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Galileo viewed nature as a book written in the language of mathematics and decipherable through physics. His metaphor may have been a stretch for his milieu, but not for ours. Ours is a world of digits that must be read through computer science.

It is a world in which artificial-intelligence (AI) applications perform many tasks better than we can. Like fish in water, digital technologies are our infosphere’s true natives, while we analog organisms try to adapt to a new habitat, one that has come to include a mix of analog and digital components.

We are sharing the infosphere with artificial agents that are increasingly smart, autonomous, and even social. Some of these agents are already right in front of us, and others are discernible on the horizon, while later generations are unforeseeable. And the most profound implication of this epochal change may be that we are most likely only at the beginning of it.

The AI agents that have already arrived come in soft forms, such as apps, web bots, algorithms, and software of all kinds; and hard forms, such as robots, driverless cars, smart watches, and other gadgets.

They are replacing even white-collar workers, and performing functions that, just a few years ago, were considered off-limits for technological disruption: cataloguing images, translating documents, interpreting radiographs, flying drones, extracting new information from huge data sets, and so forth.

Digital technologies and automation have been replacing workers in agriculture and manufacturing for decades; now they are coming to the services sector.

More old jobs will continue to disappear, and while we can only guess at the scale of the coming disruption, we should assume that it will be profound. Any job in which people serve as an interface – between, say, a GPS and a car, documents in different languages, ingredients and a finished dish, or symptoms and a corresponding disease – is now at risk.



Image: CB Insights

But, at the same time, new jobs will appear, because we will need new interfaces between automated services, websites, AI applications, and so forth. Someone will need to ensure that the AI service’s translations are accurate and reliable.

What’s more, many tasks will not be cost-effective for AI applications. For example, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program claims to give its customers “access to more than 500,000 workers from 190 countries,” and is marketed as a form of “artificial artificial intelligence.”

But as the repetition indicates, the human “Turks” are performing brainless tasks, and being paid pennies.These workers are in no position to turn down a job.

The risk is that AI will only continue to polarize our societies – between haves and never-will-haves – if we do not manage its effects. It is not hard to imagine a future social hierarchy that places a few patricians above both the machines and a massive new underclass of plebs.

Meanwhile, as jobs go, so will tax revenues; and it is unlikely that the companies profiting from AI will willingly step in to support adequate social-welfare programs for their former employees.

Instead, we will have to do something to make companies pay more, perhaps with a “robo-tax” on AI applications. We should also consider legislation and regulations to keep certain jobs “human.” Indeed, such measures are also why driverless trains are still rare, despite being more manageable than driverless taxis or buses.

Still, not all of AI’s implications for the future are so obvious. Some old jobs will survive, even when a machine is doing most of the work: a gardener who delegates cutting the grass to a “smart” lawnmower will simply have more time to focus on other things, such as landscape design.

At the same time, other tasks will be delegated back to us to perform (for free) as users, such as in the self-checkout lane at the supermarket.

Another source of uncertainty concerns the point at which AI is no longer controlled by a guild of technicians and managers. What will happen when AI becomes “democratized” and is available to billions of people on their smartphones or some other device?

What’s more, many tasks will not be cost-effective for AI applications. For example, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program claims to give its customers “access to more than 500,000 workers from 190 countries,” and is marketed as a form of “artificial artificial intelligence.

” But as the repetition indicates, the human “Turks” are performing brainless tasks, and being paid pennies.

These workers are in no position to turn down a job. The risk is that AI will only continue to polarize our societies – between haves and never-will-haves – if we do not manage its effects. It is not hard to imagine a future social hierarchy that places a few patricians above both the machines and a massive new underclass of plebs.

Meanwhile, as jobs go, so will tax revenues; and it is unlikely that the companies profiting from AI will willingly step in to support adequate social-welfare programs for their former employees.

Instead, we will have to do something to make companies pay more, perhaps with a “robo-tax” on AI applications. We should also consider legislation and regulations to keep certain jobs “human.” Indeed, such measures are also why driverless trains are still rare, despite being more manageable than driverless taxis or buses.

Still, not all of AI’s implications for the future are so obvious. Some old jobs will survive, even when a machine is doing most of the work: a gardener who delegates cutting the grass to a “smart” lawnmower will simply have more time to focus on other things, such as landscape design.

At the same time, other tasks will be delegated back to us to perform (for free) as users, such as in the self-checkout lane at the supermarket.

Another source of uncertainty concerns the point at which AI is no longer controlled by a guild of technicians and managers. What will happen when AI becomes “democratized” and is available to billions of people on their smartphones or some other device?

All of these profound transformations oblige us to reflect seriously on who we are, could be, and would like to become. AI will challenge the exalted status we have conferred on our species.

While I do not think that we are wrong to consider ourselves exceptional, I suspect that AI will help us identify the irreproducible, strictly human elements of our existence, and make us realize that we are exceptional only insofar as we are successfully dysfunctional.

In the great software of the universe, we will remain a beautiful bug, and AI will increasingly become a normal feature.

DAVOS, Switzerland — When the world’s leading bankers and policymakers gathered this week at the 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, their interest in blockchain technology was resoundingly clear.

“The number one use case of blockchain technology promoted by the government is data sharing,” Zhang Jiachen, CEO of the startup Guangzhishu Technology, said on the sidelines of the WEF. Jiachen said her firm works with several Chinese government agencies. 

Representatives from some nations are watching the People’s Bank of China's (PBoC) central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiment with eager anticipation.

Neha Narula, director of MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, described the dozens of central bank experiments with digital assets in 2020 as “inevitable.

” Along those lines, the WEF published a Central Bank Digital Currency Policy-Maker Toolkit Wednesday to help those projects access global standards if they choose.

“The Bank of Thailand has made good progress on a wholesale CBDC project, called Project Inthanon,” Veerathai Santiprabhob, governor of Bank of Thailand, said in a press statement. “From our experience, we need to identify tradeoffs between benefits from the use cases and their associated risks across different dimensions.”

In turn, Jiachen said Chinese technologists are drawing inspiration from the Facebook-initiated Libra project and ethereum, although she declined to say what types of initiatives are inspired by the latter. 

“Can we join a consortium of countries who would like to use a regional digital currency where the PBoC is part of it?” she said in an interview. “There’s a lot of strategic thinking around whether that’s a real option.”

Multiple efforts

Most experts at Davos appear to agree blockchain technology should be used for more data collection, not self-sovereign finance. 

For example, Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, technology advisor to the president of Niger, said it will be crucial for emerging economies to use digital reporting systems to avoid embezzlement and other financial crimes.

“My goal is to have a paperless government by 2028,” he said on the sidelines of the WEF.

“How could any leader or government official take that money without being noticed? Cryptocurrency brings that; through the blockchain you know where things are.”

As with China, Guimba-Saidou said his country is curious about the idea of a regional token. 

It may be too soon to say whether bitcoin will be used by African nations, he added, but 15 nations in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are in talks about launching a pan-African currency comparable to the euro. 

Matthew Blake, the WEF’s monetary systems lead, said a digital, regional currency in Africa makes a lot of sense, although the euro has proved that cooperative currency governance is tricky at best. 

While he expressed interest in watching how bitcoin evolves, Blake was skeptical, at best, of nation-states using bitcoin or allowing enterprises to use bitcoin on a significant scale.

Mikail Jabbarov, economic minister of the Azerbaijan Republic, likewise told CoinDesk he struggled to imagine nation-states condoning the use of a decentralized currency. 

While he didn’t suggest it should be banned outright, Jabbarov’s primary concern was collecting know-your-customer (KYC) information associated with bitcoin ownership.

He was otherwise dismissive of the cryptocurrency’s potential for use cases beyond speculation and illicit activities.

At least, in Guimba-Saidou’s case, the focus is on monitoring public servants’ monetary transactions rather than all civilians.

Along those lines, to safeguard who can access civilian monetary records and even passive surveillance of broader patterns, the PBoC recently filed a patent for a blockchain-based system for authorizing access to data.

“We’re going to have a public key infrastructure,” Niger’s Guimba-Saidou said. “That’s how I think we can have the transparency and traceability in place and the accountability that comes from it.

All those things have to be done with independent organizations because otherwise one organization could try to grab the information or alter it.”

Real names

There’s widespread concern about bitcoin wallets that essentially allow “secret bank accounts,” according to Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center.

In an interview, she said Russia isn’t the only nation with a state-owned nuclear power plant that is also supporting bitcoin mining operations. This trend is also spreading to Ukraine and Moldova, she said, with Ukrainian oligarchs taking dominant roles in the local bitcoin market. 

“When we see a politician declaring bitcoin, we consider him ‘high risk,’” Kaleniuk said. “This money can buy propaganda campaigns. … There needs to be unique identities of natural persons in this data.”

Some of these central bank projects go beyond mere identity checks. In China, there are already efforts to use government data, everything from healthcare data to telecommunications records, to shape financial services offered by the private sector. 

“The government owns a lot of data,” Jiachen said. “They want to enable the private sector to be able to use them but they don’t want to hand over the data ownership. So we help the government in supporting their data-sharing initiatives.”

Most raw data isn’t recorded on the blockchain, she said. Instead, blockchain technology is used to prove the records were verified or calculated at the source, without sharing the original source.

Jiachen said she hopes there will be strict policies that regulate who can request and access such data. MIT’s Nerula mirrored this concern. 

“I hope privacy is a central concern and that it’s implemented with the Application Program Interface [API] in mind,” Nerula said. 

Leigh Cuen✔@La__Cuen

1st #WEF2020 session of the day! @jerallaire says stablecoins allow people to “transact w/each other with the same ease that we communicate & share data,” adding nation-state cryptos are a game changer that he sees as “real disruption” for financial inclusion.


357:39 AM - Jan 21, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacy

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Bigger government

Even private investors from a variety of countries, who asked not to be named, were curious about central bank experiments but wary of self-custodied assets. 

Those who are optimistic about digital assets in Davos see them as a way to improve governance rather than reduce reliance on it. 

“It’s easier to track the whole monetary flows and then you can make better monetary policies,” Jiachen said. “Now with a blockchain-based system, you will have a better feedback loop.”

She said many blockchain efforts, beyond the PBoC currency yet also adjacent to it, are targeting cross-border trade.

Meanwhile, economist and ethereum community guru Glen Weyl is busy taking meetings with politicians from emerging economies. He said he’s not a fan of China’s Communist approach but he hopes China’s collective and civic mentality can be leveraged to help pioneer value systems beyond traditional assets. 

“Eventually we need to have less money and have forms of value that are more socially contextualized, like weighted edges on a graph that represent favors owed,” Weyl said in an interview. “China has social credit, so in some ways they are much more attuned to the social aspect" of money.

In order to avoid dystopian consequences, Weyl is working with organizations like the World Bank to develop the Data Freedom Act, which asserts data collectors have a “fiduciary responsibility and democratic responsibility” to both protect it and not flagrantly use data without consent.

The document is based on providing a framework for “collective bargaining,” Weyl said, to give civilians more power to challenge problematic situations than they would have as individuals. 

Speaking more broadly about CBDC experiments, WEF executive committee member Blake said the organization wants to "lean in" and "be active" there.

Vodafone has bailed on Facebook‘s cryptocurrency project, Libra, to focus on expanding its own solution for faster cross-border payments beyond Africa.The telecommunications giant is the latest in a string of companies to have left the Libra Association, alongside Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, and Ebay, CoinDesk reports.

[Read: Facebook’s Libra ‘cryptocurrency’ is turning into a soap opera — and it’s gonna be a long season] 

Libra, a stablecoin-esque digital currency first revealed in mid-2019, has faced an onslaught of criticism from regulators worldwide, who’ve shared concerns its success could destabilize world economies by undermining the Euro.

Vodafone would rather spend resources on M-Pesa (not a crypto)

In response to the news, Vodafone said it was still “fully committed” to making a “genuine contribution to extending financial inclusion,” but it seems it just won’t be through a cryptocurrency.

A Vodafone spokesperson told reporters it believes it can assist the world’s poor by focusing on M-Pesa, a money platform for smartphones with a pronounced presence in developing economies across Africa, particularly Kenya.

M-Pesa, launched in 2007, currently boasts more than 30 million users across 10 countries. The service also reportedly processed 6 billion transactions in 2016 alone.The app has no exposure to cryptocurrency, and operates more within the traditional finance system.

Can Facebook launch Libra on time?

Facebook originally planned to release Libra in the first half of 2020, but execs have since maintained the social media mainstay would only do so once all regulatory considerations have been addressed.

It was that same red tape that pushed Mastercard and Visa to part ways with the Libra Foundation, months before the Swiss finance minister would say the country isn’t likely to approve Libra as it is right now.

This has obviously left Zuckerberg and co. in a tight spot. As all this plays out, a raft of European central banks joined forces to better explore the use cases of central bank digital currencies, spurred on by corporate ‘cryptocurrencies‘ like Libra.

In the first five months of 2019, there were almost as many blockchain job listings as for all of 2018, TeQatlas research has shown.The post Blockchain job offerings growing consistently, research shows appeared first on The Block.

In the first five months of 2019, there were almost as many blockchain job listings as for all of 2018, TeQatlas research has shown. The company has analysed the data on open vacancies for blockchain-related positions, looking into disclosed salaries.

It also provided the list of the top-15 blockchain employers, with IMB grabbing first place with 335 blockchain vacancies, followed by Oracle and pwc. The rise in blockchain job offerings is nothing new—the number of blockchain-related positions has been growing consistently since the inception of blockchain.

Between  2013-2018, it noted 139 per cent CAGR growth. By the end of May, there were already 2,300 vacancies open—while there were 2,577 vacancies altogether in 2018.

With the growing number of open positions, disclosed salaries also present nicely.

While the salaries range from $17k up to $271k per year, the majority of job offerings—404 offerings—place between $81k-$144k. Therefore, an average blockchain salary is more than double the U.S. average, equaling $105k annually as opposed to $49k.

However, globally, London is the leader when it comes to job offerings. "London is Europe’s leading city in terms of Blockchain related job offerings occupying 26% of the worldwide amount.

Unsurprisingly, the US leading cities are New York and San Francisco with 19% and 13% respectively," report reads.

Smart contracts are a major technological breakthrough that will affect our society substantially. So far, interfacing with said smart contracts is still a bit challenging for the average user. Even developers sometimes struggle to do so. This is where ChainLink comes into the picture, as it provides a fully decentralized oracle network called LINK.

ChainLink is an Interesting Venture


It is certainly true that smart contracts can make a big impact on our society as a whole, although a lot of use cases have yet to be identified. Interfacing with a smart contract on any platform is a major challenge right now. This is especially true for financial institutions and other organizations looking to explore this technology.

Rather than using public blockchains, they will often develop a private and a permissioned version to use similar technologies. In the long run, these private and individual efforts still must communicate with one another, as well as with public blockchains in the future.

Connecting a smart contract to external sources is currently not possible in a convenient manner. Off-chain data and even APIs need to be introduced to smart contracts and vice versa. Currently, this is a major hindrance which can’t be resolved all that easily whatsoever.

ChainLink may be the solution for all these problems in the future. That is what its developers are hoping, at least. In fact, some new solutions are required to make this concept work in the first place. ChainLink is capable of connecting any smart contract to an external system and an API.

This secure blockchain “middleware”, as the team calls it, provides the bridge for the gap between smart contracts, APIs, and any other form of external data one might need. While it may not be the perfect solution, it should be useful for at least 90% of current and future use cases.

The project revolves around a fully decentralized network of oracles which are compatible with Bitcoin and Ethereum. It is possible other blockchains will be supported in the future, but those are the two main points of focus for the time being. In a perfect future world, this new platform would allow anyone in the world to use the LINK network.

All service providers would be able to securely provide smart contracts with access to key external data and potentially even off-chain payments. This latter point will be of particular interest to a lot of companies and service providers, for obvious reasons. Do keep in mind you will need LINK tokens to do so, though.

While it is commendable to see such a decentralized network, the use of proprietary tokens will not necessarily make it more appealing. This is the first solution of its kind, though, and we may see more competing services in the near future.

ChainLink will certainly find its place in the market, as users can become node operators to monetize their API experience. It’s a very intriguing concept, although it remains to be seen how many companies will actually use it.

Discover even more blockchain articles on Merkle here: https://themerkle.com/what-is-chainlink/

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