Layer 1 Stage | Why Decentralization Really Truly Matters: Who Will Own Us in the AI Age?

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1. 0:07

   okay hi everyone uh I'm actually wearing two hats here um one hat is that of a co-author I'm writing a book with a guy called Frank mccort about how we badly desperately need to fix a broken internet and my other hat is one that you guys are probably more familiar with and that is is the chief content officer at coindesk I'm going to start with that hat on the second one because I'm going

2. 0:31

   to tell you about the year that we have had uh at coindesk uh it's been quite a ride so basically last Thursday a certain person whose name I really just don't want to mention anymore uh was convicted of seven uh charges of Fraud and on that day it was in fact the one-year anniversary of the story that Ian Allison my colleague uh produced uh uh about the alamat balance sheet which led to the unraveling of FTX

3. 1:03

   and a wild year for coint desk and then we have Sam bankman fre I'm sorry I did have to mention Voldemort's name eventually um found guilty seven counts so it's been a great on that level fantastic year for coindesk three Awards we won from this last month we got the lobe Award right that is the Pulitzer of business journalism this is actually the proudest moment of my journalism career I've never been involved in a in a story that has had so much impact but it's

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   also been a a difficult year a very difficult year from a commercial perspective because the collapsing of the FTX Empire was obviously commensurate with crypto winter and a brutal one and marketing budgets got slashed and sponsors no longer wanted to come to uh consensus because our us audience was no longer accessible because there hadd been a regulatory backlash against the America uh and crypto so coindesk has really had a difficult time we've had I this is

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   public knowledge we've had two rounds of layoffs uh and the company is uh going through a very protracted deal process I can't talk much more about that other other than just say that it looks quite likely that finally this deal will go through but all of that has added massive amounts of uncertainty to what we do but I'm also going to say that um you know Coes is not alone a high quality high integrity news organization

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   that is struggling these days to pay for itself digital media is stuck in a game of whack-a-mole we we we spend our time trying to keep up through search engine optimization uh you know attention farming through social media and all of this is in the service of an algorithm it's a game of whack-a-mole we're just like the rules change trying to figure out what the what the audience's uh

7. 3:02

   latest Search terms are what what's what's moving what isn't this is really no way to do journalism how do you focus on what the story of the day is it's meant that as as a media organization we are no longer serving just uh two masters but three previously it was our audience obviously primarily we care about our readers and our viewers if you're a TV operation but we do have to service the ad guys we got to make sure that there's uh you know commercial operations that help to fund things but

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   really we're also serving this third thing this algorithm for Twitter for Facebook for for for Google whichever it is of the intermediating platforms that's sitting between us and our audience and I've chosen a black image because of course as we all know those algorithms are black boxes we do not know how they are structured um this is this has become a major problem uh I would argue that it

9. 3:58

   is an an existential threat in reality to to Quality journalism and I would go so far as to say that that in itself means that this is an existential threat to democracy I I first sort realized how serious this was when uh BuzzFeed came out with a story in 2016 the middle of the US elections uh there was a a team of Macedonian teenagers and they they had a website and they were just running stories like this one government of Kenya has released Obama's authentic

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    birth certificate they also had a story saying that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump uh they were then Landing the links to those stories into a Facebook group uh of clearly conservative people for whom this was an exciting story to read and driving an enormous amount of Engagement around that all of them clicking on the site and they were making good money from programmatic ads that they were running on the site all of this was really connected obviously to the to the way that Facebook's

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    algorithm helps to sort of curate uh uh attention to make sure that people are engaged that they're getting likes and all of that feedback loop that they like to build to get everybody engaged and sort of keep their own advertisers happy but what I what I realized is that oh my God and I was just had just left the Wall Street Journal at the time and you know we had layers of editors above the

12. 5:28

    journalist and the the editor and the subor the editor-in-chief we had lawyers we had a whole Machinery of people we sent people off into war zones at high risk all so that we could get the facts straight it was the infrastructure that we built as a news organization to make sure that the truth was something that we could try our hardest to maintain and we were being beaten at this game by a bunch of guys who were just making

13. 5:52

    up at no cost of themselves I I just think this is an incredibly Stark problem so this algorithmic this algorithmic concept that we're grappling with here it's part code right you guys are all most of you are developers you know the ins and outs of code but it's part human biology right because what that curation algorithm is constantly learning for itself is what exactly it is that triggers our adrenal glands to release

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    dopamine right get a hit when we get a like get a follow get a new friend whatever it is all that is an algorithm tapping into our brains working with our adrenaline gland to keep us involved part human part machine um there's a woman called Anna LM who is a psychiatrist who spent most of her career studying the impact of or the role rather of dopamine in drug addiction and she says that social media is a bigger more addictive drug than heroin she refers to the iPhones in our

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    pockets as those uh digital hyper hypodermic needles um the impact of this is profound since 2007 when the iPhone was first released suicide rates for the age of uh people from the age of 10 to 24 has risen 62% um teenage girls reported last year that or 30% of them that they had seriously considered suicide more than 50% of that same cohort teenage high school girls say that they have persistent feelings of sadness and uh

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    depression this is a system the cyber bullying the body shaming this is what the algorithm is producing it's also as a by the way uh the the two of us didn't actually realize that we were having the same the same event here Chris's uh Speech did a lot of stuff that I was talking about this polarization that you'll see but ultimately our political system is is is trapped by this so you know if if you're a politician you're a brand and you've

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    got to play to social media that's how you get attention that's how you get votes so we get you know AOC with 13.2 million followers and she's obviously a fairly hard uncompromising Progressive left person and then you get nut jobs like you know marjerie Taylor green who you know is a q andon believer and she has $2.8 million millon follows which is pretty good because she was actually banned from Twitter for for two years

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    right so and here's PE Mitt Romney ran for president was a governor of of uh of a state was was was a mayor was was you know has a huge long history of uh of polit of politics and is one of the very few uh middle of the road compromising Republicans uh in Congress and he's only got 1.9 less than margerie Taylor green so the system is driving us into these polarized differences um this this system we we badly need to fix this thing guys but you know what it's been incredibly

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    profitable for the companies the platforms that drive it so if you if you include Nvidia which I think is relevant since they sort of pretty much drive the um uh the chips drive a lot of the llms that are part of this issue right now the market cap of these companies adds up to more than1 trillion right that is um in GDP terms the third biggest country in the world uh the profit of

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    course also is reflected in their um their sort of monopolistic practices so Google as we know right it is on 75% of all the world smartphones uh Apple of course being the other one and it's really probably no coincidence that they both charge exactly the same 30% fee for developers to develop on those right Google and Facebook have more than 50% of all of the world's digital advertising just think about that um

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    Google of course controls search Google has uh dominates navigation Google is in home management uh systems our our Smart Homes it is it it leads on video streaming right it is everywhere this is I mean the Rober Barons at the turn of the century had nothing on what these guys have and think about Amazon right Amazon is both the dominant e-commerce platform but also you know is controls our web hosting and it is it's a retailer on its own right so imagine if

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    you're a pizza joint and there are two pizza joints in town and you're the one that doesn't have a telephone those guys who got the telephone and you have to rely on them to take your orders for you and there's no record of when the orders come through right can you trust that the same Peacher joint is not going to like Fill Their Own orders for yours right this is this is a literally a a broken system of of of

23. 11:17

    Commerce so look we got to fix this but like what is the problem right one of the biggest problems is that we just don't have much awareness so the book that Frank and I are writing is inspired by this common sense um this was written by Thomas Payne was under a pseudonym at the time or an anonymous uh publication and it basically was the most influential book in history came out

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    1776 let people know that there was something that they had to see and could no longer unsee which was the broken state of the British Monarchy and what it meant for for the American colonists of course we had the revolution after that the Declaration of Independence and so forth we need people everywhere to to understand that this is a huge issue that the data that these machines

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    control that their right to that is a human right just as these guys back then were're talking about the enlightenment you know and we're at a Crossroads now because we could if we change the system we give people control over the over their data control over their lives decentralize the structure of the web the the kind of economy that we could create out of this the the the open data for for medical research the incredible new business models that will emerge out of that we have a huge

26. 12:34

    opportunity ahead of us but as christas saying we also have ai coming and if this is where things are going to go with the same web two companies controlling that data then God help us right so what can you guys do well I think people who are working on open web systems can do more than anybody a lot of you are working on the infrastructure and that's really important uh uh the

27. 12:59

    underlying fixes the very complicated gains of Building Bridges and making sure all this stuff is works and it's secure but you really need we need people to be involved in this we need people to build the killer app that allows people to understand that there is an alternative to the network effect drug that they have on Facebook or or Twitter or wherever we've got to change the way people think so build something beautiful and attractive and look come and look up the project Liberty which is what Frank mccort's organization is all

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    about it's an open system it's a it's a it's a a not for-profit Arrangement it's it's all about open source software there are inviting people to come and build on that so so please get involved we need to change this like we need a revolution so let's go and start one all right so hit me up and I can talk to you more about it