What’s at the Intersection of Crypto and AI? Perhaps Murder

Security expert Ari Juels has been thinking about how technology can derail society for about as long as he can remember. That doesn’t mean Juels, the chief scientist at Chainlink and professor at Cornell Tech, in New York CIty, thinks the world is going off the rails anytime soon. But over the past decade — with the development of large language models that back increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems and autonomous, self-executing smart contracts — things have begun to trend in a more worrying direction.

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There is a “growing recognition that the financial system can be a vector of AI escape,” Juels said in an interview with CoinDesk. “If you control money, you can have an impact on the real world.” This doomsday scenario is the jumping point for Juels’ second novel, “The Oracle,” a crime thriller published by heavyweight science fiction imprint Talos, about a NYC-based blockchain researcher enlisted by the U.S. government to thwart a weaponized crypto protocol.

Set in the near future, readers might see some familiarities to today. Take the protagonist’s research into smart contracts that can go rogue — and kill — similar to Juel’s own 2015 academic paper about “criminal smart contracts.” Or references to Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov’s famous plaid shirt. Others, like a powerful AI tool that helps computers interact with and interpret the world, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, only came online after Juels started writing.

See also: The Man In Plaid

Thankfully, fiction sometimes is stranger than reality, and the prospects of smart contracts programmed to kill remain a distant threat, Juels said. He said he remains cautiously optimistic that if people start thinking about the risks today, and design guardrails like blockchain-based oracles (essentially feeder systems for information), it could help prevent problems in the long run.

CoinDesk caught up with Juels last week to discuss the burgeoning intersection of blockchain and AI, the ways things can go off the rails and what people over- and under-rate about technology.

Are smart contracts like the ones in “The Oracle” possible…