Both Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain have enjoyed widespread popularity during the past few years, with the number of applications being built around these technologies growing at an exponential rate.
The main idea behind the Blockchain technology is to allow the storage of encrypted data in a highly distributed and decentralized way. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence – and one of its subdomains: Machine Learning – focus on learning patterns from huge amounts of data with the ultimate goal of predicting outcomes based on previously unseen data.
Whereas the working principles of both technologies are fundamentally different, researchers have explored the idea of combining their innovative properties to enhance the functionality of one another.
One of the potential use-cases is to leverage the computational power of Artificial intelligence to enhance the operational principles of the Blockchain’s architecture. Currently, many Blockchain applications – including Bitcoin – are designed in such a way that they require a large amount of computational power in order to be operational. This often results in high latencies, making it impossible to use the technology in high-frequency environments. Leveraging the computational power of Machine Learning algorithms and Artificial Intelligence allows to set up the architecture in a more intelligent way, thereby drastically reducing the required computational power.
Alternatively, Blockchain can be used to protect and secure the data which drives Machine Learning algorithms. That is, one of the key issues with Artificial Intelligence is that the technology often uses highly sensitive data – thereby creating vulnerabilities in the form of data leakages and security breaches. Using Blockchain poses a solution to this problem by providing a way to store encrypted data in a secure way. On top of that, Blockchain allows to clearly define who can and cannot access the data, thereby adding an additional layer of security on top of all AI and Machine Learning – related procedures.
Whereas combining Artificial Intelligence with Blockchain technology is still in its early stages, the examples above indicate that there exist real opportunities to combine the properties of both technologies to enhance one another. As both of the technologies continue to mature, it is quite certain that they will continue to grow towards each other to create even more innovative and powerful solutions.
