foreword
What would be the impact on society if four out of five people suddenly lost their jobs in the next 5 years? In this technological change, the United States may lag behind other countries because of its "willful" regulatory attitude. Which countries will be the beneficiaries? Okey Cloud Chain Research Institute and Professor David Shrier of Imperial College of Business conducted an in-depth discussion at the Consensus conference. As an authority in the field of cutting-edge technology, he analyzed the possibilities that technologies such as AI and Web3.0 will bring to the future, and also deeply analyzed the current regulatory difficulties faced by financial technology. This article will delve into the reasons for U.S. regulatory attitudes and the possibilities for future technological change.
Produced｜Okey Cloud Chain Research Institute
Author｜Bi Lianghuan
Guest introduction
David Shrier
David Shrier is Professor of Practice at Imperial College Business School. He has served as a researcher at Oxford Saïd Business School, as well as a university lecturer and New Ventures officer at MIT. He has also served as a member of the European Parliament's Advisory Committee on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's (FINRA) Fintech Industry Committee, and a senior advisor to HMRC, as well as a member of the Financial Technology Trade and Investment Steering Committee of the Department for International Trade. member.
Shrier leads the venture capital firm Visionary Future LLC, helping Fortune 500 companies achieve breakthrough growth and incubate new technology-driven businesses. He is also the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Esme Learning Solutions, an AI-driven workforce transformation company that works with top universities including MIT, Oxford, Cambridge and London Business School.
Shrier has co-authored and co-edited several books with Alex "Sandy" Pentland of MIT, including Global Fintech (MIT Press, ALA Award for Distinguished Scholarly Writing), Trust: Data, and more "Connection Science Series" published by MIT Press.
Key preview
Bi Lianghuan (hereinafter referred to as "B")
David (hereinafter referred to as "D")
B
David, you discussed the impact of Web3.0 technology and technologies such as AI on Web3.0 and society at the Consensus conference. Currently, the industry is discussing the topic that artificial intelligence technology has more imaginative space than Web3.0. We believe that blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can support each other, AIGC can help Web3.0, and Web3.0 is expected to establish a new decentralized AI paradigm from three aspects: data, model and computing power. This approach is expected to reduce the operating and training costs of artificial intelligence, while solving the problem of artificial intelligence "abuse" through decentralization. What is your opinion on this?
D
This is a question involving many aspects, let me break it down. First of all, let me introduce myself. I am Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at Imperial College Business School. I'm working on a book called "Basic Metaverse," which is being published by Little, Brown and Harvard Business Press and will be released this June. In this book, I explore the application and how to empower many different metaverse fields, including the integration of technologies such as artificial intelligence, and how when artificial intelligence and Web3.0 meet, they can jointly make Web3.0 more powerful and fun. At the same time, I also deeply explored related issues in the field of artificial intelligence. In January of next year, my other book, Basic Artificial Intelligence, will also come out, where I will further explore the basics and applications of artificial intelligence.
Today, new technologies are being adopted at an ever-increasing rate, and businesses are leveraging this technology to innovate. Unlike invention, innovation refers to the adoption of new ideas in business practice. This speed change is amazing, for example, Netflix took about 7.5 years to get 1 million users, while OpenAI's chatbot GPT got 1 million users in 5 days. This change will have a profound impact on every aspect of how we work, live and play. For example, OpenAI recently published a research article on the impact of AI on the workforce, stating that up to 85% of the workforce could be disrupted or diverted by AI, especially these new powerful generative AI systems.
What would society look like if four out of five people quickly lost their jobs?
We need to come up with solutions to these people in the next 5 to 10 years, not 30 years from now. Otherwise we will face massive problems of social unrest, famine and government collapse. The answer is not to stop AI, but to help people work better and more effectively with AI and provide a broader social safety net to adapt to change. We need to act, not stand by.
B
Could you please describe your vision of the future in more detail?
D
First, it's important to remember that we have the ability to influence the future we're going to get. So the future is not just something that happens to us, we can change it. So there are several possible futures. The question is which future we decide to choose.
One of those futures is that we could see four in five people lose their jobs in the next few years as companies race to make higher profits . This will lead to higher profits for the company. In this future, we will face massive social unrest, economic collapse, and all the worst possible consequences of artificial intelligence.
The second kind of future is that we successfully complete the AI transformation and increase the universal basic income, because AI makes the world so efficient, we have the ability to provide it. We will have a new leisure class that will include most people. It's a future that looks a bit like the world of the movie "Robo," where people basically sit in floating chairs eating snacks and watching TV but not actually doing anything. Maybe they'll spend the rest of their lives in various virtual realities because they don't have to work and the government funds everything. This future is at least free of social unrest, but I don't think that's the best use of humanity.
There is a third future that I am very much looking forward to, and I am working with others to help you imagine the possibilities of this future. In this future, we will find ways to cooperate with artificial intelligence so that we can do things that humans cannot do alone today, and things that artificial intelligence cannot do alone today. In this future, for example, I co-founded a startup where we pool the collective intelligence of humanity and empower it with artificial intelligence to predict the future. We started by predicting security prices, but we can apply it to training in financial transactions, and to many other application domains as well.
B
Let's go back to AI and Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is expected to establish a new decentralized AI paradigm from the three aspects of data, models and computing power. It can also solve the "abuse" problem of artificial intelligence to a certain extent through decentralization. Do you agree?
D
Many people firmly believe that blockchain is a magical technology that can solve all problems. However, it is not.
Nonetheless, blockchain has some interesting application areas, notably data auditing and data provenance. For example, one way people attack AI systems is through so-called data injection. If you think of data as the fuel of an AI engine, then if you manipulate the data, you can change the performance of the AI. Therefore, protecting data is an important part of AI security, and blockchain can help in this regard. But it’s worth noting that blockchain has a lot of inefficiencies in how it handles data. So you're really making a tradeoff between security and efficiency. AI systems, on the other hand, tend to place a lot of emphasis on performance, that is, efficiency. AI needs to be simplified, but you can use it selectively to help manage AI systems.
B
AI is accelerating the transformation of society, but in contrast to Web3.0, during this conference, we saw a lot of discussions about data and tool applications, rather than new concepts such as NFT and DEFI a few years ago. Do you see this as a lack of innovation? How do you see the impact of this situation on the development of Web3.0?
D
These two answers are actually on the same topic. We absolutely need more innovation, especially in access.
Right now, to get the best performance in Web 3.0, especially in highly immersive Web 3.0 systems, you need multi-gigabit-per-second connectivity in the heart of a so-called first-tier country, the largest city, like central London. Access speed. But in reality, the average access speed in London is only about 50 megabits per second. Therefore, there is a huge gap between getting the best performance for Web 3.0 and what the current infrastructure supports.
Plus, there are a lot of exciting things to do in virtual reality, but most people don't have access to them. So I've been working on businesses that are focused on solving access and scaling issues in Web 3.0. This is an innovative example of combining artificial intelligence and augmented reality for better accessibility, but it's still not enough.
Therefore, we need to do more work in this area. Some of the Sustainable Development Goals are about providing more access, such as UN Sustainable Development Goal 9, which deals with infrastructure and connectivity. So I think we need to address inclusion and access, and that's where I think innovation is most needed.
B
So do you think this phenomenon may be related to the stage of industry development, such as the industry enters the second stage with the increase of industry adoption rate, so the focus shifts to the development and application of tools?
D
They are all related, aren't they? If we have better infrastructure to support more people, we can have better adoption rates. I think companies like HTC have done a really good job of improving access by creating very affordable Android smartphones, which means more people are now able to own smartphones. So I think we need to innovate more in terms of infrastructure and hardware. We need more software innovations to make these platforms more fun, easier to use, and leverage bridge technologies like augmented reality before we can truly fully immerse ourselves in virtual reality.
In addition to more tools appearing in the second stage, the hybrid solution of centralization and decentralization is also a trend we can observe in the next step. In terms of financial systems, I think Web 3.0 has a lot of potential, but I don't think we will have a pure DeFi system. We'll have more hybrid solutions, and that's what we're talking about in the workshop today. These schemes mix CeFi and DeFi, which is actually more practical and useful. I care about results, not dogmatic purism. In my opinion, it doesn't have to be 100% compliant with DeFi to be considered effective. If it can reach 80% of DeFi, and have some CeFi-style features, such as anti-money laundering and network security, then this is acceptable, as long as it provides a better end-user experience.
B
Mentioned anti-money laundering and cybersecurity. At the Consensus conference, we observed that many experts were discussing the security and compliance of US regulation and industry, especially in anti-money laundering and cybersecurity. However, the U.S. has yet to develop a comprehensive regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies. We were wondering, do you think there will be a model for the regulation of new assets in the U.S. so that we can refer to this model or logic when new asset classes emerge in the future?
D
I have to say that the U.S. seems to be at odds with most of the rest of the world in terms of what it is doing with cryptocurrencies. This is why I appeared in Austin, and launched a seminar with Coindesk, and will publish a report called Consensus @ Consensus. We discuss regulatory confusion in the US versus the rest of the world. This will likely be a recurring theme that we will revisit over the next few days. So the rest of the world outside of the U.S., whether it's in Europe, or in the Middle East, or in parts of Asia, is moving toward regulatory clarity. The industry may not always like this trend, but regulators are establishing a clear set of rules and compliance guidelines regardless. In the case of the EU, they have just passed new comprehensive legislation such as MICA. As a result, we are gaining clarity on how the rest of the world treats or restricts cryptocurrencies.
Unfortunately, in the US, there is confusion and a lack of regulatory clarity. Some companies have done their best to comply with regulations, but have been arbitrarily penalized by US regulators.
其实，长期以来美国一直在朝着优先考虑的方向发展。像SEC、CFTC、OCC这样的监管机构有很多高级官员，他们在教育人们有关这个行业的知识。不幸的是，我们看到了各种方式的分歧和混乱，甚至在一些机构内部也存在这种情况。因此，这些情况创造出来的缺乏明确性不利于美国，但有利于世界其他地区。换句话说，创新者将离开美国，去其他国家。美国由于促进了这种混乱，正在为其他国家创造机会。
长期来看，这将对美国在全球范围内的美元霸权产生不利影响，并为其他国家创造更多的机会，比如中国，人民币将在全球政治格局中扮演更重要的角色。它已经在朝着这个方向发展，但由于美国的混乱和振幅，其他国家如中国将在全球政治格局中获得优势。
B
据了解，造成美国监管缺乏明确的监管框架这种情况是由于三层监管机构的冲突，您认同这个说法吗？
D
不止三层。
我认为他们不一定要彼此“拉扯”。我所观察到的事实是它们一直朝着共同的方向前进直到一些新任命的官员决定采取不同的方向，并违背之前的方向。所以这不是好现象。
国会内部有跨党派的动议，可能会制定一个路径来实现监管明确化。这是非常需要的。其实，美国也面临着历史上前所未有的政治两极化，这是美国历史上从未有过的情况。我们在美国历史上曾经有过国会议员互相攻击的时刻，不过现在比这还要糟糕。
因此，目前还不清楚我们是否能够在美国官方监管机构共同努力下达成协议，但我有希望，并且我完全支持跨党派努力来提供监管明确性。一旦有了立法，我们就不再需要通过执行来实现监管了，因为我们已经有了一个明确的法律框架。这可能有助于美国摆脱其当前的失败路径。但现在，趋势似乎表明，中国和欧盟将获得重要的优势，英国进展较慢，但如果英国也加入这一趋势，特别是英格兰银行、金融行为监管局和英国其他监管机构在加密货币和区块链方面非常精明，他们有机会帮助英国重新夺回一些金融科技的优势。因此，基本上除了美国之外的其他国家都将受益，尽管美国拥有全球120万亿美元资产中的一半，但美国将落后于其他国家。
B
在当前的宏观经济和地缘政治形势下，我们应该如何建立全球监管框架？加密资产是否将成为混乱世界中的第一个退出或案例研究？
D
好消息是，已经有一个全球框架的提议。经济合作与发展组织（OECD）提出了这个框架，我的几个朋友参与了制定。在全球35个最大经济体之间，已经达成了某种程度上的一致，关于一个协调一致的方法应该是什么样子的。目前，我们还没有到广泛采用该框架的地步，但是我至少可以引导人们查看OECD区块链政策框架，并将其视为一些共性的手段。
还有一个我推荐的参考是“Commonwealth Fintech Toolkit”，这是几年前制定的，从全球范围内提取了最佳实践，提出了一个关于政府如何思考区块链、加密货币和FinTech的建议或提案。我去年与麻省理工学院的Alex Pentland教授合著了一本书，名为《Global Fintech》。该书的大约一半提出了处理这些资产以及如何与这个行业进行交流的政策框架。这本书是与经验丰富的监管机构和政策制定者合作编写的，他们深入了解过去的工作经验，然后研究这些模型，试图将它们应用于现在和未来。这本书实际上荣获了最佳学术书籍的奖项。
因此，目前已经提出了一些深入思考和全面的框架。它们尚未被广泛采用，尤其是在美国尚未被采用，但在全球范围内已经得到了一定程度的采用。
我们希望人们能够关注这些非常有思想深度的指南并且可以应用它们。OECD和世界经济论坛是两个真正试图帮助人们朝着共同方向前进的组织。我们需要更多的紧迫性，因为我确实相信加密资产可以帮助解决全球货币系统中的一些重大问题。
B
除了监管，当我们想监管与技术相关的，包括金融技术，我们需要使用技术。那么对于RegTech和SupTech, 您认为这两种技术可以帮助监管加密货币甚至未来的新类型数字资产？
D
因此，已经提出了许多有前途的主题和文本，这些可以帮助我们应对一些这些挑战。其中一个我要指出的是，实际上有几家公司提供这样的服务，从数字身份入手，提供了一种解决方案，可以解决加密货币行业在符合反洗钱、客户身份验证和最终受益所有人监管方面遇到的一些问题。我相信，随着人们越来越习惯于尝试和采用数字身份技术，这将是一个非常好的案例，可以帮助这个行业。
另一个我要提到的是剑桥大学的一个分支机构，名为“RegGenome ”，这是一个SupTech工具。这是一个提供机器可读的监管内容，这些内容是动态的和可互操作的，所有这些内容都由基于人工智能的文本信息提取技术提供。这使监管机构能够提高监管信息的可及性和传播性，并使各组织能够深化其监管情报，将其合规性和风险管理流程数字化。这是为了帮助政策制定者更好地理解如何制定更好的政策，在其他方面也可以帮助自动化某些被称为地平线扫描的事情。
因此，在制定新的监管规定时，监管机构通常会查看其他法域已经采取的相同或类似的做法，以便不重新发明某些东西，创建利用先前的监管规定，并朝着让不同国家的法规彼此相似的方向迈出第一步，以便更有效地进行合作。我会指向这两个方向 - 数字身份和监管工具例如Prof Robert Wardrop创立的RegGenome，将会是监管科技未来的不错的方向。
B
那么您看到的监管科技发展态势是如何的呢？
D
这是一个较小的领域，但正在快速发展。在英国，剑桥大学在这个领域做了一些出色的工作。在美国，还有一位名叫Melissa Koide的前美国财政部官员，在华盛顿特区运营着一个名为FinReg Lab的机构，该机构一直在试点不同的RegTech和SupTech。我认为，香港、新加坡、英国等一些拥有沙盒和测试环境的国家一直在提供支持并且对这些技术进行试验和应用。因此，如果这个行业要在某个地方开始，它将会在香港、新加坡或伦敦等地开始，而不是美国，因为美国明显滞后了。
B
最近，我们谈了很多关于谁将成为下一个Web3中心的问题。我们知道Nylonkong在传统金融界有非常稳定的地位。而当加密货币已经进入第二阶段，需要像硅谷那样的融资能力时，Nylonkong在Web3.0中是否也会像金融界的三个城市一样拥有自己的地位？
D
我认为这个观点有一定的道理。我投资了一些位于伦敦等地、在其他市场上也有影响力的Web 3.0公司。然而，当你把将Web 3定义地比较狭隘时，你可能会忽略其他一些Web 3.0中心的存在。除了纽约、伦敦和香港，迪拜、阿布扎比和沙特等地也在大量投入资源到Web 3.0中。此外，洛杉矶作为好莱坞电影产业的所在地，已经开始探索元宇宙。元宇宙是一个重要的机遇领域，洛杉矶的电影业为Web 3行业内的公司和创意人士提供了一个有利的生态系统，他们正在创造出一些可以产生现金流和收益的核心技术。
So I think London and Hong Kong offer a strong opportunity in the Web 3 space. If they choose to actively pursue this field now, they will be able to achieve more success. However, the US regulatory environment will limit development in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. While there are still opportunities in these locations, they will be more limited due to the impact of regulatory confusion.
B
Although the Web3.0 field may face lack of innovation or face regulatory obstacles in the United States, you are leading Visonaryfuture and are still investing. Which fields are you optimistic about?
D
Yes, I have a venture capital studio and a portfolio which are published on my website visionaryfuture.com. About 40% of my investment strategy is invested in finance and infrastructure in Web 3.0, about 40% is invested in cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence and neural networks, and then 20% is invested in other areas that I find interesting, such as space technology. Because it's my personal funds. So choosing space technology is a personal strategy of mine.
As far as cryptocurrencies and Web 3.0 are concerned, I can mention some projects that are going on this year. Recent investments include projects like Metaverse in Gravity, which try to solve the scaling problem in the metaverse. Another project is called Daedalus Labs, like Daedalus and Icarus in Greek mythology. Daedalus Labs is trying to modernize the financial infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean, starting with real estate, we are doing some innovative development projects, and then securitizing those properties so that more people can access them. So a small trader with $20 is able to buy real estate, whereas before, you needed a minimum purchase of millions of dollars to qualify. These are a few projects I'm working on right now.