The Human Component: Blockchain, A.I. and a Brave New World
The year is 2021. Thousands of new cryptocurrencies are minted every year, each offering its own unique value proposition in an ever-crowded market, and yet, even with all the innovations, blockchain economy revolves primarily around investment strategy and decentralized finance. Looking for relief from economic hardship and uncertainty in traditional markets, people are eager to participate in the blockchain ecosystem. The NFT craze has inspired a new rush, but the growing popularity of digital artworks will never translate into a widely profitable, or equitable, digital economy. Alas, economic polarization has only been amplified. There have been few advancements in the creation of a decentralized workforce. Lacking the technical skills to participate in blockchain development, the average crypto enthusiast is nearly always relegated to the title of “Retail Investor”, hitting social media platforms hard shilling their favorite “100X” projects with a speculative fever, but otherwise having nothing to contribute. All of that is set to change. Oraichain has advertised itself as the first A.I. Oracle, bringing machine learning to the blockchain through their A.I. Marketplace and native applications, and while A.I. yield farming strategies are exciting for some, something even more impressive is buried within its dense and ambitious 2021 roadmap : jobs. Decentralized jobs.
Experts forecast global revenues from A.I. market will grow to $325.7 billion in 2021, of which data annotating services represent less than 1%. In fact, the entire data collection and labeling market is currently only valued at $1.3 billion dollars worldwide. In order for this sector to achieve the growth anticipated over the next decade, major advancements are needed in data collection. Data scientists spend most of their time preparing data sets and they hate it. They want to be building models. So big corporations gather their raw data and ship it off to a data labeling company for processing.
Data labeling might sound complicated, but it’s not. The company gets paid by the client to accurately tag photo, video and text data, but instead of using expensive data scientists, they rely on consensus to crowdsource amongst trusted labelers. The more accurate the labels, the more trust. More trust means more jobs available. As the industry grows, so will the demand for specialized data annotators with experience in law, medicine, engineering, etc. Not all labeling and data collection requires a specialist. Some of this work could be done by just about anyone, but without a human to label the data, A.I. wouldn’t know the difference between a pizza and a cat.
The release of decentralized crowdsourcing for A.I. labeling has many potential benefits. More data can be processed from a wider range of sources. Rather than a data set being labeled once by a centralized team, the labels could become more specific and improve in quality over time. Most importantly, it might mean just about anyone with a cell phone could work for themselves on the Oraichain platform, processing data for income without a specialty in blockchain, A.I. or even computer science. But what makes us think they can achieve this? They have successfully. launched their mainnet, created multiple applications that highlight use cases in copyright, finance and commerce, they have working partnerships with Ocean Protocol, Kardiachain, Vaiot and Rikkeisoft and they are only six months old. The entire A.I. sector in crypto is working together through Oraichain and this cooperation will bring greater progress, faster, than traditional A.I. Data Management. These developments will mean a brand new avenue for the working class to access equitable self employment globally, detached from regional economies through the blockchain.
While specifics aren’t expected until late Q2, Oraichain has teased crowdsourced A.I. Labeling on their roadmap and it could be more exciting than all of their other milestones combined. Hypothetically, it could enable an individual to participate in data annotating and collection directly on the blockchain, earning rewards for tagging data. And since decentralized crowdsourcing means no middle man, the potential to increase rewards for the worker and lower cost for the client seems plausible. The average salary for a data labeler in the U.S. is around $26k in 2021. If Oraichain achieves it’s milestones, they will not only have made Lionbridge AI look expensive and obsolete, but they will have effectively created the first environment in blockchain with easily accessible, decentralized work. No C.S. degree necessary.
There is a bottleneck in the A.I. data supply chain, but it can be solved with decentralized data. In order for data scientists to make advancements in machine learning models, we have to get them back to science. There are plenty of people who want to work from home, plenty of specialists looking for a second income and plenty of data that will need to be labeled. Let’s put all those mobile phones and laptops to work. And let’s do it without the corporate gatekeepers. Blockchain might be the “Blueprint for a New Economy”, but mass adoption will require real, equitable opportunity. There is a massive workforce just waiting for the next big push, but afraid that advancements in tech and an insurmountable learning gap will leave them sidelined. This might be just the opportunity the world is waiting for. The birth of a decentralized workforce will allow for greater freedom, metric based reward and promotion without discrimination, and the exponential development of A.I. applications, optimized with the human component. Oraichain just might be building the gateway to a better world.
***This is not financial advice. All opinions are my own and do not reflect opinions of Oraichain or any other parties mentioned in this post.
