Project PAI, which stands for Project Personal Artificial Intelligence, aims to create decentralised peer-enabled AI identities for the new personal economy. The concept is unique and is certainly the first ever in the Blockchain space. The idea is that users get to create an avatar that would behave, think and speak as you would. This interesting concept has garnered a lot of news lately. On 29 Jun 2018, PAI listing on Huobi Pro was big news as being listed on the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world always is to investors. Traders can exchange against BTC and ETH. On 2 Jul 2018, PAI launched its mainnet to great fanfare too.
💻 The Information Economy is Broken. PAI Intends to Fix it by Sharing the Gains 💵
Project PAI is built on the premise that the current information economy is purely unsustainable. Users surrender personal data without compensation and technology companies scoop up these user data to profit from advertisements. In many cases, it is unclear how much of these data has been surrendered, and the true value of the profits are masked. This business model concentrates the data economy in the hands of a few internet titan companies and the value that the general public gains is largely negligible.
PAI Blockchain will recreate a public infrastructure to revolutionize this status quo. User may be able to own, provide for, manage permissions and conduct commerce with their data to unlock the true value of the personal data. These actions would be transparent to all on the Blockchain, and not have to rely on central parties to do so.
🏥 An AI Virtual Assistant in Healthcare, Social Networking and More
The use cases thrown up for a Virtual Avatar can look futuristic. The Virtual Avatar also known as Personal AI (PAI) will be able to take on work that has been outsourced to it by the user. The PAI can perform tasks on users' behalf, such that the user can focus on other pressing needs. The author believes that the lower hanging fruits tasks for the PAI includes chores that are online, repetitive and limited in varying features.
An example of such tasks could be in the healthcare space. Most of the correspondence for users in first world countries when it comes to healthcare is done on systems online. The task is largely repetitive - contacting healthcare providers, insurers, third parties in healthcare systems. PAI would serve as a bridge between these parties.
If the artificial intelligence can recreate the personality of the user through the data library provided, then it is plausible and probable that the AI could express your thoughts and opinions for you without your presence. This could keep up social interactions, although one has to question how would the user know of the interactions that took place. If 2 Project PAI were to interact without their users' knowledge, did the users actually have a social interaction? The futuristic concept seems to throw up more questions than answers.
🗽 PAI is Built on Noble Principles
PAI has 4 broad principles to adhere by - identical & realistic representation, verification, delegation and collaboration.
Identical & Realistic Representation dictates that the digital avatar will look, sound and behave like the owner. This will only be improved as users give up more individual data for the AI to model. Project PAI anticipates mobile augmented reality functionalities to play a burgeoning role in this space.
Verification is for the PAI to be easily recognized. This will be done through a Blockchain. Verifiers will be compensated with PAI coins, similar to mining activities.
Delegation will be when the digital avatars called PAI go out and do the bidding of the user. The use cases have been pencilled out in the previous few paragraphs. Delegation means that the user ought have full control of the PAIs.
Collaboration is when a user can instantly deploy a PAI into the network and start contacting, communicating with other PAIs. Trained PAIs should be able to mimic humanistic behaviours catered to the owner of the PAI, to enable smooth collaboration between PAI to PAI.
Teams and Partnership of Project PAI
The team with great ideas behind PAI are worth noting. Blockchain veteran Alex Waters is the technical advisor to Project PAI. He has held roles of on Bitcoin core development as well as founding his startup Coin.co (payments company) and Coin Apex (Blockchain Research Organization)
ObEN - a leading personal AI company - has adopted Project PAI's vision and is contributing to the PAI Blockchain Protocol too. Unlike PAI mainnet which is open source, ObEN in house R&D allows it to reach maturity in speech & computer vision, AI animation and natural language processing before rolling out.
🏂 Personal Artificial Intelligence - Would Give It a Try
The author would give it a try, simply to see first-hand the powers of a digital extension of myself. It would be interesting to see an extension of self not bound by time, computing and geographic constraints. The skills that may be deployed on the web seems to be boundless, other than the technical capabilities and accuracy of the Personal AI. Relegation of simple duties to a personal artificial intelligence and exploring the AI economy with a digital unit are enough for the author to dive into it. Investing in it may come after.
