This is a direct follow-up to two previous posts: first, The “AI Misinformation” problem can be completely solved by cryptocurrency-based “proof of human”, and second, AI is digital abundance, crypto is digital scarcity, and the world needs both.
Yesterday, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren posted the following on Twitter:
Senator Warren can be forgiven for thinking that crypto is money. Those of us who have worked in the space for awhile know that it is much more than that. “Crypto” as such is not merely money but rather it is the union of a finite state machine with a unit of account that humans wishing to access that state machine can treat as money, or, as put more simply and elegantly ten years ago by Ian Grigg, simply “a state machine with money.”
This access, and indeed all aspects of the permissioning and functioning of such systems, can be linked to the payment of fees and the payment of fees is secured not by accounting and billing departments, but rather by public-private key authentication.
Which brings us to today’s story about another prominent Democrat, Joe Biden. Or rather, a story about an AI apparition of Joe Biden:
New Hampshire is having a primary election this week. The Democratic iteration of this was particularly controversial as the national party successfully blocked RFK Jr. from appearing on the ballot and then attempted to shut the primary down. As a result, Joe Biden does not appear on the primary ballot and instead is running a write-in campaign in order to secure the state’s votes for his reelection campaign.
Someone who was clearly unhappy about this state of affairs launched an extremely illegal voter suppression campaign where an AI-generated, robocalled voice pretended to be Joe Biden and instructed voters to stay at home on Tuesday.
How does this relate to crypto, you ask? First, read the two blog posts I linked to above. Second, understand from those blog posts that the problem of AI abundance is not going to go away – it is going to get worse and it is going to get considerably more difficult to discern from the real thing.
There are several possible responses we, as a society, can mount to AI deepfakery. One of them is to ban AI, which is unlikely to do much good in the long run considering that there are many countries which will not also ban it, and it is generally speaking impossible, unless our civilization collapses and the tech is forgotten, to put this technological genie back in its lamp.
We must therefore find a way to filter the AI out of our lives. The only way to do this is to use technology which an AI cannot, presently or for the foreseeable future, fake. One such technology is a public-private key.
Here’s how such an app might work. Users could set up a crypto wallet address at a .BTC or .ETH domain. That address could be integrated into the phone system and a social phone book where users can add their pubkey addresses and communicate it to their contacts on their iPhones, and accept their contacts’ pubkey addresses in return. Every “call” made to a phone line would come with corresponding cryptographic proof indicating that the call had been signed by the user’s private key together with the date/time or some other timestamped data which could not be repeated. Users could add their favorite politicians’ public key addresses (such as Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden, if that’s your thing) to their whitelisted addresses, and public chains could act as easily verifiable registries of those addresses. Thus any phone number which called and held itself out as Joe Biden which wasn’t Joe Biden would be instantly flagged and/or blocked.
Yes, cryptocurrency is a money technology. It is used as a substitute for money because its cryptographic attributes make it an outstanding, nearly-unbeatable truth technology, and since money is one of those fields where people lie whenever they can get away with it, it is naturally the first place it found widespread use. But truth is a problem in many domains, and with the spread of human-equivalent AI fakery, truth will soon be a problem in every domain. We can use cryptocurrency to prove other truths other than the basic question of the double-spending problem, the first thing that crypto fixed.
As a truth technology, cryptocurrency has one key advantage over some new cryptosystem which is designed from scratch: cryptocurrency is already in the hands of millions of Americans and is waiting for other applications from legacy infrastructure to incorporate it into their services and thereby improve them. Onboarding is not required, because it has already happened.
AI and crypto are mirror image technologies; crypto fixes the problems that AI creates. If we want to secure the 2024 election, the United States needs to adopt and integrate public blockchains into 20th century technologies and do so with dispatch, instead of trying to ban them.