Andrew Yang, former candidate for President of the United States and mayor of New York City and founder of the Forward Party, made sobering observations about the uses of blockchain, or its lack of use, in the United States and American regulation of the artificial intelligence (AI) when speaking on November 16 at the North American Blockchain Summit (NABS) in Fort Worth, TX.
Yang, who described himself as “a big believer in smart money and currencies,” said he saw blockchain and Web3 technology in a sorry state, especially in the United States, creating the risk of companies fleeing. abroad. Part of the problem is public perception, Yang said:
“The way to avoid this fate is to have positive use cases for blockchain to solve problems for the American people. […] Unfortunately, what you see on the news is just Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.”
“We haven’t scratched the surface of what these tools can do to combat poverty,” Yang said. She also saw other potential applications of blockchain technology in civic life. “Something I’m very passionate about, why can’t we vote from our cell phones?” he said.
Related: FTX Collapse Could Trigger an ‘Appetite’ for Tighter Regulation, Says Andrew Yang
Yang also expressed concern about AI, saying that US policy on AI is “quite limited, perhaps even incoherent.” Yang was among 2,600 technology leaders and researchers who signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4. He reiterated at NABS: “We may be getting ahead of ourselves with the development of these generative models.”
AI is closely tied to politics, Yang said, because of the effect it could have on campaigns and public life in general. He said:
“A big fake of the Pentagon on fire was seen and the markets acted accordingly.”
The American regulatory approach (“let’s wait until the fiasco happens and then we’ll have hearings on it,” Yang called it) and the “winner-take-all” economy are part of the problem. In that atmosphere, the benefits of technological advances will be divided very unequally, worsening existing divisions in American political life.
An IPR special correspondent attended the recent Florida Forward Party kickoff, where Andrew Yang declared that he supports Rep. Dean Phillips over President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary. Follow IPR for more information! #flapolhttps://t.co/7jl6oR3lsv
— Independent political report (@I_P_R) November 16, 2023
Social media is governed by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Yang said. Facebook didn’t even exist in 1996. So while AI legislation is expected to be passed soon in the European Union, “we are in danger of falling straight into space because our legislative body is not functioning at a high level.”
Magazine: Crypto City: Guide to New York
