Snippings

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The emergence of transformer models that leverage deep learning and web-scale corpora has made it possible for artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle many higher-order cognitive tasks, with critical implications for industry, government, and labor markets in the US and globally. Here, we investigate whether the currently most powerful, openly-available AI model – GPT-3 – is capable of influencing the beliefs of humans, a social behavior recently seen as a unique purview of other humans. Across three preregistered experiments featuring diverse samples of Americans (total N=4,836), we find consistent evidence that messages generated by AI are persuasive across a number of policy issues, including an assault weapon ban, a carbon tax, and a paid parental-leave program. Further, AI-generated messages were as persuasive as messages crafted by lay humans. Compared to the human authors, participants rated the author of AI messages as being more factual and logical, but less angry, unique, and less likely to use story-telling. Our results show the current generation of large language models can persuade humans, even on polarized policy issues. This work raises important implications for regulating AI applications in political contexts, to counter its potential use in misinformation campaigns and other deceptive political activities.

From OSF Preprints | Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues:

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DeFi does not rely on intermediaries and centralized institutions. Instead, it is based on open protocols and decentralized applications (DApps). Agreements are enforced by code, transactions are executed in a secure and verifiable way, and legitimate state changes persist on a public blockchain. Thus, this architecture can create an immutable and highly interoperable financial system with unprecedented transparency, equal access rights, and little need for custodians, central clearing houses, or escrow services, as most of these roles can be assumed by “smart contracts.”

From Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain- and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets | St. Louis Fed.

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Nicholas Weaver, writing in the Yale Law School’s digital whitepaper on “The Death of Cryptocurrency” asks a fundamentally very interesting question about the fintech future, which is: “If a smart contract is a contract, and the terms allow an attacker to take the cryptocurrency, is it actually theft?”

This is not hypothetical 

A California federal judge has ruled that South Korean crypto project ICON (ICX, a blockchain-powered network that supports smart contracts and was historically considered South Korea’s answer to Ethereum) may have acted improperly when it instructed Kraken and Binance to freeze 14 million tokens minted by a crypto “hacker”. The word hacker is in quotes here, because it’s a matter of some dispute what constitutes a hack when it comes to smart contracts on a blockchain.

In this case, the alleged hacker, Mark Shin, countered that he had never hacked any part of ICON’s system, but he had [simply used the code as it had been programmed]. Mr. Shin’s lawyer is quoted as saying that “if the blockchain says you have certain tokens, and you didn’t take those tokens from another individual, the rules of blockchains are that that property belongs to you”. In other words, code is law and this has nothing to do with “hacking” and everything to do with redistributing value to, as my friend David Gerard would put it, cryptographically more deserving causes.

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Just the top 10 major cryptocurrency exploits garnered over $2 billion for malicious actors in a year that was marred with bankruptcies and collapses.

From The 10 largest crypto hacks and exploits in 2022 saw $2.1B stolen:

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While most jurisdictions apply the Basel rules to their entire banking system anyway, the US has a strong and powerful community bank lobby, and US community banks are usually quite aggressive in their use of the borrow-short/lend-long business model.

So the Fed adopted a rule under which only the very largest international banks were subject to the full Basel NSFR requirements (several of those large banks are actually holding companies for foreign institutions). It adopted a second tier, under which the ratio only had to be 85%, and a third tier where it was calibrated to 70%. And even then, the majority of US banks are not required to follow the NSFR or LCR standards at all.

Despite being the 16th largest bank in the US by balance-sheet size, SVB was apparently not subject to the “no more Dexias, no more HBOSes” regulation.

From Silicon Valley Bank is a very American mess | Financial Times.

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Overall, consumers trust PayPal to store their money in an app more than they trust their bank to store their money in an app. There are nevertheless some consumers who trust their banks more: the consumers who have either never stored their money in an app, or who have only stored their money in a merchant app. After PayPal and their banks, consumers most trust Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Amazon and American Express, in that order.

From Money-Storing Apps Grow With Consumers’ Embrace | PYMNTS.com:

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The Digital Markets Act was drafted to address this need. It features a list of “dos and don’ts” aimed at preventing so-called gatekeeper platforms from abusing their position in digital markets, and enabling some space for new entrants to compete with incumbents on their merits.

From Tearing Down Big Tech’s Walls by Margrethe Vestager – Project Syndicate:

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The widespread use of digital veils — AI interface + augmented reality (as in the TV series Years and Years). Facial recognition has become meaningless

From Artificial intelligence in 2040 — The Information Forum:

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But faced with the tech future arriving on fast-forward, policymakers and strategists have increasingly been resorting to science fiction writers to help them imagine what is accelerating towards us. The latest example is Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which commissioned PW Singer and August Cole to write eight short stories about future warfare. The US, Canadian, Australian and French militaries have also conducted similar literary exercises, creating a demand for “fictional intelligence”.

From ‘Fictional intelligence’ can blind us to real-world dangers | Financial Times:

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The first, best articulated by the late Ursula Le Guin, is that science fiction is descriptive more than predictive. Science fiction writers construct literary “lies” that simply reflect the dreams, fears and experiences of their own times. “All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent telling lies,” she wrote in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness.

The second challenge is that by focusing on remote future scenarios we distract ourselves from the more pressing, and often overlooked, threats of today.

From ‘Fictional intelligence’ can blind us to real-world dangers | Financial Times:

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But Singer accepts that many military failures, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, were predictable, but largely ignored due to a lack of attention. Far from being unimaginable “black swan” events, these were big, obvious and ugly “grey rhino” events.

From ‘Fictional intelligence’ can blind us to real-world dangers | Financial Times:

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Payment service provider Worldline has launched a shopping mall as a white-label solution in Decentraland to enable all-industry companies worldwide to enter the metaverse.

Looking to help merchants, banks, and service providers to create an initial presence in the metaverse, Worldline launched the shopping mall on 8 March with 9 stores having already joined, including Germany-based direct bank Consorsbank, Switzerland-based luxury hotel The Chedi Andermatt, and Australia-based non-alcoholic spirits brand Naked Life.

From Worldline enables companies to enter the metaverse – ThePaypers:

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The starter package includes a multitude of features targeting metaverse newcomers, providing store tenants with the Worldline payment function, with or without cryptocurrencies, and a set of advertising services. Stores and products are assisted with achieving increased visibility and creating ‘innovative’ customer experience through means of optional add-on packages such as target advertising, phygital products and augmented reality, provided through partnerships with 42Meta (target advertising), Metyis (phygital products) and Threedium (augmented reality).

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Morgan Ricks, a professor at the Vanderbilt Law School and a former Treasury official, was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that “there’s nothing inherently dodgy about stablecoins. But there is something inherently dodgy about banking, which is why countries build elaborate regulatory regimes to protect deposits”.

From Locking The Stablecoin Door After The Horse Has Spent All Of The Crypto On Carrots And Then Vanished Over The Fence:

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Account Abstraction (AA) aims to use smart contracts to execute crypto transactions, by creating certain validity rules. With AA, users won’t need to sign off on every transaction with one’s private keys.

From Ethereum Account Abstraction Could Make It Harder to Lose All Your Crypto:

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On Ethereum, users have the ability to create two types of accounts: External Owned Accounts (EOA) and Contract Accounts (CA). The two account types differ in terms of how they initiate transactions over Ethereum’s network.

EOA’s, the typical account-type for Ethereum users, are the type of account you use if you have used a wallet provider such as MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet.

With an EOA, users are given a pair of keys: a public and a private key. Anyone can send funds to an EOA using its public key. But only the account’s owner – whoever has access to the account’s private key, which should be kept secret – can actually initiate transactions from the account.

CAs, better known as “smart contracts,” are like mini computer programs that live on the Ethereum network. These accounts are controlled by code – not private keys – but they cannot initiate transactions themselves; an EOA needs to send a transaction (which you can think of like a message or instruction) to a CA in order for it to make transactions of its own.

On Ethereum, users have the ability to create two types of accounts: External Owned Accounts (EOA) and Contract Accounts (CA). The two account types differ in terms of how they initiate transactions over Ethereum’s network.

EOA’s, the typical account-type for Ethereum users, are the type of account you use if you have used a wallet provider such as MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet.

With an EOA, users are given a pair of keys: a public and a private key. Anyone can send funds to an EOA using its public key. But only the account’s owner – whoever has access to the account’s private key, which should be kept secret – can actually initiate transactions from the account.

CAs, better known as “smart contracts,” are like mini computer programs that live on the Ethereum network. These accounts are controlled by code – not private keys – but they cannot initiate transactions themselves; an EOA needs to send a transaction (which you can think of like a message or instruction) to a CA in order for it to make transactions of its own.

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Ethereum supports push payments but doesn’t natively support pull payments – auto payments are an example of pull payments.

From Visa Crypto Thought Leadership – Auto Payments | Visa:

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