Re: blockchain and AI
My mum said I should get into AI. I'm working on it.
Blockchain and AI is a really powerful combo.
I’ve seen people tweet some version of this. A lot. I know many of you are rolling your eyes right now. That’s ok, I’m rolling my eyes too.
But I think it’s correct, even if it’s not the way so many people think about this.
Blockchain lets you put data at the edges, in the hands of users. It allows an identity travel through the world and accumulate datapoints in one central entity (like a wallet). Or multiple discrete ones (this is definitely more likely).
AI would allow any surface (store, point of sale system, social network, device) to personalize itself based on this decentralized data.
Why not a central store? Mostly how public sentiment has turned against the power of the central data oligopolies. But I admit there is some wishful thinking here.
I think about e-commerce a lot so I think that this is eventually going to end up looking like this — you connect your identity to a commerce surface, and everything — the products, bundles, variants, sizes, and prices — you’re shown changes based on who you are.
You make a purchase (or don’t) and that data gets stored in your “wallet”. There is no universal store experience for all the customers, there is your store experience. There is no more A/B testing landing pages, there is your landing page.
Of course, humans are more alike than we’d like to think so your “super-personalized landing page” is probably going to be something that looks similar to everyone else like you.
But you will feel special. It will be yours.
When is this going to happen? Honestly no idea. I think it’s pretty far off; there are so many things that need to happen before this actually comes about.
And I’ve been super early before. I think I called Netflix doing ads back in 2016 or something. And in my head, this is even more early than *that* so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But it will happen. That’ll be fun.
Please send me comments and thoughts on this. I wrote it on the spur of the moment, but I have been thinking about this for a minute
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I agree this will happen, and — perhaps unsurprisingly given that I'm also building blockchain based tech — I think it will be a good thing. What seems harder to predict is whether it will be fun. In many ways I hope the power of decentralized data will help us understand where we are the same more than where we are different. I guess they said that of the early web, and we got personalized feeds and advertising and polarization and so on. I'm generally of the opinion that the world has been getting better, so not saying it's all been bad, but I'd be curious to hear (especially from your perspective on e-commerce) whether you think this will be good for humans as well as for commerce, and how? When I'm on Instagram, my ads are incredibly personalized, but I'm not sure I feel "special" as much as "coerced" — the fact that I no longer need to look for things also removes some of my sense of sovereignty.
I believe this will eventually happen. Applications like Sign-in with Ethereum and Token-gating will serve as a foundation for this.
Love your writing btw.