Peter Thiel: “Crypto Is Libertarian, AI Is Communist”
by Sonya Mann via Inc.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 02/06/2018
Peter Thiel is known for extending an idea to its logical extremes and then inverting it. The habit has served him well as one of tech’s most contrarian and successful investors.
Talking about two of the technologies that Silicon Valley is most excited about right now — cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence — the controversial billionaire and PayPal cofounder used this technique on Wednesday night.
“Crypto is libertarian, AI is communist,” Thiel declared, during a public debate with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.
Like many of Thiel’s pronouncements, it was equal parts catchy and gnomic. In case you’re wondering, he was talking about decentralization and centralization.
Cryptocurrencies are typically open-source, meaning that anyone with technical ability can contribute. On top of that, anyone disgruntled with a given cryptocurrency’s trajectory can “fork” it, creating a new coin, as has happened to both bitcoin and ethereum. When tokens are purchased or earned, they can’t be confiscated unless the owner’s private keys (a sort of cryptographic password) are compromised.
Cryptocurrencies are also famously designed to be extralegal — beyond the reach of the government — although of course the SEC and the IRS hope to quash that notion.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence relies on the trend that came before it, big data, and big data is gathered by big entities. For example, Google is able to do extraordinary things with machine learning because of the staggering amount of search data, image data, and general user behavior data that it’s amassed over the years.
Historically, communist regimes like the Soviet Union and Maoist China sought to create highly centralized command economies, noted Thiel. A sufficiently powerful AI could realize the bureaucrat’s dream of accurately predicting peasant farmers’ potato yields months in advance from thousands of miles away. No wonder, then, as he said, “the Chinese Communist Party hates crypto and loves AI.”
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