artificial intelligence

Exclusive: Talent Shortage is The Key Pain Point in the AI Industry

Exclusive interview with Timothy Leung: Part 1

Artificial intelligence is one of the emerging fintech trends in Hong Kong. While there are some great minds and AI companies in Hong Kong, they can’t survive without sufficient funding and technical support from government and industry leaders. We had the opportunity to invite Timothy Leung, Executive Director of HKAI Lab, to share his thoughts on how HKAI Lab facilitates the growth of AI ecosystem in Hong Kong. He also identified talent shortage is the key pain point in AI industry which hinders integration of AI and blockchain.

HKAI lab has a six-months accelerator program, which is held twice a year. Can you tell us more about this program?

HKAI LAB is a non-profit making entity and it’s fully funded by Alibaba Group and SenseTime Group. I don’t think I need to elaborate more on Alibaba Group. But you may also want to know about SenseTime. SenseTime is a Hong Kong startup founded by a professor of the Chinese University in Hong Kong. HKAI Lab was established in May and we started official operation in the Science Park six months ago.

The goal of HKAI Lab is to promote AI technology in Hong Kong. In order to do that, we decided to do two things. First is running an incubation program or accelerator program and we cooperated with the Hong Kong Science Park. We are initially running the program for six months now, for the second cohort onwards, we extended to 12 months to provide adequate support for the startups. Note that we accept new application every six months but the cohort can stay in the LAB for 12 months.

What our accelerator program excels is that we’re focusing on AI. We are well aware of the skill set required for startups, as well as the hardware needed to perform data crunching. It’s like doing mining in blockchain. With that we apply our own GPU supercomputer and we let the startups in our program to use it freely. That is something unique that we are offering. We also provide coaching services to the startups, for example, training courses of the Alibaba deep learning platform and the SenseTime development platform. These tools have different strengths, because Alibaba Group is a master in e-commerce, whereas SenseTime excels in image recognition. We have luncheon with our startups and scientists from SenseTime to discuss the pain points that startups are facing. The scientists can provide useful advice in addressing these pain points and this is another unique advantage of our accelerator program.

What are your criteria in picking the startups into the program?

We not only take in applicants from the startup companies, but also personal applications. So basically a university student, or professor or someone’s working in a large enterprise can apply to us. If they have a good idea without a company, they can apply to us attaching their testing idea and business plan first. If we think the applicants have good potential, then we can accept them to the program and they can form a company afterwards. In Hong Kong, it only takes a few hours to get a Business Registration (BR) license, and then they are enrolled to our program.

As AI development is still at its early stage in Hong Kong, we don’t have enough AI solution providers. We welcome the brains of creative people, either in academics, or even working in enterprises. That’s basically what we do in a nutshell.

Office of HKAI Lab in Science Park

How do you build the ecosystem in AI industry?

The second key initiative we are doing is to build the ecosystem around AI technology. Having a startup is good, yet they need businesses and revenues to survive. We try to build an ecosystem connecting enterprises and AI startups with a “Pain Point and Showcase approach”. Enterprises like real estate developer, big chain retailers, and banks have expressed their interests to explore AI technology towards their pain points, however, they don’t know where to start as they can’t grasp the fundamentals of AI technology. We then try to match their demand with suitable solutions from AI startups, regardless the startup is from our accelerator program or not. The AI startups will showcase their solutions and that’s how enterprises and AI startups work together. Venture capital firms are another player in our ecosystem, which provides funding to promising AI companies.

Can you share with us some collaboration with academics and scientists?

A good question! The way we’re working with academics and scientists is that, if our startup has an issue with AI technology, they may work with a professor in that field. We’re leveraging the universities to extend our reach to the students from the entrepreneur center and technology transfer center. I directly talked to the professors and hoped to build solutions helping the startups.

I think the unique position for HKAI LAB is we have this close relationship with the startups in the past. The startups also put faith in us to work with academics to solve that particular pain point. We also have good connections with CTO of Alibaba group and professors from different universities serving as our advisors, which can provide adequate technical support to the startups.

What the key challenges in integrating blockchain and AI?

I think the key challenge is talent shortage in Hong Kong. Finding enough talent in AI is difficult. Whether it is a large enterprise or startup, they all scream for AI talents. We don’t have enough well-trained professionals in the AI field. This field is so new, that universities don’t have degrees for it. We are picking people from computer science, statistics, physics and mathematics fields, as long as these people have the correct mindset working on AI. It is extremely rare to have someone with expertise in both AI and blockchain.

Having said that, there are some advantages of integrating blockchain and AI because you need a lot of data processing in AI. The protection of data source is a common issue in AI. Blockchain may have a way to solve that since it is a distributed ledger, and you can trace transactions on the blockchain. The immutable nature of blockchain ensures data protection. Another scenario is when you build a financial model that people will use the data to formulate an AI solution, which users can trace back the data with blockchain so they can reward the original data owner. In that sense, I can see the beauties of merging the two technologies.

Currently there are many challenges in integrating AI and blockchain. People also talk about smart contract would be a way of merging the two technology. Smart contract is definitely the scenario for blockchain. But whether the contract is “smart” is an issue for AI. How could we merge the two together? I think there’s definitely a potential yet the challenges are still there, like talent shortage and lack of successful integration cases.

Exclusive: Blockchain at the Stage of Tech Convergence

Exclusive interview with Paul Sin: Part 2

How does Deloitte Blockchain Lab envision the future of blockchain? Dr. Paul Sin believes that blockchain is at the stage of technology convergence with IoT, big data and artificial intelligence. He also explained the three challenges for enterprises to implement their own blockchain and various blockchain auditing services offered by Deloitte.

From your experience, what are the pain points for enterprises in implementing their own blockchain?

Since these are enterprise permissioned blockchains, one of the challenges is the commercial model. We need to figure out how these people share the cost of the platform. Going forward, [we need to look at] how they can recover their investments.

The second challenge is regulatory concerns, we need to comply with all the different regulations such as the GDPR in Europe, China’s cybersecurity law, Hong Kong’s PDPO. Liability issues are also a concern. If you are creating a KYC network, for example, if Bank A opens an account for terrorists and Bank B finances the terrorists based on the records from Bank A, who will bear the liability for terrorist financing? This will also be something we will need to sort out. We classify these problems as the governance model.

The third challenge will be the interoperability of the technologies being used by more than 20 platforms on trade finance and supply chain across the world that are in production. You need to exchange data across different distributed ledger technologies, you need to interoperate on Corda, Hyperledger, Ethereum, and also connect the Internet of Things (IoT) with blockchain so that the physical products can be linked to the digital record of the blockchain. You also need to create advanced analytics models that will make use of the data on the blockchain. There is a lot of technology convergence happening at the moment in the market. This is a challenge but also an interesting part of the technology.

Which blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platforms are the most popular from your experience working with enterprises, and what are the reasons behind choosing them?

We generally recommend open-source platforms for our clients because it enhances adoption. Even though we deploy blockchain on hybrid cloud infrastructure, we try not to use managed blockchain services unless they are truly open. Some cloud providers have BaaS with open-source technology; those would be the ones we are more comfortable working with. Some blockchain services providing blockchain on a proprietary platform—if one party is on that platform, the whole ecosystem must be using that vendor—those are not recommended. If you see some corporations working with certain well-known vendors who provide proprietary managed blockchain on the cloud, they will have a lot of challenges with adoption. A corporation may find that only they are on the blockchain and no other corporations are willing to join, mostly because the platform is proprietary. This is the reason why it is not attractive from the perspective of supporting the whole ecosystem.

From a corporate perspective, it can certainly save time developing and deploying the technology, so using blockchain managed by the cloud is understandable.

How do you envision the future of blockchain and what is your outlook for enterprise blockchain adoption?

We are now getting to the stage of convergence, as I mentioned earlier, it is now feasible to exchange data with each other without compromising on the authenticity and authorization mechanism. We are also working on technology convergence, where IoT puts data on the blockchain to share among exclusive members, we create a big data pool for the whole ecosystem and we run AI engines on top of that to create insights for analytics. This is what we are working on at the moment.

Other Big Four auditing firms—PwC, KPMG, EY— have launched blockchain auditing services. Does Deloitte have blockchain auditing services currently?

Yes, we have blockchain auditing services. Blockchain auditing is a very confusing term, there are different kinds of blockchain auditing. If a company has certain assets, stored in a crypto format, you will need financial auditing, which is a kind of blockchain auditing. There are also ICOs, STOs, stablecoin issuances, etc., and those need audit firms to audit liquidity, for example. We also conduct IT audits for blockchain platforms, to make sure they are not breaching any technology risks or guidelines, from regulators as well as data privacy auditors.

What are your views on consensus as a service?

I believe this is more for public blockchains because in public blockchains, consensus is very resource-consuming, and it does not make sense to build ASIC server farms in order to create consensus. For permissioned blockchains that we use, the underlying consensus mechanism is very light in terms of power consumption. Many new permissioned blockchains support plug-and-play consensus mechanisms, all of which are open-source, and do not need to do any outsourcing for them.

US FDA Calls Meeting on Blockchain, AI and the New Era of Smarter Food Safety

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will hold a meeting with stakeholders to discuss its plans to usher in “A New Era of Smarter Food Safety .” The meetingwill take place on October 21st, with the aim of gathering input and feedback to help shape an FDA blueprint for the initiative. The FDA will propose leveraging modern technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, and IoT to improve transparency and decrease the risks of contamination in the food supply chain. The initiative is part of an ongoing effort by the FDA to implements the agency’s Food and Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) which was designed to shift the focus from responding to foodborne illness to preventing it. The meeting will include breakout sessions on key topics that include traceability, smarter tools for prevention, evolving business models and retail food safety, and food safety culture.

Food Tech Revolution In a recent interview, Frank Yiannas, Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy, FDA said, “We are in the midst of a new revolution in food technology. There will be more changes in the next 10 years than there have been in the past 20 years. Products will be reformulated; new food sources and production approaches will be realized, and the food system will become increasingly digitalized.”

Before joining the FDA, Yiannis was a champion of blockchain in the private sector and claims he has been “chasing the holy grail of food traceability for years”. He believes that chase is at an end with the emergence of new technologies and specifically blockchain. Yiannis said, “Because of its distributed and decentralized nature that aligns more closely with a decentralized and distributed food system, has enabled food system stakeholders to imagine being able to have full end-to-end traceability. An ability to deliver accurate, real-time information about food, how it’s produced, and how it flows from farm to table is a game-changer for food safety.”

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Axon Explores Blockchain to Fight Body-Cam Deepfake Videos

Axon Enterprise Inc, a leading manufacturer of body-cams for United States law enforcement agencies, has produced new cameras enhanced with blockchain technology in an attempt to thwart ‘deepfake’ videos.

Artificial Videos

According to Reuters, the rollout of Axon’s Body 3 Camera is in direct response to lawmakers and the public concerns about “deepfake” videos—a form of video tampering that utilizes artificial intelligence to create incredibly convincing synthetic videos.

Public access to the software necessary to create deepfakes is growing, which has prompted US lawmakers to demand high-tech solutions to combat the issue. Deepfake videos are nearly impossible to discern with the naked eyes and can empower malicious actors to create confusion or discredit an individual which could have devastating consequences in high-stakes situations such as criminal justice.

The chaos manipulated video can cause was evidenced when a “cheapfake” of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surfaced that had been manually slowed down to make her appear intoxicated and slurring her speech.

Body-cam footage has been used as evidence in cases of alleged police misconduct. Defense councils and civil liberties groups have called into question the integrity of some police videos, citing changes in timestamps and noticeable edits. In a statement to Reuters, a spokesman for Axon said, “Axon recognizes the threat posed by ‘deepfakes’ to cause general mistrust in the integrity of any video, including body-worn camera videos.” In the Body 3 Camera, Axon has included a secure digital signature to help track the authenticity of videos. The company declined to elaborate much further on the software features of the new device citing the need to protect their intellectual property.

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Blockchain and the Wheel of Fate: The Role of Blockchain Technology in Disease Surveillance and Pandemic Prevention

There is a line in Stephen King’s The Stand that goes: ‘Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, in the end, came round to the same place again.’

In The Stand, a man-made virus wipes out most of the world population within a short timespan. The antigen is a genetically modified flu-virus designed to be a constantly shifting agent, thus rendering it extremely or totally invulnerable to vaccines. The virus was part of a larger US Government-funded bio-weapons program known as Project Blue.

Project Blue’s end game is a global Superflu epidemic, nicknamed Captain Trips. The Superflu rapidly spreads worldwide, thinning out the human race to barely a thread of existence.

The Stand is a work of fiction, of course. The story deals with how the survivors (0.6% of the entire human population are naturally immune) deal with the new world, ultimately boiling down to a final stand between good and evil.

But the book’s core message of a flu-like disease rapidly spreading and infecting an ever-increasing number of people across the world is very real and relevant indeed.

It’s happening right now.

Coronavirus outbreak: The wheel has come to the same place again

At the time of writing, the coronavirus outbreak has killed almost 3,000 people worldwide, with more than 80,000 infections confirmed and rising, as the virus pops up in new countries.

Pandemics, defined as international cross-border epidemics that infect and kill large percentages of the population have occurred through the ages. The deadliest perhaps are The Black Death in mid-14th-century that killed between 75 and 200 million people (true figure will never be known), and the 1918 Spanish Flu, which may have killed up to 100m people.

Global epidemics can occur anytime, anywhere, as we have seen with the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. The first case was detected in Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019. Wuhan, a city of around 11 million people, became a hotbed for coronavirus infection. The disease spread like wildfire and soon reached other Chinese cities before crossing international borders.

Modern air travel means that an infected individual can reach almost anywhere in the world within a few hours, which makes containment almost impossible, and global contagion a real possibility.

So what can be done to prevent that wheel from coming back again to the same place as it did in the mid 14th century and 1918?

Using blockchain technology as a weapon to prevent pandemics

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the United States’ chief public health and disease prevention agency. CDC operatives show up wherever and whenever an outbreak of an infectious disease is detected. The CDC is researching how blockchain technology can become the latest weapon in their armamentarium to fight disease and prevent future epidemics from razing the world.

But this vital fight can sometimes be hampered by difficulties in the timely sharing of information with local health enforcement agencies on the ground. Language barriers, the sheer distance between the geographical location of an outbreak, cultural differences, and many other factors might become an issue that slows the transmission and exchange of information, which in some cases might literally become a life or death situation. Time is of the essence when dealing with outbreaks of the deadly disease.

Currently, the CDC uploads epidemiological data to a cloud-based solution, which is far from ideal as personally identifiable information cannot be stored there, due to data privacy and security risks, forcing on-the-ground operatives to find alternative solutions, which means more precious time-wasting. A blockchain-powered solution would address this issue, as data can be shared instantly while complying with data privacy and security regulations.

But the CDC’s intended use of blockchain technology is only one of myriad other revolutionary use cases in healthcare.

We have seen that disease outbreaks can happen at any time, anywhere on the planet, with little or no warning. Blockchain will not prevent the outbreak itself, nothing can. These are natural events that have occurred in the past and will re-occur in the future. That wheel spins all the time, remember.

But what blockchain can do is create the first line of rapid defense through a network of connected devices whose only purpose is to remain vigilant about disease outbreaks, 24/7, 365 days a year, in perpetuity. Blockchain is a highly scalable solution that works in real-time, implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence routines that can gather, analyze, and collate data and instantly recommend a course of action, should an outbreak be detected. This instant response capability can represent the difference between quick containment and global contagion.

Blockchain Monitor Launched to Track Coronavirus-Free Safe Zones to Protect the Non-Infected Community During Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has currently reached countless countries and territories all over the world and has caused over 220,000 infections in the world population. With the global death rate climbing and almost reaching 9,000, the World Health Organization declared it as a pandemic on March 11.

Many countries have encouraged employers to adopt a work-from-home system, while schools have been closed in many cities in hopes of curbing the spread of the coronavirus. Many countries have also closed their borders and implemented travel restrictions and alerts to slow down the rate of the spread.

With the alarming rate of new cases, technological advancements have been emerging to help governments to detect new and record new cases. Chinese President Xi Jinping previously suggested that the fight against the new virus has highlighted the need for a better governance mechanism, suggesting blockchain technology should be integrated into the existing system to gain better insights into social circumstances.

The Public Health Blockchain Consortium (PHBC) has announced the launch of a monitoring blockchain aimed to verify communities and workplaces that are free from the coronavirus COVID-19, as well as other high-risk viruses, bacteria, and fungi. The Consortium consists of health authorities, universities, healthcare providers, and innovators who aim to collect and store anonymous health data on the blockchain, to improve the lives of people in the world. The blockchain monitor would help identify safe zones where there have been no confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

Data would be stored and updated in real-time using blockchain, and the information will be received from surveillance providers who use a combination of technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and geographical information systems.

Ayon Hazra, the CEO of Qlikchain, administrator for the PHBC explained, “Communities and workplaces can maintain such safe zone status if they restrict access to anonymously identified persons and only allow movement to and from other safe zones. This method enables communities and workplaces to effectively protect uninfected persons.”

The method suggests an incentive for communities and workplaces to restrict access and conduct proper testing to keep its status as a safe zone. Hazra mentioned that the individuals and communities from the safe zones would be able to restrict their movement safely according to the information provided by the blockchain monitor.

The blockchain monitor also tracks the protection certificates offered by the regulatory authorities to workplaces and communities, detecting of an individual in the safe zone who has possibly been in one of the infected areas, a quarantine requirement will be alerted.

With the PHBC virus-free monitoring blockchain being introduced to public health officials in Geneva on February 10, 2020, the impact of the technology will be presented after a year at the PHBC’s 2021 conference.

China’s Blockchain and FinTech Sector to Brace for 'Capital Winter' Even After the Coronavirus Pandemic Subsides

Investment activity in China’s tech sector has seen a massive drop in the past four months since the coronavirus outbreak has emerged from the city of Wuhan. The venture capital market has been suffering a tremendous impact on its existing drop in activity. The epicenter of the pandemic, Wuhan, has eased its lockdown measures and is now open.

Tech-based industries, including FinTech, artificial intelligence, and web-based services have seen a 31.3 percent decline from 173.5 billion to 119.1 billion in Q1, in the same period as last year. Investment deals have also seen a dip, from 1,143 to 634 in the same period, resulting in a 44.5 percent decline.

According to a report by Itjuzi.com, In 2019, 3161 startup companies were founded, while in Q1 of 2020, less than 100 startups were founded, which was around 3 percent of companies founded last year. Of those 100 startups, many were founded in January before the COVID-19 outbreak. The report further suggested that startups in artificial intelligence and e-commerce continue to attract funding, as shown in the first quarter.

Xu Miaocheng, investment vice president at Chinese venture capital firm Unity Venture said, “There is already a downturn in the number of new tech startups in the past two years, and the number is further declining in the first quarter because of the coronavirus outbreak. Under those circumstances, VC firms are continuing to stick to the conservative investing strategy that they had in the past one to two years.”

China has already been in a trade war with the United States and already has experienced a rocky economic outlook. Analysts have deemed China to be going through a “capital winter,” describing the significant slowdown in fundraising activities since 2018, signaling a longer decline even after lockdown measures have been eased.

However, there is still hope. Major venture capital firms including Sequoia China, which has invested heavily in the blockchain sector continues to remain active in investment despite the coronavirus pandemic. Sequoia China made 23 investments in the Q1 of 2020, while other major firms including Tencent and Addor Capital has invested in 17 and 16 respectively.

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Spanish Researchers Deploy AI and Blockchain-Powered App to Tame COVID-19

At least 100 Spanish researchers from the University of Salamanca, the Artificial Intelligent Research Institute, and the Institute of Biomedical Research of Salamanca have joined hands to design an artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain-based app to picture the evolution of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Their objective is flattening this pandemic’s curve as it has wreaked havoc across the globe.

Blockchain to offer digital identities

It is no longer a doubt that COVID-19 is one of the toughest challenges humanity has ever faced. So far, Spain has emerged as one of the hardest-hit nations with over 19,000 deaths.

The team of Spanish researchers led by Javier Prieto and Juan Manuel Corchado, both members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), seek to change this narrative by availing relevant information about the pandemic, as well as the evolution of the virus.

With the help of blockchain technology, the app will enable the researchers to check whether people are adhering to precautionary measures like social distancing. This will be attained by issuing licenses and creating digital identities whenever people are going to the supermarket or work. The licenses will hold private keys in place of paper certificates given to the citizens by the government.

AI will be instrumental in generating hybrid neuro-symbolic algorithms to predict the evolution of coronavirus pandemic based on patient information like medical treatments and genetic profiles.

Blockchain to assist in future epidemic tracking

People will be required to download the app to authenticate whether they are following the quarantine and social distancing measures.

Both Prieto and Corchado noted, “The technology will be able to support healthcare professionals and public health officials by providing them with information that can be used when making decisions. For example, if the data shows an increase in COVID-19 cases, officials can decide whether to shelter-in-place.”

By deploying both AI and blockchain technology, the researchers seek to track COVID-19 so that they can predict future pandemics and epidemics. For instance, they are keeping a close eye on microorganisms that have a likelihood of triggering the next healthcare crisis. Blockchain technology has been playing an instrumental role in curbing coronavirus in China.

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Blockchain and AI: The Delicate Balance Between Two Cyber Titans

‘The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.‘ -The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Back in 2017, a team of researchers worked on a Facebook-sponsored project to develop dialog agents (that’s chatbots to you and me) that could deal and negotiate with customers naturally and efficiently. The program was called Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR).Today’s chatbots have a rather limited ability to communicate. A chatbot conversation sounds mechanical, stilted, and unnatural. To paraphrase John Connor from The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), chatbots can be spotted easily. This is because human-to-human communication has a degree of randomness to it, and a conversation between two or more people can take unexpected twists and turns that a chatbot simply cannot recognize, follow, or adequately respond to without sounding like, well, like a robot.FAIR’s objective was the creation of ‘dialog agents’ that could learn to negotiate via natural language dialogue. In other words, mimic human language well enough, and to reach a successful outcome by planning (‘thinking’) ahead, carefully calibrating all the possible paths that the conversation might take, and adapting their actions and words accordingly.To that end, one could argue that this particular project was a failure. The chatbots created for the experiment (Alice and Bob) did not quite master the art of conversation of negotiation. Their communication remained unnatural and robot-like. Nonsensical, even, or so it seemed. After a while, however, the research team hurriedly shut down their work with Alice and Bob. Because Alice and Bob, while did not learn to negotiate, did learn a very peculiar skill, hitherto restricted to the human mind, or so the research team thought: The ability to create a language only they could understand.

Alice, Bob, and paper clips: A tale of runaway AI

The implications of the FAIR chatbot experiment are obvious. Why would the bots create their own language, one that their human overseers couldn’t easily identify or understand, until it was too late, perhaps? What if Alice and Bob had been left unchecked? Would they have learned to negotiate a deal that did not include humans? Far fetched as they might be, these scenarios are not quite implausible. In January 2015, a large sample of the world’s brightest scientific and entrepreneurial minds co-signed an open letter on Artificial Intelligence (AI). People like the late Stephen Hawking, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Google’s director of research Peter Norvig among many others came together to warn the world about the perilous path of embarking in the development of super-intelligent entities that might one day become uncontrollable and hostile towards the very people who created them.In his paper Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom deals with the ethical implications of creating an entity with far superior intellectual capabilities than the average human being, focusing particularly on our motivation to do such a thing and the very motivations that this entity would be instructed to abide by. To this respect, Bostrom does say that “the superintelligence may become unstoppably powerful because of its intellectual superiority and the technologies it could develop, it is crucial that it be provided with human-friendly motivations,” while acknowledging that “superintelligence could also easily surpass humans in the quality of its moral thinking.”Bostrom beautifully illustrates this quandary with this often-quoted example: “Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.”This seemingly silly scenario does, however, reflect the cold internal logic attributed to a machine, whose one-track ‘mind’, for lack of a better word, will strictly follow the parameters of its original programming to the point of exterminating the human race so that it can continue making paper clips unhindered until the end of time.So the question arises, how can all of this be prevented? How can AI be stopped, even controlled? Is it even possible to exert dominion over a super-intelligent entity in the long run? Neither of these questions can be effectively answered today, for one simple reason. Mankind has not created any of these entities yet, so these questions remain largely theoretical and speculative at this time.

Blockchain: The big red button

At the end of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003), John Connor finally understands the true nature of Skynet and narrates it against a background of nuclear missiles crisscrossing Planet Earth, heralding Armageddon: ‘It was software, in cyberspace. There was no system core. It could not be shut down. The attack began at 6:18 pm…’ Great ending to a mediocre movie, all the same, a piece of cinematography that, albeit brief, accurately reflects the folly in mankind’s hubris.The Terminator franchise is perhaps one of the most popular cinematic exemplifications of the dire consequences that the human race might face if we foolishly allow a cybernetic entity to run the show. Skynet’s motivations are not that far removed from Bostrom’s paperclip-making AI. In both cases, the AI’s reasoning to remove humans from the overall picture is that by doing so, the AI can fulfill its programming. No humans means no one to turn the AI off.So can be done about this seemingly inescapable doom, before we all burn in the nuclear fire? Can anything be done? Industrial engineers typically fit their machinery with a big, fat red button that triggers an immediate stop in case of an emergency. You see these buttons every day. In escalators inside the subway system, or in big shopping centers, for example. Printing presses, garbage trucks, and so on. All an operator has to do is press this button, and the machine stops. The operator has total control over the machine.Only AI is not a machine, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. AI is not a kettle that can be switch on and off at will. Nor is it a car, whose ignition key can be removed to render the vehicle immobile. AI is something inside the kettle. It is code that might be programmed to switch the kettle on at certain times of the day, when it knows the user normally drinks his coffee, for example. Or a routine in the car’s central computer that opens the doors when it detects the driver’s own heat signature nearby. AI is software. In cyberspace. It cannot be shut down.Or can it?The paper ‘Safely interruptible agents,’ written and published by DeepMind researcher Laurent Orseau and Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University begins thus: ‘Reinforcement learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are unlikely to behave optimally all the time. If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions—harmful either for the agent or for the environment—and lead the agent into a safer situation.’In other words, AI agents might begin acting unpredictably, so there better be a means to control them, lest we all end up being turned into paper clips. But this solution, while seemingly ideal, has one inherent flaw. What if the operator is unable, or unwilling to press that button? This is the key problem with a single point of failure, and this is also why a decentralized solution is a much better proposition when it comes to matters of nuclear annihilation.Blockchain technology operates in a decentralized fashion, thus removing the single-point-of-failure quandary. If one node in the network is disabled, another one takes action. Blockchain would become AI’s big red button.Let’s elaborate on this. Blockchain nodes typically have more to gain by being truthful than otherwise. This is because, within the confines of a blockchain, the rewards for doing the right thing far outweigh the opposite, and the notion of wide-scale fraud is almost unthinkable.Economist and game-theorist John P. Conley illustrates this with an example: “Let’s take Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work concept. Let’s say that we have 30,000 nodes that are validating transactions. How are they ever going to coordinate together and do something that’s dishonest? The distribution of the nodes that are validating gives inherent stability. At least half would have to be dishonest for the system to break, but the notion that 15,000 nodes would coordinate to do something dishonest is ridiculous.”

Conclusion

The concept of an incorporeal AI is perfectly illustrated in the manga Ghost in the Shell. Created by Japanese artist Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell depicts a cyberpunk future where advanced cybernetics enable the direct interaction between the biological brain and computer networks. The main antagonist is thought to be a prominent human hacker, but it’s ultimately revealed that a highly advanced AI entity is behind the events of the story. The AI (‘ghost’) manipulates people’s bodies (‘shell’) and brains to do its bidding. Ghost in the Shell is a sci-fi tale, of course, but one could argue that its basic premise is not that far removed from tomorrow’s reality. The issue of brain jacking (that is, the artificial manipulation of a human brain via implants) has already been postulated. The Internet of Things (IoT) is slowly becoming commonplace. Soon, every household device will have a microchip. Many last-generation family cars already do. The humble toaster is not far behind. Alice and Bob might become the progenitors of a long cybernetic lineage, and that’s where the real trouble might start.The coronavirus pandemic has resoundingly proven how woefully prepared mankind is for a major global emergency. Covid-19 is a dangerous virus, certainly, but its mortality is nowhere near enough to eradicate the human race, so we’ll live to fight another day.But suppose that one day, a computer virus strikes in a world that’s connected, interlinked, and wholly reliant on technology to survive. From kettles to jet airliners, all is rendered inoperative in a millisecond. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI, Morpheus said in The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999)We better have a big, fat, blockchain-powered red button to push.

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US National Lab Computer Scientists Deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Thwart Illegal Crypto Mining

Computer scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have created an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of identifying malicious codes that prompt supercomputers to mine cryptocurrencies like Monero and Bitcoin.

The lab operating under the United States Department of Energy hopes to put an end to cryptocurrency cybercrime.

Software-based watchdog

Hackers are continuously wreaking havoc globally, and the crypto mining arena hasn’t been spared. Gopinath Chennupati, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, noted that the deep learning AI model will be instrumental in detecting supercomputer hacks that usually instigate cryptocurrency mining. Speaking on behalf of his team’s AI project designed to combat illegal crypto mining on the internet, Chennupati said:

“Based on recent computer break-ins in Europe and elsewhere, this type of software watchdog will soon be crucial to prevent cryptocurrency miners from hacking into high-performance computing facilities and stealing precious computing resources.”

Valid cryptocurrency miners usually assemble vast computer arrays needed to dig up digital assets. Nevertheless, crafty ones usually manipulate supercomputers by making sure that their tracks are hidden.

The new artificial intelligence algorithm is coded in such a way that it can detect crypto miners who steal computing power from research supercomputers.

AI-centered analysis

The researchers gave the system the green-light after comparing an invasive Bitcoin (BTC) mining code with a known benign code.

The AI analysis provided by the lab researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory was more reliable and faster than conventional ones because the AI algorithm is based on graph comparisons. As a result, it cannot be fooled by common methods employed by illegal crypto miners to conceal their illicit activities on the web. These strategies include the release of obfuscated comments and variables used to disguise the codes as legitimate programming.

The system, therefore, seeks to avert the illicit cryptocurrency mining headache by identifying any foul play.

Cybercrime in a rising digital world

Cybercrime is on the rise, and alternatives such as artificial intelligence are being continuously researched during these times to regulate cybercrime.

Earlier this month, Federal authorities unraveled a huge illegal Bitcoin mining farm in Kyrgyzstan operated by government officials.

Another instance of illicit activities that are Bitcoin-driven is the illegal BTC mining activities that were uncovered by Chinese police in June. Scammers operated by digging two graves for the purpose of driving forward their illegal mining operations and were stealing electricity from a Chinese oil field company.