How AI can be the ultimate boss whale of crypto.
Everyone from Elon Musk to the CEO of Google DeepMind has predicted that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence within a few decades. This situation is often referred to as AI singularity.
Big tech, academia, and governments around the world have begun workshopping possible scenarios to deal with this hypothetical period. While much has been written about the threat of a powerful AI invasion, there is little in the way of research into how a machine could disrupt the global economy.
Singleness
Tech futurist Ray Kurzweil, a former Google researcher, recently published a book titled “The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI.” In the article, he discusses what he sees as our future second intelligent beings on Earth.
Kurzweil defines “singularity” differently from the general scientific community. From his point of view, singularity, as mentioned above, is only the tipping point when an AI model can reason better than humans. According to Kurzweil, we will reach this point around 2029 when “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) is finally created.
AGI, in this sense, will be a machine that can perform any task that an average human can, given the appropriate resources.
But, according to Kurzweil, the singularity will be superhuman in the 2040s when humans and AI merge. The futurist says this will lead to longer lifespans, an end to disease and the ultimate human utopia.
This article focuses on the general interpretation of AI singularity: a hypothetical point at which an AI model is smarter than any other person at reasoning tasks.
AI overlords
Countless researchers, scholars, and politicians have speculated that such an event could lead to the extinction of humanity. In most cases, AI creates robots that rise to destroy humanity and create the planet in its own image. Others use violence to force the machines to bring humans to their knees for one reason or another.
Related: Elon Musk and tech execs call for pause on AI development
Many of these fears fall under the threat of “non-conformity”, the machines refusing to do what they were designed to do despite the best efforts of scientists and pursuing their own agendas.
All of this makes for great science fiction, but the logistics involved can be daunting even for an advanced AI hive mind. For example, it would be a planning nightmare to recreate and deploy weapons of sufficient destruction to harm 8 billion people without destroying the infrastructure that powers the machines.
A more likely scenario might involve the control of machines that don't spill a single drop of human blood: cornering the financial markets. Unfortunately for any potential AI overlords, even the smartest machines in the world may not be able to hack into a traditional banking system.
If the theoretical AI controller starts before the quantum computing sector is big enough to produce machines capable of breaking RSA encryption, even an AGI built from all the supercomputers on the planet could not hack banks following the proper encryption protocols.
Final Boss Well
Technologically speaking, however, there is nothing stopping a more savvy 24-hour-a-day trader, capable of executing millions of transactions at once, across all accessible digital assets and blockchain, from dominating the entire cryptocurrency market.
While humans are distracted by things like sleeping and using the toilet, superintendent AI may be flooding the worlds of crypto, NFT, Web3 and online gambling with millions of bots in coordinated, math-based revenue generation schemes.
It is impossible to predict whether such AI will be able to successfully exploit every network. But judging by how massive “whale” transactions in the past have resulted in fluctuations worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a super-intelligent machine could amass a treasure trove of high-value digital assets in no time.
If we count only the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and assume that AI uses reactive trading on as many networks as possible, the upper limit on the machine wallet reaches up to $2 trillion – as the market stood in August. 25.
Without needing to rob a bank or technically—even steal from anyone—this super-intelligent AI would then theoretically have enough capital to turn its attention to the global stock market.
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