Decrypt: The AI-blockchain impact confluence

CHENNAI: Last week, Tim Cook said Apple would weave AI into products as researchers work on solving bias. Now, If Chat GPT was not enough, this announcement set the AI tempo on an all time high!

As AI hogs the limelight, let us look at the unassuming blockchain and take a step back and see how blockchain is placing a critical role in augmenting AI and evolving into leading frontier technologies that are driving innovation across almost every industry — and they’re even more powerful together.

But there is a hitch. Now, AI’s primary benefit is its capacity to mimic human reasoning and respond fast to large amounts of variegated data. This is a benefit, but it also has a disadvantage because the intricacy of AI decision-making is frequently opaque. Deep neural networks and other sophisticated machine learning models in AI are frequently opaque black boxes. This issue, also referred to as “explainability,” or lack thereof, can affect trust and ethical behaviour.

So can blockchain enhance AI? Absolutely. Blockchain’s main attributes, such as decentralised data storage and immutable, transparent digital records, help shed light on a traditionally centralised and opaque AI. In other words, blockchain might be able to give AI accountability, trust, and privacy as one of the difficulties AI faces is trust accountability, which has an impact on people’s confidence in its results. AI must have understandable algorithms for people to be able to trust it. This knowledge would increase confidence in the precision of AI outputs.

By addressing the issue of explainable AI, blockchain’s immutable digital record makes it easier to comprehend the conceptualisation of AI and the source of the data it uses, thereby increasing confidence in the accuracy of the data used by AI and, consequently, in the suggestions it makes.

We would now also see an audit trail of how their data is used by businesses and other centralised organisations, thanks to the decentralised data storage offered by blockchains. AI judgments will become more decentralised, responsible, and transparent if they are distributed and kept on blockchains.

AI uses a lot of resources and can demand a lot of processing power, which centralised data servers might not be able to handle. Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies prove be helpful by using the processing power of numerous devices.

And AI in turn can actually help blockchain! AI can read, analyse, and link data fast and thoroughly, it can boost the intelligence of blockchain-based business networks and provide them a competitive edge. Blockchain-based smart contracts with AI models integrated could use predetermined thresholds and events to carry out operations like reorders, payments, or inventory purchases as well as recommend recalled goods that are past their expiration dates.

Additionally, AI systems may be able to assist in the identification of fraudulent activities on the blockchain. As a result, blockchain and AI can cooperate to expand and automate transaction evaluation procedures.

By properly balancing out each other’s shortcomings, these technologies enable reciprocal benefits, technological improvements, and robust corporate support. The next step in the development of these two technologies to aid in corporate expansion would be to develop international standards for assessing the application of combined Blockchain and AI technology.

(The writer is founder, India Blockchain Alliance)