Whatever happened to the cryptocurrency revolution? Well, even though we fell into a crypto winter that we never really came out of, the cryptocurrency craze did spur some thinking about advances in finance.
At our recent Imagination in Action event in April, we heard from Anna Kazlauskas of Vana who admits that during MIT University days she was obsessed with central banks, and set up a rig in her dorm room to mine Ethereum.
“It was using technology to shift power to the people,” she said, of the general ethos of using crypto in these ways. “How do you take decentralization and allow it to create this distributed central bank?”
Now, Kazlauskas is part of the effort at Vana, where data democratization is in the mission statement.
“Your data is fully yours,” she said, describing a personal server architecture that sounds like it works sort of like an API – to allow users to give permission for their data to flow into other environments.
She presented three key criteria for these systems – 1. self hosted, 2. portable and 3. monetizable.
In a live demo, she showed how she could program a service to remind her to meditate daily, in her own voice.
This type of technology, she conceded, has to be carefully protected.
“It would be really scary if someone could take the clone of my voice and use it for whatever they want,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important that you own your AI and your data – that allows you to create things like this.”
Speaking to the greater context, Kazlauskas talked about the moment that we’re in as an uncertain era, where some of the things that we’ve held as ongoing realities are now being challenged.
“We’re in a time when there is a huge economic shift,” she said. “People are really worried: is AI going to take my job? What happens is a lot of big tech companies are taking data from all across the Internet, a lot of it is probably your data, and then training an AI model that can do your job, and replace you. … It’s a really bad deal for society.”
In contrast, she talked about a new Reddit data collective initiative, where users are controlling and monetizing their own information.
This, she said, can help to reform a system that seems inequitable right now.
“Today, open source AI kind of eats the leftovers of big tech,” she said, suggesting that in a different scenario, prominent community-supported efforts would have a lot more sway.
“People can create an even better model if we’re able to collectivize it in the right way,” she said.
So what are you going to do with your data? Presumably, these questions are going to be at the heart of what happens with AI in our societies. Many of us believe we simply have to have guardrails around our own data – if not this, then something like this. Vana is on the vanguard, and I’m sure there will be many more people thinking about this as we forge ahead. I’ll be detailing a lot more that came out of the IIA event, but this is one of those central topics that you really shouldn’t ignore, in enterprise or any other context.
