2023 Joshua Schachter predictions

AI, identity and trust

AI

• haven’t seen innovation in the product side modulo AI

• giant growth in tech has been business vs. tech innovation

• image generation visceral, but not that important

• Video and text are more information dense - LLMs enormously more impactful

• Copyright, credit, ownership turbulence

• Photos are copyright or not, but music has more complicated ideas of ownership

• Legislation and non-practitioner understanding will lag 30 years

• Language models - complicates the marketplace of information

• Tough to eval quality of something

Identity & Trust

• Everything will become untrustworthy

• Huge bunch of people will not trust anything, huge bunch of people will trust everything

• When transactions can’t be trusted, p2p as a viable architecture disappears

• No such thing as core verifiable identity

• PKI as an identity thing - discussed for years - nobody wanted that, difficulty of use trumps security

• Existing social networks unlikely to innovate there, play against their own interests

• LLMs could look at things someone writes and help evaluate identity

• Pace of trust erosion picking up

• See systems designed around high trust

• Communication attachable to sueable person that can be punished

• Very low cost to spam

• Bring up the transaction costs to improve the behavior

• Reduce barrier to entry to make them big, increase tx cost to make them good - never did that second step