In-depth dialogue with Professor David Shrier from Imperial College of Technology: the collision of Web3 and the new technology favorite AI

Original source: Okey Cloud Chain Research Institute

Original Author: Bi Lianghuan

Original source: Okey Cloud Chain Research Institute

Original Author: Bi Lianghuan

first level title  

David Shrier

foreword

What would happen to society if four out of five people suddenly lost their jobs in the next 5 years? In this technological change, the United States may lag behind other countries because of its "willful" regulatory attitude. Which countries will be the beneficiaries? Okey Cloud Chain Research Institute and Professor David Shrier from Imperial College of Business conducted an in-depth discussion at the Consensus conference. As an authority in the field of cutting-edge technology, he analyzed the possibilities that technologies such as AI and Web3.0 will bring to the future, and also deeply analyzed the current regulatory difficulties faced by financial technology. This article will delve into the reasons for U.S. regulatory attitudes and the possibilities for future technological change.

Guest introduction"Sandy"David Shrier is Professor of Practice at Imperial College Business School. He has served as a researcher at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, as well as a university lecturer and New Ventures officer at MIT. He has also served as a member of the European Parliament's Advisory Committee on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's (FINRA) Fintech Industry Committee, and a senior advisor to HMRC, as well as a member of the Financial Technology Trade and Investment Steering Committee of the Department for International Trade. member.

Shrier leads the venture capital firm Visionary Future LLC, helping Fortune 500 companies achieve breakthrough growth and incubate new technology-driven businesses. He is also the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Esme Learning Solutions, an AI-driven workforce transformation company that works with top universities including MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, and London Business School.Shrier with MIT's Alex

David （D）：Pentland has co-published several books, including Global Fintech (MIT Press, winner of the American Library Association Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing), Trust: Data, and co-edited the "Connection Science Series" published by MIT Press.

Bi Lianghuan (B):David, you discussed Web3.0 technology and the impact of technologies such as AI on Web3.0 and society at Consensus. Currently, the industry is discussing the topic that artificial intelligence technology has more imaginative space than Web3.0. We believe that blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can support each other, AIGC can help Web3.0, and Web3.0 is expected to establish a new decentralized AI paradigm from three aspects: data, model and computing power. This approach is expected to reduce the operating and training costs of artificial intelligence, while solving the problem of artificial intelligence "abuse" through decentralization. What is your opinion on this?This is a question involving many aspects, let me break it down. First of all, let me introduce myself. I am Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at Imperial College Business School. I'm working on a book called "Basic Metaverse" which will be published by Little, Brown and Harvard Business Publishing this June. In this book, I explore the application and how to empower many different metaverse fields, including the convergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence, and how when artificial intelligence and Web3.0 meet, they can jointly make Web3.0 stronger and fun. At the same time, I also deeply explored related issues in the field of artificial intelligence. Next January, my other book, "Basic Artificial Intelligence", will also come out, at which time I will further explore the basics and applications of artificial intelligence.

Today, new technologies are being adopted at an ever-increasing rate, and businesses are leveraging this technology to innovate.

Unlike invention, innovation refers to the adoption of new ideas in business practice. This speed of change is staggering, for example, it took Netflix about 7.5 years to get 1 million users, while OpenAI's chatbot GPT got 1 million users in 5 days.This change will have a profound impact on every aspect of how we work, live and play. For example, OpenAI recently published a research article on the impact of AI on the workforce, stating that up to 85% of the workforce could be disrupted or displaced by AI, especially these new powerful generative AI systems.

B：What would society look like if four out of five people quickly lost their jobs?

D：We need to come up with solutions to these people in the next 5 to 10 years, not 30 years from now. Otherwise we will face massive problems of social unrest, famine and government collapse.The answer is not to stop AI, but to help people work better and more effectively with AI and provide a broader social safety net to adapt to change. We need to act, not stand by.Could you please describe your vision of the future in more detail?

First, it is important to remember thatWe have the ability to influence the future we will have. So the future is not just something that happens to us, we can change it.

So there are several possible futures. The question is which future we decide to choose.One of these futures is that, as companies race to make higher profits,We may see four out of five people lose their jobs in the next few years. This will lead to higher profits for the company. In this future, we will face massive social unrest, economic collapse, and all the worst possible consequences of artificial intelligence.

The second kind of future is that we successfully complete the AI ​​transformation and increase the universal basic income, because AI makes the world so efficient, we have the ability to provide it.We will have a new leisure class that will include most people. It's a future that looks a bit like the world of the movie "Robo," where people basically sit in floating chairs eating snacks and watching TV but not actually doing anything.Maybe they'll spend the rest of their lives in various virtual realities because they don't have to work and the government funds everything. This future is at least free of social unrest, but I don't think that's the best use of humanity.

B：The third future is what I look forward to very much,"I'm working with others to help you imagine the possibilities of this future. In this future, we will find ways to cooperate with artificial intelligence so that we can do things that humans cannot do alone today, and things that artificial intelligence cannot do alone today.

D：In this future, for example, I co-founded a startup where we pool the collective intelligence of humanity and empower it with artificial intelligence to predict the future. We started by predicting security prices, but we can apply it to training in financial transactions, and to many other application domains as well.

Let’s go back to AI and Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is expected to establish a new decentralized AI paradigm from three aspects: data, models, and computing power. It can also solve the problem of artificial intelligence to a certain extent through decentralization.abuse" problem. Do you agree?Many people firmly believe that blockchain is a magical technology that can solve all problems. However, it is not.Nonetheless, blockchain has some interesting application areas, notably data auditing and data provenance. For example, one way people attack AI systems is through so-called data injection.If you think of data as the fuel of an AI engine, then if you manipulate the data, you can change the performance of the AI. Therefore, protecting data is an important part of AI security, and blockchain can help in this regard.

B：But it’s worth noting that blockchain has a lot of inefficiencies in how it handles data. therefore,

D：You're actually making a tradeoff between security and efficiency. AI systems, on the other hand, tend to place a lot of emphasis on performance, that is, efficiency.AI needs to be simplified, but you can use it selectively to help manage AI systems.

AI is accelerating the transformation of society, but in contrast to Web3.0, during this conference, we saw a lot of discussions about data and tool applications, rather than new concepts such as NFT and DEFI a few years ago. Do you see this as a lack of innovation? How do you see the impact of this situation on the development of Web3.0?These two answers are actually on the same topic. We definitely need more innovation,

Especially in terms of access.Right now, to get the best performance in Web 3.0, especially highly immersive Web 3.0 systems, you need multi-gigabit-per-second Access speed. But in reality, the average access speed in London is only about 50 megabits per second.As a result, there is a huge gap between getting the best performance out of Web 3.0 and what current infrastructure supports.in addition,There are a lot of exciting things to do in virtual reality, but most people don't have access to them.

So I've been trying to focus onEnterprises solving access and scaling problems in Web 3.0.

B：This is an innovative example of combining artificial intelligence and augmented reality for better accessibility, but it's still not enough.

D：Therefore, we need to do more work in this area. Some of the Sustainable Development Goals are about providing more access, such as UN Sustainable Development Goal 9, which deals with infrastructure and connectivity.

So I think we need to address inclusion and access, and that's where I think innovation is most needed.So do you think this phenomenon may be related to the stage of industry development, such as the industry enters the second stage as the industry adoption rate increases, so the focus shifts to the development and application of tools?

B: They are all related, aren't they? If we have better infrastructure to support more people, we can have better adoption rates. I think companies like HTC have done a really good job of improving access by creating very affordable Android smartphones, which means more people now have smartphones. So I think we need to innovate more in terms of infrastructure and hardware. We need more software innovations to make these platforms more fun, easier to use, and leverage bridge technologies like augmented reality before we can truly fully immerse ourselves in virtual reality.

D：In addition to more tools appearing in the second stage, the hybrid solution of centralization and decentralization is also a trend we can observe in the next step. In terms of financial systems, I think Web 3.0 has a lot of potential, but I don't think we will have a pure DeFi system. We'll have more hybrid solutions, and that's what we're talking about in the workshop today. These schemes mix CeFi and DeFi, which is actually more practical and useful.

I care about results, not dogmatic purism. In my opinion, it doesn't have to be 100% compliant with DeFi to be considered valid. If it can reach 80% of DeFi, and have some CeFi-style features, such as anti-money laundering and network security, then this is acceptable, as long as it provides a better end-user experience.

Mentioned anti-money laundering, cybersecurity, and at the Consensus conference, we observed that there were many experts discussing security and compliance in US regulation and industry, especially in terms of anti-money laundering and cybersecurity. However, the U.S. has yet to develop a comprehensive regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies. We were wondering, do you think there will be a model for the regulation of new assets in the U.S. so that we can refer to this model or logic when new asset classes emerge in the future?

I have to say that the U.S. seems to be at odds with most of the rest of the world in terms of what it is doing with cryptocurrencies. That’s why I’m here in Austin, launching a workshop with Coindesk, and will release a report called Consensus @ Consensus. We discuss regulatory confusion in the US versus the rest of the world. This will likely be a recurring theme that we will revisit over the next few days. So the rest of the world outside of the U.S., whether it's in Europe, or in the Middle East, or in parts of Asia, is moving toward regulatory clarity. The industry may not always like this trend, but regulators are establishing a clear set of rules and compliance guidelines regardless. In the case of the EU, they just passed new comprehensive legislation such as MICA. As a result, we are gaining clarity on how the rest of the world treats or restricts cryptocurrencies.Unfortunately, in the US, there is confusion and a lack of regulatory clarity. Some companies have done their best to comply with regulations, but have been arbitrarily penalized by US regulators.In fact, the United States has been moving in the direction of priority for a long time. Regulatory agencies like SEC, CFTC, OCC have a lot of senior officials who are educating people about the industry. Unfortunately, we've seen division and confusion in all kinds of ways, even within some institutions. Thus, the lack of clarity these circumstances create is not good for the United States, but good for the rest of the world. In other words, innovators will leave the US for other countries. By facilitating this chaos, the United States is creating opportunities for other countries.

B：In the long run,

D：This will adversely affect US dollar hegemony around the world and create more opportunities for other countries, such as China, where the renminbi will play a more important role in the global political landscape.

It is already moving in this direction, but because of the chaos and amplitude in the US, other countries such as China will gain an advantage in the global political landscape.

It is understood that the lack of a clear regulatory framework for U.S. regulation is due to conflicts between three layers of regulatory agencies. Do you agree with this statement?

More than three floors.I don't think they necessarily have to "pull" each other. What I have observed is that they have been moving in a common direction until some newly appointed officials decide to take a different direction and go against the previous direction. So this is not a good sign.There are bipartisan initiatives within Congress that could chart a path to regulatory clarity. This is much needed. In fact, the United States is also facing unprecedented political polarization in history, which has never been seen in American history. We've had moments in American history when members of Congress turned on each other, and it's worse than that.So it's unclear whether we'll be able to reach an agreement with official U.S. regulators working together, but I have hope, and I fully support bipartisan efforts to provide regulatory clarity.

B：Once we have legislation, we no longer need to implement regulation because we already have a clear legal framework.

D：This could help the US escape its current path of failure. But now, the trend seems to indicate that China and the EU will gain important advantages. The blockchain side is very savvy, and they have an opportunity to help the UK regain some of its fintech edge. Therefore, basically all countries except the United States will benefit,

Even though the U.S. owns half of the $120 trillion in global assets, the U.S. will lag other countries.

Given the current macroeconomic and geopolitical situation, how should we establish a global regulatory framework? Will crypto assets be the first exit or case study in a chaotic world?

The good news is that there is already a proposal for a global framework. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) came up with this framework, and a few friends of mine helped develop it. There has been some agreement among the world's 35 largest economies about what a coordinated approach should look like. Right now, we are not at the point where the framework is widely adopted, but I can at least direct people to look at the OECD blockchain policy framework as a means of some commonality.Another reference that I recommend is the "Commonwealth Fintech Toolkit", which was developed a few years ago and distills best practices from around the world to present a proposal for how governments should think about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and FinTech or proposal. I co-authored a book with Professor Alex Pentland from MIT last year called Global Fintech. About half of the book proposes a policy framework for dealing with these assets and how to engage with the industry. The book has been written in collaboration with experienced regulators and policymakers who dig into past work experience and then examine the models in an attempt to apply them to the present and the future. This book actually won an award for best academic book.

B：Therefore, some well-thought-out and comprehensive frameworks have been proposed so far. They haven't been widely adopted, especially in the US, but have been adopted to some extent globally.

D: We hope that people will follow these very thoughtful guidelines and apply them. The OECD and the World Economic Forum are two organizations that are really trying to help people move in a common direction.We need more urgency because I do believe that crypto assets can help solve some of the big problems in the global monetary system.In addition to regulation, when we want to regulate technology-related, including financial technology, we need to use technology. So for RegTech and SupTech, do you think these two technologies can help regulate cryptocurrencies and even new types of digital assets in the future?

Consequently, many promising themes and texts have been proposed that can help us address some of these challenges. One of the things I should point out is that there are actually several companies that offer such a service,

Starting with digital identity offers a solution to some of the issues the cryptocurrency industry has faced with compliance with anti-money laundering, customer authentication, and ultimate beneficial owner regulation.I believe this will be a very good case to help the industry as people become more comfortable experimenting and adopting digital identity technologies.

B：Another one I should mention is a Cambridge University spinoff called "RegGenome", which is a SupTech tool. It is a provider of machine-readable regulatory content that is dynamic and interoperable, all powered by AI-based text information extraction technology. This enables regulators to improve the accessibility and dissemination of regulatory information, and enables organizations to deepen their regulatory intelligence and digitize their compliance and risk management processes. This is to help policymakers better understand how to make better policies, and among other things to help automate some of the things known as horizon scanning.

D: Therefore, when developing new regulations, regulators will often look at the same or similar approaches already taken in other jurisdictions, so as not to reinvent something, create regulations that take advantage of previous regulations, and move towards making the regulations of different countries compatible with each other. Take the first step in a similar direction to collaborate more effectively.I would point in both directions - digital identity and regulatory tools such as RegGenome, founded by Prof Robert Wardrop, would be a good direction for the future of RegTech.

B：So how do you see the development trend of regulatory technology?

D：It's a small field, but one that's growing rapidly. In the UK, the University of Cambridge has done some excellent work in this area. In the U.S., there is also a former U.S. Treasury official named Melissa Koide who runs a Washington, D.C.-based facility called FinReg Lab, which has been piloting different RegTechs and SupTechs.I think some countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK that have sandboxes and test environments have been supporting and experimenting and applying these technologies. So if the industry was going to start somewhere, it would start somewhere like Hong Kong or Singapore or London, not the US, which is clearly lagging behind.

Recently, we've talked a lot about who will be the next Web3 hub. We know that Nylonkong has a very stable position in the traditional financial world. And when cryptocurrency has entered the second stage and needs financing capabilities like Silicon Valley, will Nylonkong also have its own status in Web3.0 like the three cities in the financial world?

B：I think there is some truth to this view. I've invested in a number of Web 3.0 companies based in places like London that are also influential in other markets. However, when you define Web 3 narrowly, you may overlook the existence of some other Web 3.0 hubs. In addition to New York, London and Hong Kong, places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia are investing heavily in Web 3.0. Additionally, Los Angeles, home to the Hollywood film industry, has already begun exploring the Metaverse.

D：The Metaverse is an important area of ​​opportunity, and the film industry in Los Angeles provides a favorable ecosystem for companies and creatives in the Web 3 industry who are creating some core technologies that can generate cash flow and revenue.

So I think London and Hong Kong offer a strong opportunity in the Web 3 space. If they choose to actively pursue this field now, they will be able to achieve more success. However, the US regulatory environment will limit development in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. While there are still opportunities in these locations, they will be more limited due to the impact of regulatory confusion.