Most people have heard about cryptocurrency. If you listen to Warren Buffet’s partner Charlie Munger, you would have heard it is a fraud. My own problem with cryptocurrency is it’s all promises with no delivery. No one has built anything useful yet.
When you talk to proponents of cryptocurrency, they will regale you with ideas about how it can replace a lot of things in finance and real estate. That might be true, but the hurdles for education, implementation, and adoption are extremely high.
In it, President Joe Biden calls for installation of the Selective Service system. If you are over the age of 65, you will remember registering for the draft. If you are age 70 or older, you will remember the lottery. Having a number that matched didn’t mean you won.
The problem with this video is that it is fake. Except when you start to look at all kinds of technological innovation that can also benefit us, like ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence, it’s going to become meaningful to see if something was generated by a person or if it were generated artificially.
When I went to the Computer Electronic Show this year in Las Vegas, I saw some incredible fake video. There was a person on a screen that you could interact with that looked like a younger women who could listen and talk back to you. Everything was fake. It was artificial intelligence.
Science-fiction aficionados will recall in many stories how holograms transported people from one place to another. What happens in the future when you are able to make a hologram of yourself and attend a meeting in three dimensions? What happens when you are busy, and you send a robot you own in your place to do commoditized tasks? That’s coming someday to your life.
COVID has allowed kids at high school and college to cheat on exams. Since it is all virtual, they can pay someone to take an exam for them. It’s similar to the deep-fake video tweet.
By the way, when quantum computing finally becomes a reality, innovation will happen even faster. We are probably 10 or 20 years away from that happening, but it will become a normal backbone of computing systems and you will interact with quantum computing daily.
A lot of people are scared of artificial intelligence precisely for some of the reasons I outlined above. Who needs virtual reality when the information in the real world is being manipulated and faked? How do you know what you are seeing is real?
The reality is that all the innovation will create new jobs that we can’t even dream up today and raise our standards of living so we can concentrate on doing something else. If you don’t like innovation, maybe we should all go back to being subsistence farmers and bartering with neighbors. I’ll admit, innovation can be scary, but I’d rather live with cars, refrigeration, and washing machines than give them up.
In the world of not too long ago, we hired accountants and lawyers to authenticate for us.
We had notaries, and we had watermarks. We relied on the U.S. Patent Office and copyrights. However, they can’t work fast enough to keep up with innovation. It must be automated.
Cryptocurrency could authenticate something if you did the work for it. No one could steal or replicate your creation or your work. You will be the source for it, and you will get credit for it. One of the functions of cryptocurrency is called “proof of work.” In many cases, it’s proof that your computer solved the problem that allowed the coin to be mined. Everyone on that particular blockchain “agrees,” and it’s posted to the blockchain. The blockchain is an immutable, transparent general ledger. Once something is posted, it is almost impossible to take it down or reverse it. But what if it proved that you had a part in it?
We always tend to think of cryptocurrency as some medium of exchange that will replace the U.S. dollar—but what if cryptocurrency’s true value allowed humans to harness technology and provide more transparency and trust around innovation? Mr. Munger and the naysayers might be able to get on board with that.
