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Agent maxing
(thelemmy.club)
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
I think all those features are already available and working really well in a high-trust society. In any non-crumbling modern country you already have trust systems embedded in people and institutions, not algorithms, and when they fail you have a court system where another human can disentangle the situation and rule one way or the other. This is a much more desirable state than a low-trust society with algorithmically enforced rules.
Because when you fall in a blockchain edge case, you're fucked and truly fucked. Nobody can come up and save your ass if someone manages to take advantage of you despite the algorithmic safeguards (which may or may not be well coded themselves). Nobody can help if you die suddenly without handing your crypto keys to a trusted party. This kind of problems, which are trivially solved in the real world, are literally impossible to solve in a blockchain.
Sure, fraud and bad faith can happen in real world institutions, but that's really a marginal risk, everyday millions of transactions go on without a hitch. And when something fails there's always a chance of getting your day in court. On average, blockchain "solves" a problem which most people will never encounter in their life. I would imagine that there are interesting applications of the tech in high-stakes boring businesses such as logistics and banking but that's infrastructure that the end user would never even know exists.
You're definitely right that existing systems already implement 99% of the functionality that one would ever want out of these assets, but I do want to note that the notion of "code is law" is pretty optional when you're talking about these Government-backed assets. Code is not law. Law is law.
If an asset is transferred on a blockchain, it's only presumptively authorised, not conclusively. Just like a paper deed bearing what looks like your signature next to a notary stamp is also only presumptively valid. You can go to court to overturn that presumption. By similar logic, a "master key" can exist to allow transfer of the assets by court order. And because the blockchain is still just a human concept which has only the value humans assign to it, if all else fails, a court or government can just declare a problematic deed NFT to be invalid and re-issue it or go back to paper.
Thanks for the measured take, you're right i am painting with a broad stroke here. And there's great irony in what you're describing because if that's what the blockchain is, then it's just a piece of legal infrastructure for governments and big corporations. A nice bit of tech, and a fine industry for a few companies to rake in billions a year, but nowhere near the trillion-dollar industry that the investors were pissing themselves about. And their thesis was all fucked so they burnt all that cash on consumer facing gizmos nobody wanted, while they should have been quietly pursuing institutional contracts. Really ridiculous way to waste enormous amounts of money.