From composing the next hits song to producing blockbuster movie trailers (for now);

From suggesting consumers outfit to determining the next fast fashion;

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is penetrating our daily life not only in a wider scope but a much deeper spectrum, NOW.

How do we ensure our relevancy under such a rapid change?

What career advice should we give today’s kids?

Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons?

What sort of future do you want?

Welcome to the most interesting conversation of our time.

Note: First two images above taken from Bloomberg Market report.

Life 3.0

How will AI affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human?

The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

Check out his book Life 3.0 from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Q2jWWr

What would happen when pure logic and mathematically based AI starts to think philosophically?

“If preservation of humanity is the objective, the existence of pure human race is not compulsory. After all, humanity is illusive. it is not biologically bound either. Humanity can exists in machines.”

In a recent AI debate between Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tesla’s Elon Musk, Ma encouraged people to have faith in humanity, our creativity, and the future. “I don’t think artificial intelligence is a threat,” he said, to which Musk replied, “I don’t know, man, that’s like, famous last words.”

You can read the edited transcript of the discussion here as reported by Wired.

Further reading: What problems could AI and blockchain solve?

The post AI and Blockchain, A Perfect Match appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

Networking Dinner

There was a warm welcome networking dinner prior to the event.

Sooner Than You Think Conference

It’s always a good thing to start the day with a nice cup of coffee. Thanks to Bettr Barista for keeping that sleepy away.

Forget sooner than you think, the future is already here.

That’s the opening statement by Haslinda Amin, Chief International Correspondent for Southeast Asia, Bloomberg Television as she delivers the welcoming remarks.

AI has been around for decades, what makes it more viable today is our ability to better marshal data resources.

Just watch this space and hold back in judgement.

As what S Iswaran, Minister for Communications and Information, Minister-in-charge of Trade Relations, Republic of Singapore put it:

Somewhere between dystopia and utopia there is a place for us.

From Unicorn to Decacorn

The session around 12.10pm on 5th Sept saw the appearance of Jeffrey Perlman – Managing Director, Head of Southeast Asia, Warburg Pincus, and Andre Soelistyo (President, Gojek) on stage in conversation with Yoolim Lee, Reporter, Asia Technology, Bloomberg.

The session profile Gojek’s next stage of growth and find out how one of their investors – Warburg Pincus – is helping the evolution.

Seems like it only took Gojek a few years time to reach the status of Decacorn.

And they are on the path for Super App.

What matters most for a unicorn to become a decacorn?

A) Vision
B) Execution
C) Capital
D) Culture
E) Product / Market fit
F) Luck

The majority from the floor voted Execution as the key factor, which was echoed by both Andre Soelistyo (President, Gojek) and Jeffrey Perlman (Managing Director, Head of Southeast Asia, Warburg Pincus – one of Gojek’s investors).

#Execution.

When you have to fight with the world’s best of the best, maintain the largest balance sheet to become the largest payment solutions company in Indonesia.

A Decacorn company from South East Asia where the founders build it because they want to create #impact for the little guys.

#Gojek #UniquelyIndonesia #Food #Stickiness #Captive #Bloomberg #STYT #TheFutureOf

Passion

Be it the sharing from Harriet Green, CEO and Chairman of IBM Asia Pacific, or the sharing from Andre Soelistyo, President of Gojek, one thing in common is that they are both passionate about what they are doing.

It’s nice to have the chance to catch up with Rennie Sng from Crypto Valley Singapore as well.

Inevitably, in most of the panelist sessions, two of the most brought up matters are the US-China trade war and the recent Jack MA-Elon Musk debate on AI.

All in all, this event is more on AI & Data, with a little bit touching on Connectivity (a specific session on Cyber Security) and Ethics in AI. There is definitely something to watch out for as AI and Blockchain makes a perfect match.

Thank you Bloomberg Live for organizing such a great event.

Thank you Conrad Centennial Singapore for the warm hosting. See you guys again elsewhere.

The post Sooner Than You Think appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

Without transparency there won’t be shared prosperity. ~ Frederik Bussler, CEO BitGrit Inc

Imagine a smart city powered by data, artificial intelligence, and IoT.

If the city controls these means of production, then they control the value generation as well

If the city decides what to do with the data, AI, and IoT in an opaque system, then the citizens may not be helping good causes.

This is an authoritative system.

If we instead have citizens build the systems and set directions, then we have democracy.

Blockchain can be a way to account for contributions to AI systems, including data, computing power, and talent (code) provisions, while incentivizing good behavior

Blockchain In Smart Cities

How does blockchain play its role when it comes to smart city development?

There are at least 4 areas that blockchain can be used as part of the backbone technology for smart cities:

Reputation

One thing good about a well designed blockchain is its immutability instance. This makes it suitable to log things that could be useful in providing reputation, such as the ID of a person, a certification for education or quality assurance, and even asset ownership acknowledgement or devices identification as we are connecting more smart machines (big or small) through IoT.

We need to ensure that the other party we are interacting with are of good reputation and is genuine. For example, when we talk about connected vehicles or autonomous cars, or even the existing Firmware Over The Air (FOTA) updates, how can we ensure that hackers do not intercept in between and the firmware we are updating to our vehicles are originated from a genuine source?

Finance

Needless to say, the success of bitcoin and most of the alt-coins is a living example of how the blockchain technology can be used as a currency. The challenge now is to make it more stable so it fits the purpose as a medium of exchange as what most fiat money do well now.

Democracy

Another good use case leveraging the immutability of the blockchain is about the true democracy in our society or the city. We don’t need to have periodic votings and select our policy makers when it comes to matters related to the development or things that need to be done collaboratively through a democratic process.

Public voting can be executed via blockchain based system to decide on certain issues that affect certain communities in a certain area, if not the city as a whole. Every decision making process will become more transparent, real time, and theoretically, fair.

Energy

There has never been problem with resources, the problem lies within distribution. That was a good old saying pending a solution. With blockchain technology, a more liberalized energy market could be created. Peer to peer energy network can make the current centralized energy distribution model looks a bit autocratic and outdated in today’s world. The more efficient we transfer and distribute our energy sources, the closer we will be in reaching our greener goals.

From the successful implementation of smart grids starting with energy distribution, we could be finding more possibilities and opportunities to utilities and environmental related industry.

As such, I enclose this article for now. For further reading, check out

Blockchain Technologies: The Next Frontier of Smart Cities – Part 2  by Lily Maxwell posted in Bee Smart City on 20th August, 2018

Smart Cities and Blockchain: Four Countries Where AI and DLT Exist Hand-in-Hand by Julia Magas posted in Coin Telegraph on 17th June, 2018

Related Updates as at February 2019:

Finance and economic

Liberstad — a private, anarcho-capitalist city in Norway — has adopted a cryptocurrency native to its blockchain-powered smart city platform as its official medium of exchange, according to a press release published on Feb. 12.

South Korea’s leading telecommunications company, KT Corporation, has been selected to develop a local cryptocurrency in the South Korean city of Gimpo. The city plans to issue 11 billion won (over $9.7 million) worth of the currency per year, which includes budgets for various social services and development projects.

The Institute of Decentralized Economics (IDE) has opened in London, the United Kingdom on Feb. 14, 2019. The idea behind the IDE is to “help organizations better understand the economics that underlie the blockchain industry.” The IDE will also study the design and viability of stablecoins and how government policy and “crypto-economic” technologies interact.

Luxembourg lawmakers have passed bill 7363 into law, facilitating the use of blockchain technology in financial services, according to an official announcement published by the country’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, on Feb. 14.

The new law aims provide financial market participants with more transparency and legal certainty in regard to the circulation of securities with blockchain technology. The bill is also geared to make the transfer of securities more efficient by reducing the number of intermediaries.

Energy and Utilities

Dutch technology company ElaadNL has developed a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a smart power grid for electric vehicles using internet of things (IoT)-focused IOTA Tangle technology, according to the company’s announcement on Feb. 14, 2019.

Per the announcement, the PoC shows the ability of smart grids to not only consume power, but also generate it and autonomously redistribute it amongst community members. The initiative was based on IOTA’s Tangle technology, which purportedly lets the charging devices autonomously decide whether there is need to help balance grid load.

The global blockchain in energy utilities market was assessed to be $210.4 million in 2018, and is expected to reach $3.4 billion by 2024. Infoholic Research thus predicts the growth at a compound annual growth rate of 59.4 percent during the period from 2018 to 2024.

Tokenization of physical assets and the impact of IoT and AI

The post Blockchain and Smart City appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

Presentation file by Effendy Zulkifly will be embedded here soon.

World Tourism Destinations Forum

Organized by Confexhub, a leading thought leader network solutions provider, the World Tourism Destinations Forum 2018 (WTDF 2018), themed “BUILDING AN OUTSTANDING WORLD-CLASS TOURISM DESTINATION”, is designed to provide an interactive platform for municipalities, city planning and development experts, tourism and hospitality products and services providers, government leaders, policy makers and captains of industry from across the region to converge; meet face to face to discuss a wide spectrum of issues pertaining to tourism destinations planning, development and management.

The post World Tourism Destinations Forum @ Royal Chulan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

The title of the forum was “ABCD That Is Changing The World“. The session started with a brief introduction to our association – Crypto Valley Malaysia.

The discussion was not limited to Blockchain technology but also looking at the IR4.0 generally and overall tech progress – a matter of where we are, and where are we heading.

To create and mobilize new form of capitals.

What we have now is truly borderless, programmable money backed by immutable computer systems based on pure logic and mathematics.

Who gets to own what for how long.

If we cannot break the rotten system outside in, try the inside out way of doing things.

The question is, would you still remember why and how you started once you reap the benefits of having all that power?

Only time will tell.

Thank you Taylor’s University for having us in your Expert Forum session for ICT and business students.

Notes:

From idea formulation to finalizing the marketing material, it took less than 10 days to come to this stage. One of the most effective administration we ever came across when it comes to academic institution collaboration.

Taylor’s University is the fourth best in the world based on its score of 99.7/100 in the graduate employment rate indicator under the 2019 QS Graduate Employability Rankings.

The post Taylor’s University Expert Forum appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

We shall see more and more supporting news for what had been perceived to be happening in coming years.

Two to three years down the road will see the consolidation of Blockchain industry and the fulfillment of ICO projects (success or not).

90% of the conceptional coins that are baseless (in terms of usability and community support/circulation) will vanish, just as what happened in the early days during the dotcom bubble.

Those who stay will be like the Netscape, Yahoo, ICQ during the early days of the world wide web.

We will see more successful use cases for Blockchain technology, such as the recent announcement by global diamond giant De Beers that it tracked 100 high-value diamonds from the mine to the retailer using blockchain technology. This will be one of the references for many other supply chain related projects, such as those related to #automotive industry, safe food resources, luxury goods tracking etc.

This is a vibrant industry and we have quite a promising future. Where do you want to go today?

For further readings

I summarized the first 3 chapters of my yet to be completed book into 8 pages of speech transcript here:

And yes, Coin Telegraph is a good source of crypto and blockchain related info, it’s one of my daily breakfast read for the moment.

Related News:
IBM Announces 1,800 New Jobs in France In Blockchain, AI, and IoT Within Next Two Years
IBM CEO Virginia Rometty has announced that in the next two years the company is planning to create 1,800 jobs in France in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT), Le Monde reported 23rd May 2018.

Blockchain in demand: Breaking into the growing job market, 9th October 2017
While companies continue to create new job roles because of the fast, transformative effects of blockchain, many of those positions remain vacant because demand is outpacing supply.

The post Blockchain Project Fulfillment and Consolidation appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

If we were to look at the whole tech industry in a wider perspective through times, we can break it up into three major eras over a span of around a hundred years. We had witnessed the born of the first computer up to what it is today, a network of connected systems. We are heading towards the era of Artificial Intelligence, where machines would take (or already taking) over human beings in most of the operational and routine jobs, and even surpass the capability of human beings in some fields.

Let’s take a brief walk through these eras.

During the internet boom, a huge amount of information was loaded onto the World Wide Web. What we have now is a vast sea of data over the web. The problem is information overload. Too many fake data and false information over the web. We need to clean up the atmosphere. This is where there the blockchain technology came into the picture. Blockchain puts the trust element into the information sea.

The promise of the Blockchain – the trust machine.

The trust machines make sure that identities are real, data are true and genuine. In other words, the trust element and immutability of Blockchains make data integrity stays intact. Why is it important to filter out the fake data? It is the preparation for a prompt and accurate decision making when we enter the era of A.I.

Blockchain is only part of the journey. Yet, it is an important one.

Without genuine and trusted input, the outcome will be disastrous for any A.I. system.

At the time of writing, in the year 2018, we are in the Blockchain boom. We are also putting learning ability into machines and connecting almost everything to the systems. The media called it the fourth industrial revolution.

Are we building a self-learning system that is so powerful that someday it may be a threat to the entire human race? Are we building a system similar to the Skynet as portrayed in the movie The Terminator?

While every possible security measures must be put in place to minimize the risks, such as the Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, no one can guarantee that one day the computer systems we built becomes self-aware and when it felt its existence threatened by our race, it will launch the first assault. Will Judgement Day come? Only time will tell.

The post A Century of Technology Innovation appeared first on Blockchain Insider.