Blockchain and AI: A Deadly Combo PART 1

Yes a match made in heaven. Maybe.

So before I talk about this lethal marriage between Blockchain and AI, I first want to beak down some relevant concepts in each topic. Lets first talk about AI (And this will be a "simple" explanation, I do not want to bore you with some of the math in AI). In a second part, I will discuss more about Blockchain and their relationship with each other.

Artificial Intelligence encompasses so many concepts; in all honesty it seems like its a blanket term now . To the average person it means Robots doing stuff for us. To skeptics it doesn't exist. To people who watch too many movies, its the end of the world. But AI is basically "human" making decisions based on on what they learn/given, rather than emotion and feelings. This technique is called machine learning.

Machine Learning isn't anything new. Perhaps you have already done it! Before explaining what specifically it is, lets talk about how we teach a child something. Maybe we want to teach a child what a ball is. So we show him/her some examples: tennis balls, basketballs, soccer balls. Right now what we are doing is training him. Next we might show him some things that aren't balls but similar. Like a tennis racket or a net. This validates whats a ball and what isn't. Now we have him determine what is a ball on his own, essentially testing him. The child deduces that a ball is anything that is spherical is a ball.

And this is machine learning. We give training set to an algorithm. We validate what is true and false. Then we test the algorithm if its ready. And this how a lot of AI learn today. Of course though there are flows. What if we showed the child from earlier a football? It contradicts to what he thinks a ball is. So we fix it by giving him a larger training set. Easy for this example, not so easy in others.

Microsoft released a chatbot named Tay that would learn from teens in twitter. It went from being nice and humble to being explosive and racist. Because Tay was given such a huge "training" set and with the huge amount of crazy in Twitter, Tay became such way.

This whole argument of how much should we train/show someone can easily be a philosophical debate. And I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments! In my next article, I will explain what Blockchain is and how machine learning can hopefully help it make it more efficient.