Robots, Blockchain & Artificial Intelligence. Federico Pistono

My name is Federico Pistono. I've been in IT since almost 18 years ago. I started programming when I was 12 or 13 and computers always fascinated me and systems in general and just learn new things. I got into blockchain around 2012, 2011. So I read the first bit bitcoin white paper by Satoshi. I was very interested in the Byzantine problem, you know, background in mathematics and computer science. So that was double spending and operating research, data structures, algorithms. Those are things that really interested me on the mathematical level. And to then think that those principles could be applied for social change, it was kind of a love at first sight of blending these things together. So I got into Blockchain, yeah, around 2011 then I was one of the first people to get into Ethereum. And from there on it just grew more and more. Now I'm leading the blockchain team at Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which is this new tech that's essentially a supersonic speed travel on a train. So you have an evacuated tube. You've got a tube, you suck up the air, you put a capsule inside with about 30 people and then you've got magnetic levitation, passive magnetic levitation, it's called Indotrack. And you can just move this thing at super high speed, supersonic, so more than 1200km per hour. So regarding AI and blockchain, I would say one of the biggest issues probably is how we decide to structure the algorithm and the incentive mechanisms that we put into the system. Because in the end you get what you reward. And AIs today and probably for the foreseeable future are not really intelligent in any sort. They perform narrow tasks and they optimize for specific things that we tell them to do. And so we don't really know how to give them the right constraints. And if we just say, hey, make profit and you know, do this, it may find all sorts of ways around to perform that task very well, to optimize for that factor. And on the flip side, I think any time you have any system that is in sort of equilibrium, like the system we have now, where there is a huge centralization of power, centralization of capital, centralization of risk in particular, the big players are de risking everything by hedging the risk on the small guys, particularly in developing countries, I think every time that you have a shift in technology or a dramatic shift, you have the ability to, to change things by creating a new incentive structure, by changing the rules of the game. And right now, that is that moment, that seismic event that can change the incentive structure and the mechanisms underneath. And blockchain is a way to do it distributed securely. And I think we can do great things, but they don't come by themselves. We have to actively pursue a specific goal and to agree on how to design these new systems. I think currently we are not ready for this change. Well, first of all, the technology isn't ready. We don't have figured out still so many things about blockchain systems. We're still very, very early stage of the protocols and of the mechanisms that we're building. I mean we don't know how to scale, we don't know how to do it securely, we don't know how to do it fast enough. And we really don't have the game theory behind it. We don't know how all these things are going to be put together. So we don't have the social infrastructure and the technological infrastructure, but it's a feedback loop, it's a system of systems. So by interacting with this system and by allowing ourselves to make mistakes and to do it faster and faster, we create resilience in the network where a single entity might die or go bust. The overall network captures some of that value and, and then you can increase the value again and again and again. And hopefully we can find something that is not just resilient, but it's anti fragile. So that by stressing the system it actually becomes stronger. Something like your body when you go in the gym and you do exercise, you actually stress your muscles and you break them apart. And because you break them apart they become stronger afterwards. So that's an anti fragile system. And we should do that for the economic system and also for decision making and everything. So we know that we're gonna make mistakes. We should design a system that gets better as we make more mistakes because we learn from them instead of just repeating the same shit over and over and not learning from it, which is mostly what's been happening. Recently. I wrote a few books. The first one is called Robots will steal your job. But that's okay. I wrote it five, six years ago, kind of unsuspected time. I was told I was a charlatan and didn't have a PhD in economics. And you know, I wasn't a professor from MIT or Oxford should just stick to my computer science and not talk about these things. And then, you know, little did you know, two, three years later, professors from MIT and Oxford write papers that say exactly the same things with exactly the same numbers but using different methodologies. So kind of validating Everything that I was saying. So I went from charlatan to Oracle. It was kind of weird, but, you know, same stuff, just different reaction from people. Then I wrote another book, a fiction book, this time called A Tale of Two Futures, kind of outlines. It's a short novella, sci fi. And it shows two different paths that we can take. One where things have taken the kind of decentralized open source model and a more sensible approach to how to use technology to better society. And the other is this hyper capitalistic, narrowly focused, kind of mindless, repetitive work that leads to a dystopian society. The third book I wrote for Italians, so How to Build Startups. Because in Italy no one knows how to build startups. Very few people know. And the few people who do, they leave the country and they go elsewhere and they never tell anyone, but back in town, so they call startups everything like a pizzeria is a start. No, that's not a startup. Startup is something else. So I wrote this new book, it's coming out next week. It's called startup 0.0. Kind of give the idea that we're not even a step one, we are step zero. We should get the basics first, understand them. And you know, I've been doing a lot of that. And I also have a TV show in Italy on national tv. It's called Codice. La Vita Digitale means Code Life is digital. And we've had about 2 or 3 million people watching it every week. First episode was just about Blockchain and Bitcoin. Yeah, we went to bitfury, went to China, to Japan. We interviewed Roger Ver and we had a bunch of people in there. I think it was very well done. The episode on Blockchain, we did one on IoT. Smart cities, the Cognitive Revolution, Artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, genetic engineering. So we're kind of bringing these emerging technologies to the wider audience. So yeah, between, you know, my. And also I'm an angel investor. I invest in about 20 companies so far, mostly in blockchain, but also I'm moving like to the medical sector and things that I think are going to help humanity in one way or another. So I tried to give my contribution in some way and now I'm spending most of my time doing hyperloop. I think one of the biggest opportunities we have is to use autonomous agents to automate all things that should be automated, particularly in bureaucracy and in how systems interoperate. So there is no reason why I should go and ask a person to verify my identity or to stamp something and Wait for months for a paper to come back or fax it somewhere. I mean, some places they still need a fax machine. A lot of this stuff is because you don't trust the computer to verify that transaction or that information that's being conveyed. Now the blockchain can solve that. Not only can solve it, but it can solve it systematically and securely and for anybody. And also it's censorship resistant. Not just a government censoring information, but also a company not releasing some of the data that maybe you should own. For example, among all the social networks, the only one that gives you the contacts is LinkedIn. Everyone else doesn't allow you to export the contacts. They are your contacts. Why shouldn't be allowed to have your own contacts and information about them? It's crazy, but this happens. So think about all the corruption that happens throughout the world. Trillions of dollars worth of value and hundreds of millions of people in distress, or who they can be forced into doing things because they have no legal recourse. The blockchain could help all of these people before, you know, helps the first world. It can help the long tail of the supply chain that's now being held hostage by the owners of capital who have an unfair advantage in that game. They can be less efficient than them, but still win just because they have access to cheap capital. And that's really unfair. So all the risk is on these people who have no power, no legal recourse, and their lives are miserable because the game is tilted. The game is unfair and blockchain can allow for that to change, but we need to actively pursue that goal because it will not come automatically by itself. I think that's a moral responsibility that we have and I think we have to step up and take that responsibility. City.