AI vs Crypto: What is more impactful to society?

With the rising popularity of ChatGPT and AI, the innovation wave of the next revolutionary technology is here. Developers, writers, and marketers are able to increase their productivity, directly benefitting from what AI can offer. Fortune 500s and small businesses alike are experimenting on how to integrate AI into their workflow to improve processes, throughput, and add more to that bottomline number.

Zooming out, the hype and euphoria around AI feels very familiar, akin to the last six years with blockchain. Another revolutionary technology, blockchain captured the imagination of millions and everyone scrambled on how to implement it into their businesses. It was heralded as a technology that was going to shift the society paradigm, but after six years it still is far from the world changing vision people heralded it for. Albeit six years is an unfair window to judge a technology, the world moved to the next shiny object, AI.

A colleague of mine, an enthusiast and developer of both technologies, posed the question on which is more impactful to human society: blockchain or AI? While blockchain opens a new door to the possibility of a true sovereign digital economy, AI has the opportunity to offer a wider foundational impact to society due to being a force multiplier of human productivity.

Blockchain (and crypto) is not going anywhere

If anything, the last five years has shown blockchain is here to stay. A trillion dollar market (as of this writing), decentralized financial infrastructure, and growing applications in consumer and enterprise use cases demonstrate its adoption. For this post, I’m not going to dive into the statistics of how many people use and own crypto or the financial success (and failure) stories. Instead, I want to direct thought towards what blockchain has accomplished, what it still can, and what is the width of this impact.

Blockchain has brought the dream of a financial sandbox to reality. Starting with Bitcoin and moving to programmable instruments made possible by Ethereum, it provides the building blocks for people to create their own and gain exposure to other financial systems, independent from any central authority and technologically secure. The impact of this is profound to demographics whom experienced manipulation or instability with their local currencies, able to increase their exposure to financial systems outside of their geographical locations. Below are some impactful use cases:

• Automated Market Makers (AMMs) have allowed a decentralized and transparent exchange of digital assets.
• Decentralized lending markets allows users access to financial instruments that typically aren’t consumer available.
• Non-fungible tokens (NFT) change how we view digital asset ownership and open up interoperability of content and assets.

The blockchain space is still in a find-itself phase, having no widespread global application yet which entices society to use it. Any applications of decentralized finance is heavily overshadowed with speculation and scams. Consumer applications are still finding their wide-spread usage or very superficial in its crypto implementation. Enterprise, as usual, is slow to integrate it past the exploratory POC stage. It’s core strengths lie in the digital realm, allowing assets and instruments to exist which were only possible IRL. If a metaverse does come to fruition, blockchain will be the backbone for it.

AI isn’t new, but its accessibility is

OpenAI’s ChatGPT brought an accessible AI tool to the masses with the simplicity of entering a prompt into a website. No need to run your own tool or train your model, users were immediately able to experience it themselves and test the various prompts that became popular on social media. Memes shifted to curiosity which then shifted to applications. No longer are people obsessed with trying to break ChatGPT by making it believe mathematical errors (2+2=5) but enticed on how it can increase their productivity. Other tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion brought image content and art to those whom could not create it before.

Depending on who you ask, AI seems like a beneficial tool or threat to job security. AI at this stage is still a tool, and a skillset will be developed to handle it properly. Generated essays will have factual errors and images will be exhibit uncanny flaws. It is not a substitute for critical thinking (at least for now!) as it just aggregates data relevant to resolving the prompt. AI will not make some jobs obsolete yet, but it may allow individuals productive with it to do the jobs of several of their colleagues.

The applications of AI are quite endless, as a tool that increases productivity is only bound by creativity.

Not there yet, but it won’t be long

Blockchain will change how our global financial systems work and how society exchanges value. AI will allow humans to be more productive than before, at the expense of human tasks it replaces. Net human productivity will impact society more and influence its evolution, but both technologies will be engrained in the fabric of society in the not-so-far future.