EU Fights Corporatization of AI and Blockchain With Massive Investment

Blockchain technology has the promise to radically transform the way society handles data as well as how AIs are trained and taught with this data.

It has the potential to create a world in which control over and reward from data and AI is distributed more broadly across various stakeholders, including the people who generate the data.

The AI industry in the West is currently dominated by a relatively small number of large players centered in the United States, who have gained their positions by providing users with "Free" or discounted services in exchange for the relatively unfettered use of their data.

By using this data to train and teach AI systems, these companies have been able to create unprecedentedly effective advertising machines, with extraordinary capabilities of using the patterns mined from personal data to influence peoples' decisions about purchasing, political elections or anything else.

The Chinese model has its pros and cons but clearly is not the path preferred by the typical citizen of North America or Western Europe - particularly the latter, where GDPR has begun to revolutionize data sovereignty in the tech ecosystem.

The company also cooperates openly with the Chinese government in using their data store and AI capabilities for purposes judged to be for the common good of the nation.

If the West is to go in the direction of greater data sovereignty, enabling individuals to control their own data and the way it's used by AIs - and if it wants to maintain this respect for sovereignty without falling behind in the AI race - then it will need to aggressively develop tools that allow AI to learn from data without compromising data sovereignty.

Multiparty computation, homomorphic encryption and other methods allow AI tools to analyze datasets - that exist fragmented across multiple locations, owned by multiple individuals or entities - in a trustless way, without anyone needing to reveal their data to other parties.

There is no fundamental reason that, right now, each individual's personal data doesn't go into a cloud-based data wallet that is controlled by their own private keys, wherein the individual specifically guides the use of their data for various purposes.

A relevant key constraint is that in the present state of things, tools enabling AI to respect data sovereignty are often slow to run and difficult to use.