David Chaum on Privacy & AI x Web3Privacy Now summit #2

it's uh so it's so great to be uh back in Prague uh here such a fantastic venue uh with all of you uh talking about privacy and well up until now it's been become I think pretty bleak uh seemingly the public has been sensitized to the power of artificial intelligence and its early precursors in social media to uh create misinformation and acrimony and basically fractionate civilization to a uh a point where we may very well go off in a totalitarian direction that I think if you think about it you you'll agree with me would very likely be an irreversible transition because the power of of AI to manipulate public opinion and values and so on plus you know spying on people on internet of things and and and and robots and so forth and so on I don't think there will be a way back from a misstep uh in this direction a seaing of power will be forever it's not like in the science fiction books and the you know the previous revolutions where you could just go out in the street and uh you know you it's this will be once and for all [Music] so interestingly and surprisingly [Music] privacy technology finds itself at the heart of the matter once again because actually there is a different way we could go forward and that is based on enabling privacy technology through a kind of jujitsu move to turn AI the power of AI around to help individuals protect their themselves their private spheres uh their control over civilization and so consider the fact that privacy technology has been very difficult to use in the past actually I know we've tried to make it easy but it's hard to use and that is not helped its widespread adoption and with people's decreasing attention span and so and so on we really can't expect widespread adoption without that fortunately AI can help us make privacy technology just as easy to use as any other technology and that's uh that's a great advantage and that's a new thing really new opportunity and it's coming at just the right time because uh we can disrupt major areas of Information Technology with privacy Technologies compelling advantages but still be just as easy to use so think about mobile telepan where you uh pay as you go you find the best carriers at each instant to give you the best bandwidth and latency and you are able to use uh uh mixing to to be located without actually um you know revealing your where you are what sort of informational stuff you're doing this is a very compelling use and through AI it can be just as easy to use as uh as anything in fact easier look at the the configuration Pages for you know T-Mobile's uh privacy settings for example and you'll see what I'm talking about um or consider another major important area of um identity this pervasive in Information Technology well there have been some fundamental breakthroughs recently Zanzibar and U factor and their their use uh combined with you know the long-standing idea of using different digital pseudonyms with different entities and using different knowledge proofs and so on to manage a kind of cred mechanism uh what I call it that's um that can all happen now in a way that's very easy to use but it would be incredibly difficult to use uh without help from AI so it can you could uh imagine people benefiting from this and not revealing uh extra information and deciding what exactly to show when and to whom and and negotiating these things and so forth and so on uh all through the help of AI so we're sort of turning the power of AI around to help people protect themselves and their information or consider the the whole area of payments and Investments you know you what you'd like is to manage a portfolio of all kinds of assets uh uh with the help of AI so that it's optimized for your risk tolerances and preferences and uh you know where you're traveling to where your friends are and so forth and so on the kind of industry you're involved in uh but where you could do that effortlessly and where you could transfer value from your portfolio directly to someone else's portfolio using a better than money technology without having to go through Fiat so this will kind of protect the public from these currency Wars that we're uh starting to see uh appear that no one will benefit from um [Music] and this is um you know these are examples of how we could basically create a world where the individual is empowered through protected spheres of of privacy to the the extent that they're able to meaningfully participate in the Democratic governance of civilization along with AI helping them manage this process and that's a vision I've articulated at some length uh elsewhere and what it can really lead to is something that was anticipated you know around the time I was born uh in a in a poem that was actually written at Caltech if you can believe it uh that uh has in the title the phrase uh Machines of Loving Grace so thank you so much and I hope we can all pull together to make this happen and change the world because privacy technology is it's the way through and this is the moment so I'm I'm if you're interested in joining up and making this happen just reach out to me David atom.com