Robert Ta argues that blockchain could let people own and control their personal data, storing resumes and medical records on a decentralized ledger. If individuals could monetize their data and share in the value AI extracts from it, he says, it could redistribute the wealth AI generates. The obstacles are real: consumer friction, regulatory changes, and building usable systems.
If we think about what's the reality we want, I think we want a regulation that not just regulates what the companies are going to do, but it actually advocates for citizenship. It actually advocates for the personal data that we create in our day-to-day lives such that it protects us and it protects our personal data. It can defend us if our data is stolen and used for purposes that we don't want it to be used for. But it's also the same mechanism that says like, don't build bioweapons. As just people using the models, we need to have a relationship with the government where the lines of what's legal and what's illegal are very clear. And then there's easy mechanisms for us to interact. So what it comes down to is like, this is a relationship between me, my data, and the society and the government that I live in. And then Anthropic is just like the compliance steward of this whole situation because they're the interface by which we share this data and interact with the public corpus of data that's been indexed and trained. What do you think about that framing?
I mean, owning your own data has been something I've always been into because, I mean, my first startup was in crypto. I had a belief around it, actually. I was like, oh, we're going to change the world. We're, you know, like, this could lead to like equity in the world. It could. We're at sort of at a nascent stage with like blockchain, and I think eventually, you know, take Timeslider and Infinity, some of the UX challenges, policy regulation challenges will be solved. The reason I bring up blockchain is I see it as a technology that enables the own your own data capability at the consumer individual level for any domain. Own your own data, own my resume on the chain, accessed by my fingerprint, verified by my crypto wallet. I could verify my employment, W-2, 1099, like whatever that's stored there and only I could access, only I could like approve approve other people's access, and all those read receipts are in the sky for anybody to kind of look at. I think that's a really interesting view of the world and a philosophy of being, actually. You know what's interesting is after I left crypto, I kind of determined that the technology was way too early to meet the idealism that is own your own data. Meaning in every domain that actually matters, there's going to be friction in consumer expectations and adoption rates. The capital that could be allocated to solving some gnarly problems like the one I just talked about, like bring my own data as an employee to be employed anywhere, to be verified by on my own. Like there's a whole set of problems to, to solve and it's uphill battle to solve. Think about the medical domain, another whole set of problems to solve with like HIPAA compliance. That is that you would have to go and change regulation to make that thing happen. You're asking me about like, what's my lens on what you say around the idealism of owning your own data? Idealistically, I would love that. I would love if I could say, and I can control from the palm of my hand, yes, today I wanna share some of my data with this type of company that has this kind of benefit for the world. And then I monetize that in some way. That'd be sick. And then it'd be really cool if I never had to call a hospital to get access to my own medical records to share with like another hospital. That would be insanely cool. And it'd be so cool if I didn't have to go and reverify employment every time I got employed anywhere and I could just verify it and like the proof is there and you only get access to that for a limited amount of time. Or even I bring my medical record to a doctor and you only, you get access to that for a period of time. So like that's like really owning your own data. I just think that there are a lot of uphill battles to it, but idealistically I, I really believe that that is the way the world should go and that actually brings the most agency to the individual level. And I also think if we do it right, I could see a world where it actually helps to mitigate and solve for, in a way, the wealth distribution problem that people are worried with the whole AI thing. It's like, oh, if you could own your own data and then like that helps these companies leverage it to make more money and they give you a cut. Yeah, okay, that sounds great. It sounds like I'm buying a stock and then wait, you're saying like I just get paid for this? And then maybe we could even spin it to like this is doing a service for all of us. And so everybody benefits. That sounds really good.
