crank.report

Technology

Hacker News published a link to an opinion piece by Paul Krugman on blockchain. In it Krugman writes:

A blockchain is a digital ledger associated with an asset, recording the history of transactions in that asset — who bought it from whom and so on. The asset could be a digital token like a Bitcoin, but it could also be a stock or even a physical thing like a shipping container. Ledgers, of course, are nothing new. What’s distinctive about blockchains is that the ledgers are supposed to be decentralized: They aren’t sitting on the computers of a single bank or other company; they’re in the public domain, sustained by protocols that induce many people to maintain records on many servers.

These protocols are, everyone tells me, extremely clever. I’ll take their word for it. The question I’ve never heard or seen satisfactorily answered, however, is, “What’s the point?” Why go to the trouble and expense of maintaining a ledger in many places, and basically carrying that ledger around every time a transaction takes place?

Krugman’s answer and the Hacker News comment consensus is: Nothing. At best, it’s a solution is search of a problem.

I don’t agree. I think it’s a solution in search of a user interface. The first people grokked, if it all, is bitcoin. Because, money. But that’s not all:

Can these problems be solved in other ways? Of course. Is blockchain and interesting way to solve these: yes.

In a world where billionaires can disrupt social communications by buying a platform, war and its crimes continue to be perpetrated, and government records are removed from public view, decentralized tools using a ledger can help us maintain the past, understand the present, and collaborate into the future.

#area #technology #blockchain

Discuss...

This means two things for you. First, you should be evaluating AI solutions for specific, narrow tasks in your organization and deploying it to fulfill those tasks as rapidly as possible. If, for example, you crank out press releases, AI should be doing all your first drafts now. If you make captions in videos for different language markets, AI should be doing all the translations of those captions. I did a video recently for a friend in French and they said the translation was spot on, helping me be more understandable in their language. For fun, I’ve put Spanish captions into this video as an example. Is the language translation perfect? No. Is it’ usable? Absolutely.

Second, these tools open doors. If you have friends you’ve met online or at in-person events and your language isn’t their native language, you now have a way to communicate with them easily. It won’t be via voice in real-time, but you can absolutely hold a chat conversation in many common languages without needing to speak it and still be understood.

From Almost Timely News, 6 February 2022: Two AI Advances, Dedication, Content Strategy – Christopher S. Penn – Marketing Data Science Keynote Speaker

#Technology #AI #Translation

Discuss...