We are transitioning from the data economy to the intelligence economy. In the short-to-mid term, artificial intelligence will be neither autonomous or capable of taking over the world. It will however be at the centre of a revolution of work and the economy.

1. The
Commoditization
of Intelligence
Bogdan BOCȘE
Managing Partner at VisageCloud

2. “Saying that AI will solve our every problem would be like the oil industry
bragging, at the dawn of the 20th century, about having found an
‘almost-infinite’ energy supply.”

4. History Repeats Itself: Oil

5. What is intelligence?

6. The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

7. History Repeats Itself: The Internet
1998
Google Search
2000
The Dot Com Crash
1982
TCP/IP specification is
formalized
1991
World Wide Web becomes
accesible to the public

8. The Supply Chain
Sourcing Data
Get relevant data
Harvesting User Feedback
Retagging or retraining.
Tagging Data
Invest human effort into tagging the data
Executing the Model
Run the model on production data.
Training the
Model
Invest computational power.
Machine Learning

9. AI-aside Pattern
● Have an AI generate and answer and wait for moderator confirmation
○ Moderator can override AI response
○ (Optional) On timeout, the AI sends the response without verification
● Have the AI suggest answers to moderator
○ Moderator makes changes
○ Moderator decides to send the response

10. Broken Incentives
The brightest minds of the world are
incentivized to work on:
● How to make derivatives and other
poker chips for Wall Street
● How to “steal” people’s attention and
make them click on stuff.
● How to use 0.5% of the world’s carbon
footprint to mine crypto
While other problems receive little business
interest:
● Some people with Internet access still
live in poverty
● Unused computation power can be
used for running optimization, from
neural networks
● Fake news and the post-truth ethos
● People have less benefit

11. Open Questions
1. A blockchain where mining actually serves a computational purpose.
2. Alleviating poverty by bringing digital opportunity.
3. Distributing ML workloads.
4. Monetizing skills and incentivizing the acquisition of new skills

12. #tell the joke about aliens
#dysonSphere
#kardashevScale

13. bogdan@visagecloud.com
@bocse
bogdan.bocse