Artificial Intelligence (Ai) as a market is full of hype, with vendors, customers, and press all speaking breathlessly about the capabilities for Ai in general and their offerings specifically. Likewise, blockchain is also a widely hyped market, with technology providers and customers claiming all sorts of capabilities that may or may not be possible. Combining Ai and blockchain then must be double the hype? On the other hand, Ai is providing real, tangible value in many myriad ways we talk about every day. Likewise, blockchain is starting to show value across a range of applications and industry. So, perhaps combining Ai and blockchain will also show twice the value combined together.
The Role Of Blockchain In An Ai Context
Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger of transactions that has elements of transparency, trust, verifiability, and something called smart contracts. Decentralized and distributed means that information that is stored across the network in such a way that each end point has access to the data without requiring access to a central server. The network is also distributed because the transactions happen at each end point without requiring centralized coordination. A ledger is a record of transactions. Blockchain records a ledger of interactions between two separate parties whether it be a financial exchange or even a chain of custody showing when things have changed hands over time.
Since every block in the blockchain contains a different piece of information that is encrypted or encoded, the blockchain can help guarantee trust and verifiability of data. The concept of the chain and block in blockchain is that each block has its own information and that information contains a link to the block before it, which develop the chain and provides a verifiable chain of custody. No individual actor can change the information in a block without invalidating the entire chain of information in a particular block and thus messing up the chain. Since the chain is distributed in myriad of other places and between other parties, to make changes to the chain, a consensus of all the parties would need to agree to the changes being made.
Adding to the concept of the blockchain are smart contracts, which are decentralized pieces of code that can be triggered when a specific chain of actions has been met. In this way, when you have two parties wanting to execute a secure, trusted transaction without the use of an intermediary this is what blockchain ideally would be used for.
So how can blockchain help with Ai? The first benefit is that you can share machine learning models among all parties without an intermediary. A good example is with facial recognition software. If one device knows what a person looks like and uploads it to the chain, other devices hooked up also know what that person looks like. When other devices upload their own facial recognition data, the other devices will gain the ability to use that for the facial recognition model. Since this happens on the blockchain, there is no central control over facial recognition, and as such no one company owns or stores the data. This approach also allows for everyone to learn faster and collaboratively through the use of integrated Ai with blockchain.
Ai systems can also use blockchain to facilitate the sharing of data used across multiple models. A great example is the use of machine learning models for product recommendations in online retail. If an online store knows the preferences of one shopper, and then that customer goes to a different store website, these two sites can be connected through a blockchain to share trusted personalization information. This could potentially become a place of competition for smaller ecommerce sites that want to share with each other personalization information. Instead of each company gathering their own personalization data, they can share it amongst each other in a blockchain, providing competition to sites like Amazon and Walmart who have already developed their own data systems to gather this information about their customers. The benefit for this to the customer is that in exchange for sharing their information, they can get everything from better pricing to customized shopping experiences. This could also prevent data breaches if all information and payment systems are stored and shared through a blockchain rather than a centralized data server.
How Blockchain Benefit Ai
Not only can blockchains be used to share models and data, but blockchains can help serve a role as a “master brain” in a manner shared across multiple Ai systems. If we can put all of these shared learning benefits and blockchain and Ai together, the possibility may also be there to combine all of these things that can learn from their surroundings and then share that learning with all the Ai systems on the network. A major benefit would be that no one owns it and there’s no government control over the bot or the shared brain. It could potentially be unbiased because of the sheer amount of information coming in from different areas and different angles.
Another application is addressing the challenge of explainable Ai. One of the more significant problems with deep learning is that there isn’t a clear idea about what inputs result in what output and how that affected the whole sequence. If something goes wrong in a deep learning neural network, we don’t have a clear idea of how to identify the problem and correct it. This is the problem of neural networks in effect being a “black box” without any real transparency or explainability. However, if we use blockchains, we can record how individual actions result in a final decision in a non-reputable manner, which allows us to go back and see where things went wrong and then fix the problem. The blockchain would be used to record events, such as autonomous vehicle decisions and actions in a way that will not be modified later. This can also increase trust since the blockchain element is unbiased and is just for storage and analysis, anyone can go in and see what has happened.
Finally, Ai systems can be used to improve blockchains in general. Machine learning models can keep an eye on what is happening in the blockchain. It can look for patterns and anomalies in the types of data being stored and actions being performed on a particular server and be used to alert users when something may be happening. The systems can look for normal behavior and flag what seems to be unusual. Ai systems can help keep blockchain more secure, more reliable, and more efficient.
While it’s quite possible that the worlds of Ai and blockchain are full of hype, there are actual, tangible, realistic ways in which the two emerging technologies can be used in ways that benefit each other and provide real outcomes for those looking to implement the technologies today in their environments.
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