks rather than specific activities. It may have human-level cognitive abilities and be able to perform any intelligent task a human can perform. Today, weak artificial intelligence has emerged, but strong artificial intelligence has not yet emerged. In fact, many experts also question the possibility of strong artificial intelligence.

We are currently unable to predict the potential impact of strong artificial intelligence, and many people believe that blockchain and artificial intelligence may be used together in the future. One might argue that they will become one of the most important technologies of the next few decades.  

Therefore, it is very important to carefully study how the two technologies will be combined in the future.

The synergy of artificial intelligence and blockchain

Artificial intelligence can improve blockchain capabilities

Mining requires a lot of computing power and resources. Distributed ledgers sacrifice operational efficiency for things like immutability and censorship resistance. And artificial intelligence can optimize energy consumption very effectively, which is very effective for improving mining algorithms.  

One of the main objections to the use of blockchain systems is the extremely high energy waste of blockchains. The cryptoeconomics and security afforded by blockchain technology introduce computational tasks that would otherwise be useless. Reducing the consumption of proof-of-work blockchains will benefit the entire industry and may facilitate the mainstream adoption of blockchains.

Artificial intelligence can also optimize the storage needs of blockchains. Since transaction history is stored across all nodes, the capacity of the distributed ledger can grow rapidly. If storage requirements are high, the barrier to entry will also be higher, which may make the network less distributed. Artificial intelligence can introduce new database sharding technology, allowing the blockchain to be smaller in size and store data in it more efficiently.  

Decentralized data economy

Data is an increasingly valuable asset that not only needs to be securely stored, but also exchanged. Effective artificial intelligence systems rely heavily on data, and blockchain can store data with a high degree of reliability.

Blockchain is essentially a secure, distributed database shared by all participants in the network. Its data is stored in blocks, and each block is cryptographically linked to the previous block. This makes it difficult for an attacker to modify the information stored in the blockchain in some way (such as through a 51% attack) without changing the network consensus.

Decentralized data exchange is a new digital economy built on the blockchain. These transactions will make data and storage easily and securely accessible to anyone (or anything). In being connected to this digital economy, AI algorithms can use a larger set of external inputs and learn faster. On top of that, the algorithms themselves can also trade in these markets. This will make them more accessible to a wider range of users and can speed up their development.

Decentralized data exchanges may revolutionize the data storage space. Essentially, anyone can rent their local storage space for a fee (paid in tokens). On the other hand, existing data storage service providers will have to improve their services to remain competitive.

While some of these data markets are still in the early stages of maturation, they are already up and running. AI systems will benefit greatly by incentivizing data and storage providers to maintain high data integrity.

Decentralized supercomputers

Training artificial intelligence is not only Algorithms that can learn from medium- to high-quality data are needed, and significant computing resources are required. Artificial intelligence algorithms typically use a computing system called an artificial neural network (ANN). Artificial neural networks learn to perform tasks by considering many cases. These artificial neural networks often require massive amounts of computing power to process millions of parameters and perform specified tasks.

If data can be shared on a blockchain network, why can’t computing power be shared? In some blockchain applications, users can effectively rent their computers' computing power in peer-to-peer (P2P) markets to those seeking to perform complex calculations. Incentivize users to increase their computing power by obtaining tokens.

Artificial intelligence systems can be trained more efficiently and cost-effectively on these computing platforms. Although early examples are mainly used for rendering 3D computer graphics, they will gradually move into the field of artificial intelligence.

As these decentralized applications (DApps) develop, there may be competition among a large number of companies providing computing resources. Large amounts of computing power can be utilized more efficiently by allowing users to earn income by renting out idle computing resources. Theoretically, every CPU or GPU in the world can work as a node in a decentralized supercomputer when not in use.

Artificial intelligence has better decision-making and auditability

AI systems make decisions that may be difficult for humans to understand. These algorithms can process large amounts of data, making their decision-making processes virtually impossible for anyone to audit and replicate.

If decisions are made based on each data point record, there will be a clear audit trail for human review, which can increase trust in decisions made by AI algorithms.

Summary

If these two technologies can each fulfill their potential, then they There will undoubtedly be a lasting impact. While many companies leverage these two technologies individually, there are some interesting cases where they are combined.

As both technologies develop further, leveraging blockchain technology and artificial intelligence simultaneously, more innovations may be discovered. The potential outcomes are difficult to assess, but what is certain is that they will lead to improvements in many aspects of our economic system.