Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational speaker who can cover the convergence of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at your next business event. Contact us to check availability. The full transcript of the above video is included below.
 

 

Full Video Transcript:

 
Hi and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about the convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence. There’s a fascinating convergence taking place with all sorts of different technologies but this video, blockchain and AI.

So the essence of AI is machine learning, and one of the biggest single requirements of machine learning is having a huge dataset. So the larger the dataset, the more data that the platform can learn from, the faster it can develop its own insights into what’s actually happening. There are a number of examples of this. Of course, Apple’s Siri is a form of artificial intelligence and because everybody’s using it the Siri actual infrastructure, software infrastructure, is learning from all those interactions with tens and hundreds of millions of people all around the world, and so it’s learning. It’s getting better all the time. The same thing is true with Google now. The same thing is true with Cortana by Microsoft.

And I’d like to give you one example from Tesla, which is fascinating because they are benefitting by what they referred to as “fleet learning.” And there’s one story in particular of a Tesla owner who lived in Santa Cruz Hills and took his Tesla and left it on autopilot and asked the car to drive him home, and on the way home there was a very sharp corner. It’s not a hairpin corner but a very tight corner in the Santa Cruz Hills, and the first time he took that corner the Tesla almost went off the road. It went outside of the lane. The alert came on telling the driver, “Take control of the vehicle.” It did not work. I mean, he didn’t fall off the road, there wasn’t any accident, but it was sketchy. It was not a smooth transition. But the next day, he did the same thing, and the day after that he did it again and the fourth day he did it again, and within two weeks the car had learned how to take the corner.

Now, here’s the important part: It wasn’t just his car that learned how to take that corner. It was every Tesla. In other words, that’s how these platforms work, is that the experience of every individual user is uploaded into the cloud, uploaded into the actual infrastructure – software infrastructure of Tesla Autopilot, and the entire fleet benefitted from that process. So now, any Tesla owner can go around a similar curve and the car will understand how to take that corner. This is a characteristic feature of machine learning, is that this capability exists.

And so now, let’s put that aside and let’s talk about the blockchain, which is an exploding technology today with countless—the companies include Colony and SlockIt and Backfeed and Provenance and Consensys, and perhaps Ethereum in particular. Ethereum is building essentially an Internet 2.0. It’s a platform where you can upload code into a blockchain, and as you probably know, in the blockchain, once you add something to the blockchain you can’t take it down, you can’t hack it, you can’t stop it. It’s like an unstoppable public ledger. It is out there, it exists, and if you try to take it down in one place it exists in thousands of other places. So you can’t take it down. You can’t stop it. That’s an incredibly fascinating platform and what Ethereum is building could potentially revolutionize the Internet on such a profound level that it could literally change every industry, at one level or another.

And you can think about it as the Internet is a network that facilitates communication and Ethereum is a platform that facilitates computation, and so people can upload programs and code into the Ethereum platform, which is fascinating. And this is where the convergence takes place because it’s only a matter of time before the computational capability of the average computer goes up so much that a platform or a network, if you will, such as Ethereum can support an AI of some kind, and once that happens, these platforms—think about the Internet. The Internet literally has three billion people accessing it today and it’s growing all the time. Three billion people. It’s only a matter of time before the entire world population has access to the Internet. They don’t all have access today, but it’s coming and it’s coming very quickly. But three billion is already a huge number of people and all those interactions give some platform, some AI, some machine-learning infrastructure the opportunity to learn and improve very, very quickly.

So it’s when a platform like Ethereum or any kind of a blockchain infrastructure can support artificial intelligence and a machine-learning infrastructure, when those two come together, that’s going to be an incredibly powerful moment and an incredibly powerful time when, I believe, the intelligence of AIs and the capability and perhaps even the dangers of AI, but all of that, that growth curve will accelerate dramatically when we have effectively an open-source platform that’s not hackable, that you can’t take down, you can’t stop, and is accessible to the entire world population. This is a fascinating time to be alive and two technologies to watch closely today are blockchain and artificial intelligence, and they are converging. It’s coming soon and I encourage you to keep tabs on the progress as it unfolds in front of us.

Thanks so much for watching this video. My name is Patrick, reminding you as always to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.
 

 
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a keynote speaker who has spoken at business conferences in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.