Remove your doubts about AI and explore how this technology can be future-proofed using blockchain's smart contracts and tamper-evident ledgers. With this practical book, system architects, software engineers, and systems solution specialists will learn how enterprise blockchain provides permanent provenance of AI, removes the mystery, and allows you to validate AI before it's ever used.

Authors Karen Kilroy, Lynn Riley, and Deepak Bhatta explain that AI's ability to change itself through program synthesis could take the technology beyond human control. With this book, you'll learn an efficient way to solve this problem by building simple blockchain controls for verifying, tracking, tracing, auditing, and even reversing AI. Blockchain tethered AI interweaves the MLOps process with blockchain so that an MLOps system requires blockchain to function, which in turn tethers AI. This guide shows you how.

You will:

• Learn how to create and power AI marketplaces with blockchain
• Understand why and how to implement on-chain AI governance
• Control AI by learning methods to tether it to blockchain networks
• Use blockchain crypto anchors to detect common AI hacks
• Learn methods for reversing tethered AI

Review

Praise for Blockchain Tethered AI

The field of AI continues to march on regardless of the consequences. This thoughtful book explains how to balance innovative AI with checks and measures in order to both explain how AI got its answers and to tether it using blockchain to ensure that you get your desired results. Very little in this field has been developed, and this solid developer-focused treatise will have you up to your arms in code that will tame your AI and stop Skynet! Miss this read at your peril.

-Mandip (Mans) Bhuller, Public Cloud Expert and Technology Visionary

This book demystifies the advanced technologies of AI, ML, and blockchain, immersing the reader in an interactive exercise you can build on using these technologies. It was an absolute pleasure being one of the first readers of this highly valuable material.

-Tommy Cooksey III, Blockchain and Cloud Architect

AI is a superhero toddler. Without meaning harm, its laser eyes could reduce a city to ashes. The solution? Make sure the toddler does not have a tantrum in Times Square. This hands-on book describes this solution precisely and pragmatically.

-Jean-Georges "jgp" Perrin, Intelligence Platform Lead, PayPal, and Lifetime IBM Champion

Why We Wrote This Book

We wrote this book to share our knowledge and understanding of how to control AI with blockchain, because we believe there can be great benefits to using AI wisely. With AI, we have the ability to grok vast volumes of data that would otherwise be unactionable. The image below illustrates how AI brings us the ability to make decisions that could vastly improve our quality of life. We need the right amount of leverage over AI to reap the benefit of its use but still keep it under our control.

We think AI needs to be tethered because it supplies the critical logic for so many inventions. AI powers exciting technologies like robots, automated vehicles, education and entertainment systems, farming equipment, elder care, and all kinds of other new ways of working; AI inventions will change our lives beyond our wildest dreams.

Because AI can be both powerful and clever, there should be an immutable kill switch that AI can never covertly code around, which can only be guaranteed by building in a tether. It is worthwhile to invest the effort now to build blockchain tethered AI that is trackable and traceable, and reading this book is your first step.

Your three authors, Karen Kilroy, Lynn Riley, and Deepak Bhatta, have worked together for years at Kilroy Blockchain, developing enterprise-level products that use blockchain technology to prove data authenticity. This interest began in 2017 with Kilroy Blockchain’s award-winning AI app RILEY, which won the IBM Watson Build Award for North America.

RILEY was developed to help students who are blind and visually impaired understand the world around them by hearing descriptions based on images gathered from their smartphones. We thought that especially for this type of user group, we would want to be certain that the AI had not undergone tampering or corruption, and that RILEY always stays true to its intent of helping this population. RILEY, by the way, was generally pretty accurate, correctly identifying Karen’s dog, Iggy Pup, from the front as a Rhodesian Ridgeback. From the back, however, we all got a good laugh when Iggy Pup was misidentified as a duck-billed platypus.

One of the big steps in tethering AI is making sure that all data in all workflow systems is AI ready. Kilroy Blockchain’s recent products such as CASEY (a blockchain-based student behavior intervention system) and FLO (a blockchain-based forms workflow system) use blockchain as a control. When we add AI to CASEY or FLO, the data that has been produced by these systems over time is already tamper-evident because it uses blockchain. All significant events are able to be proven by transactions stored in tamper-evident, linked blocks. Nodes of the blockchain can be distributed to stakeholders, and the blockchain history can be viewed by authorized users.

Although AI has been around for 50–60 years, it has become far more powerful in recent years, primarily because hardware has finally advanced to a point where it can support AI’s ability to scale. Now, when we train machine learning programs in a massively parallel fashion, we may get results that we don’t expect as the AI learns at an accelerated pace. Dealing with a computer system that could potentially outsmart us would be something totally new to the human experience, and AI surpassing us in applications beyond games could pose a risk to humanity if we don’t prevent it now.

One way to do this is by building a backdoor into the AI, which is an alternate way into a system that is only known to a few people. Backdoors that are unknown to the systems’ stakeholders are unethical, especially if a developer uses a backdoor to gain unauthorized access. However, in the case of tethering AI, a backdoor known only to humans can be good because it can ensure that human engineers can always shut the system down, even if the AI tries to prevent itself from being shut down.

A backdoor may very well be needed if we listen to the most widely recognized technical leaders of our time. For example, according to Elon Musk, “I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me.... It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.” Musk also made a disturbing comment comparing AI to nuclear warheads, saying AI is the bigger threat.

Bill Gates also compared AI to nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, saying, “The world hasn’t had that many technologies that are both promising and dangerous [the way AI is].... We had nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and so far, so good.”

Nick Bilton, a tech columnist for The New York Times, notes that humans could be eliminated by AI: “The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.”

The concern about AI is nothing new. Claude Shannon, a 20th century mathematician who is known as the father of information theory, believed computers could become superior to humans, and put it bluntly: “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”

IBM takes the subject further than most companies that discuss the dangers of AI, suggesting blockchain as a solution: “Blockchain’s digital record offers insight into the framework behind AI and the provenance of the data it is using, addressing the challenge of explainable AI. This helps improve trust in data integrity and, by extension, in the recommendations that AI provides. Using blockchain to store and distribute AI models provides an audit trail, and pairing blockchain and AI can enhance data security.”

When we tether AI with blockchain, we can track and trace what the AI learns, and from what sources, while also ensuring that those sources are authentic. Then, when an AI model learns something and shares it en masse with other iterations of itself and other AI models, human beings can always track and trace from where the knowledge originated.

At the time of this writing, artificial intelligence is still in human control. Given all of this concern, we ask: why don’t we just fix it?

About the Author

Karen Kilroy is a lifelong technologist with heart, as well as a full-stack software engineer, speaker, and author living in Northwest Arkansas. This book is Karen's third publication for O'Reilly, following Blockchain as a Service (2019) and AI and the Law (2021). As CEO of Kilroy Blockchain, Karen has invented several products, including FLO, CASEY, Kilroy Blockchain PaaS, CARNAK, and RILEY, an AI mobile app that won the IBM Watson Build award for North America in 2017. Karen and Lynn Riley were selected as recipients of a National Science Foundation research grant in 2018 and focused their studies on autonomous vehicles. Karen was selected as a 2022 recipient of the Life Works Here award by the Northwest Arkansas Council and is a four-time IBM Champion. Karen is also a professional dragon boat coach.