More crypto news
So here’s the deal. Right now, as I type, a startup is using AI for distributed investment of cryptocurrency.
As is perhaps obvious, that’s relevant to my interests. If they worked in tea and death metal TokenAI would have Matt Salter bingo.
TOKEN OF ALL TRADES
TokenAI wants, more or less, to be the implementation of every potential gamechanger in real estate concocted in the past 5 years. Their pitch is straightforward, at least by the standards of real estate finance: over the last few years tech-savvy Wall Street types have traded in their standard indexes for AI tools – used here in the narrow sense of complex algorithms that self-improve – that identify the best bets in a given market. As is the nature of tech solutions, those algorithms have gotten smart and available enough that anybody can get and use them. They just have to be made available.
If TokenAI were just the first crew to make those tools available on the open market, that would be worth an article.
They aren’t. They’re pitching those tools to consumers in the form of a cryptocurrency exchange. TokenAI won’t just use robots to find you investment opportunities. They’ll convert the money you want to invest into imaginatively named Total Market Tokens, transferable into any of the many forms of cryptocurrency and as secure as money currently gets. Better still, your investment gives you voting rights on what gets invested where.
Barring a core administration team to swap hard drives and buy coffee, TokenAI’s business model is democratic: decisions get made on the basis that everybody with TMTs is a shareholder, with a proportionate vote on what gets done.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE (ALSO ROBOTS)
That’s the point where TokenAI stops being a clever but frankly predetermined outcome of the way online business is evolving. It’s easy to take that way, as an equation of “crypto + distributed risk + AI = X.” Their model presents a vital subtraction: they remove executive action. Decision making is democratic. Implementation is AI. No director or board thereof need apply.
To state the obvious, that’s new. To get less obvious, what matters is that it’s new. The idea that any group controlling a non-negligible amount of capital could roll without an executive team – I’d say it would have been crazy talk 5 years ago, but let’s level. To a good approximation of the entire business world, that’s crazy talk now.
But it’s possible. Whether it’s probable, or profitable, is an open question. At the moment, TokenAI is a website and a whitepaper, but they go live in October. As of next month, there will be smart people putting work and money behind the idea that you can invest, intelligently, without human input telling you how, where and why, because AI.
Changing the game
“Investment banker” is not traditionally included on lists of jobs in danger of being automated. TokenAI says otherwise.
If they’re even a little bit right, what exactly isn’t on that list? I mean, they already got me. Just what can you do that AI can’t?
#TokenAI
