The True Power of AI Is Here, and You’re About to Miss Out

AI will be a $3 trillion market, but don’t expect to benefit if things don’t change.

I’m Mitchell Loureiro, and I’ve helped major blockchain projects grow including NXT, Ardor, Santiment, Decentraland, Byteball, and Steemit. I joined the team at SingularityNET because I am deeply concerned about the future of AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon dominate the global economy, transforming every aspect of your daily life. The AI market is worth roughly $230 billion today, and by 2025, it is projected to surpass $3 trillion. From there it will take over the economy entirely.

The massive influx of capital and innovation will result in amazing new applications. AI will redefine the world’s largest industries, from healthcare and education to finance and logistics. Experts are calling AI the most important technological advancement in the history of the human race… and they are right.

But without critical advancements, the evolution of AI is stunted. Worse yet, the gains could be captured by a few powerful individuals, corporations, or governments, ushering a new age of AI-based neo-feudalism.

Imagine a future where production is automated. Those who control either the things that are automated (robots) or the process of automation itself (AI) control access to resources. Without them, nothing can be made. Nothing can be developed. And nothing can be changed, without their approval. They will control the spigots of life to the entire human race. And the more their technology improves, the more dependent the world (including you) will become on the automation they offer. They will become a new elite, one that dominates every area of human life.

Corporations & governments will not give you the power of AI

Only large corporations, nation-states, and research institutions can afford groundbreaking AI research.

On the corporate side, most AI research is controlled by the likes of Google, IBM, and Facebook, all of which are incentivized to hoard and privatize their creations for the benefit of shareholders.

Nation states are the most fearful agents developing AI tech. Both Russia and the U.S. have been accelerating their research efforts dramatically. China recently announced its ambition to become the global leader in AI research by 2030.

“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” — Vladimir Putin

Meanwhile, research institutions (including universities) have no way to share their innovations even if they wanted to. While they may not have the might of their corporate and government peers, there is still plenty of powerful innovation happening in academia. If they could efficiently combine their resources, perhaps they would have a fighting chance. But in the current environment, there are no interoperability standards, making this dream an impossibility.

Corporations, governments, or research institutions, it doesn’t matter — the benefits of AI are not set to accrue to you.

Your life is set to be dominated by powerful AI, and those that control it

What if we could unleash the power of AI for everyone?

If we could combine the resources and capabilities of every independent developer, business, and research institution, the result would be the most powerful AI network in the world, capable of taking on any centralized competitor. We could then structure the system so that it works on behalf of all, not the few.

To realize this dream of ‘AI for all’, we first have to overcome some technical hurdles.

The biggest factor to overcome is the lack of interoperability, which stops researchers and developers from leveraging existing innovations. This leaves AI tech fragmented, relegated to narrow functionalities or dominated by corporations that can afford bespoke AI integration.

Nearly every AI technology today has wide applications but is ‘stuck’ serving a specific company, industry, or use-case.

This lack of interoperability slows AI innovation. It means that valuable datasets and analytical capabilities need to be developed in-house and from scratch. This process is not only time-intensive, but requires significantly more capital. There are also few ways to monetize these unique assets.

The world’s first interoperability standards would allow AI innovations from anywhere in the world to be combined into a custom tech stack that no independent service could compete with. By removing the biggest barrier to AI evolution, we would see things progress unlike ever before.

We’re closer than you think to overthrowing our future AI overlords

Decentralizing AI is our best chance at fighting back

The current technological paradigm means that artificial intelligence will be controlled by a limited number of groups and individuals, all of whom are incentivized to maintain their dominance. The most important innovation in the history of mankind could almost exclusively benefit a small number of people.

SingularityNET was created by leading AI experts to fight back, bringing the life-changing power of AI directly to the people. This is huge.

SingularityNET is accomplishing all of this by establishing the first interoperability standards for decentralized AIs. These standards let AI transact both data and value with each other.

Until this point, decentralized AI coordination at scale was impossible. SingularityNET sets the stage for an alternative to AI-based neo-feudalism by creating a permissionless, open access marketplace of AI for all. If it works it could democratize AI, boosting the speed of innovation, increasing access to technology, and spreading the benefits of AI technology to all.

Decentralized tech built on blockchain infrastructures would distribute AI power to everyone

Coordinated AI would accelerate development & benefit all

Every market, industry, and niche will be able to use SingularityNET to their advantage, whether it be by purchasing new capabilities in the marketplace or monetizing their own assets to a global suite of buyers. With SingularityNET, a small distributed team in southern Africa would have access to the same resources as a multi-billion dollar corporation in Europe.

Here are just a handful of the market opportunities for the SingularityNET platform:

Cybersecurity

The application of machine learning to cybersecurity is maturing, and coordinating multiple ML-cybersecurity tools within SingularityNET will provide capabilities that no standalone service could match.

Today, there is no single software package that handles every cybersecurity need. SingularityNET’s decentralized approach will provide a fundamentally superior approach to AI based cybersecurity. Empowered cybersecurity AI agents will be continually updated by a diverse group of programmers around the world, much more rapidly and comprehensively than any one company would be able to do.

SingularityNET’s reputation system, with accuracy enforced by AI subsystems, will ensure that only those cybersecurity AI agents providing actual value are highly rated and widely used. Vulpem Ventures will be among the first to launch cybersecurity AI agents on SingularityNET.

Biomedical & Healthcare

Technology is advancing at an impressive rate within the healthcare industry. Allowing disparate teams to share, integrate, and monetize various AI resources will dramatically boost research and development speed.

For example, hundreds of biotech companies are currently using state of the art machine-learning systems to map genomes and DNA markers. Replicating this process with each iteration is slow, costly, and prone to error. Instead, teams could immediately acquired the necessary capabilities from external teams around the world. And even if their drug trials fail, they could still monetize their research innovations on the SingularityNET marketplace, reducing the hurdles to success.

Media & Content

Media companies, both big and small, devote significant amounts of time and financial resources toward activities that could be done by existing AI tech. The only issue is that they don’t have access to this tech, and those controlling the tech don’t have a way to monetize it externally. As with nearly every other industry, SingularityNET is destroying these barriers, connecting a huge amount of supply with even larger levels of demand.

For example, if a hardware company like Cisco wants video recognition for their enterprise customers, they would need to build it internally or license an individual service. SingularityNET would allow it to buy semantic vision processing on demand, combining multiple services into a custom tech stack tailored to their needs. This opportunity would apply to any software need in existence.

The AI-to-AI economy is coming soon, don’t miss out

If SingularityNET does not take a leading role in AI, we will still get all these technologies…it’s just that the benefits AI creates will be dominated by an incredibly small clique of corporations and nation-state elites. It is imperative that we open AI technology using a network like SingularityNET, or we will suffer the consequences of dependency on a technology dominated by a tiny few.

The explosion of artificial intelligence will be exhilarating. If we can properly coordinate these powerful AI agents, the industry’s explosion will not only occur faster, but with greater magnitude than ever imagined. If we can decentralize this coordination, then we dodge AI feudalism and give the benefits of AI to all.

The SingularityNET team has already collaborated with hundreds of developers and global businesses in preparation for an aggressive launch. The first scalable version will launch in mid-2018.

The organization has also announced a public token sale, so anyone can participate in the growth of the platform and the AI economy as a whole. See their website and blog for more information. I’ve thrown my support behind them in the hopes of a better, more equitable future. I ask that you do too.