Oracles Science Fiction and Not So Science Fiction | Ari Juels - Cornell Tech + Chainlink Labs

and a but these guys seem like the kind of people who would just prefer if you at them on Twitter so just do that um I think we all already know this man but I'll just do a small introduction professor at Cornell and Cornell Tech zi jeel and he's going to be talking to you about what happens when AIS and protocols become a problem okay can people hear me raise your hand all right at least a few that's good good story I'm delighted to be here with you today I'm going to talk about my Thriller novel The Oracle which was released just last week last Tuesday as it happens now the book is science fiction but it's also also a scientifically based exploration of the near future and I'm going to focus today on one of its Central me messages a caution about the combination of blockchains and AI now to be clear the convergence of these two technologies is both powerful and promising in my view and I'm looking forward for instance to the panel later today about decentralized AI which is something that's realized of course using blockchain technology but there's also a potential dark side back in 2015 2016 co-authors and I wrote this paper that implicitly warned about how AI could be used with smart contracts to lead to the emergence of something that I'll refer to as Rogue smart contracts or Rogue contract for short a rogue contract in a word is a smart contract whose purpose is to sell criminal services or to solicit a crime for money for a bounty paid out in cryptocurrency and it does so of course using the trust properties of smart contracts let me give you a little example to illustrate this is a benign example nobody gets hurt many of you may be familiar with the coor diamond it's one of the world's most famous gemstones and it's part of the British Royal Family's collection of jewels sits in the to Tower of London but it has a contentious history it's a politically contentious thing and there are many people in fact who believe that it's cursed so you can imagine that somebody might want it to disappear doesn't necessarily want to possess it just wants it to vanish from the Tower of London well such a somebody could create a rogue contract that pays a bounty let's say $100,000 in cryptocurrency to whoever makes this Diamond disappear now of course there are two questions here how does the contract know to begin with if the diamond's been stolen and number two how does it determine to whom the Bounty should be paid should the diamond disappear to answer these questions I have to quickly introduce a concept known as a calling card this is an exotic detail left at the scene of a crime whose purpose is intentionally to identify a criminal to the world so for example if you've seen the classic and delightful P pather movies there's a jewel thief who uses the name the Phantom played here by David nien and his calling card is a glove monogrammed with the letter P which stands for Phantom of course so if a jewel disappears and this glove is found at the scene of the crime everyone knows that the theft was committed by the Phantom okay with that Concept in mind I can show you how a rogue contract would work for this particular scenario so let's suppose this is the first time that the thief has used this particular calling card at a crime what the would be Thief does is take a description of the calling card monogrammed P glove and sends it in concealed form to the contract so you can think of it as encrypted or using a cryptographic commitment at that point the diamond gets stolen and the news reports famous Diamond stolen coor is gone at the scene of the crime was left this monogram P glove and now the contract checks after the thief reveals the calling card the thief now decommits it or decrypts it the contract checks whether there's a correspondence between this revealed calling card the monogrammed P glove descriptor and news reports of the crime and if they match because the criminal was the only one who could have known in advance that this was the calling card for this particular crime the Bounty is paid out to whoever revealed the correct calling card now where does AI come into play here here to establish this correspondence between the calling card and the News you need to make use of an AI tool like an llm like chap GPT and this would naturally reside in an oracle so the contract would pose to the Oracle the question does do the news reports match the calling card and if the llm says yes the Bounty is paid as I showed I've left out a lot of details of course but knowing how smart contracts work what you can appreciate is that all of this can be done without the person who offered the bount and the thief having to trust one another or ever having met and this is what makes Rogue contracts potentially so dangerous now my novel The Oracle is about a man happens to be a software developer at an oracle company who's targeted by a rogue contract in the case of the novel the contract is offering a Bounty again cryptocurrency reward for him to be killed and of course is suitably coded smart contract is in principle Unstoppable so our heroes faced with this Unstoppable force and essentially an impossible task to terminate the smart contract this is the Crux of the novel and this of course is what makes it a thriller I want to make a few remarks first Rogue contracts of the type that I described are technically feasible thanks to the Advent of chat GPT and other powerful llm but happily they're not possible with today's infrastructure we have time not possible yet so the no novel is among other things a cautionary tale about the future of blockchains and AI it's also worth taking stock of the bigger picture right we all worry about Rogue AI by which I mean this Godzilla likee thing that's somehow going to escape into the real world and go on a rampage for example one of the nightmare scenarios would be an AI agent gaining control of a weapon system an autonomous weapon system or somehow seizing control of cyber physical infrastructure like autonomous vehicles but there's a vector of Escape that many of us Overlook and that is the financial system Godzilla with a wallet if you will because if you can control money you can impact the tangible world World in ways good and bad and the scenario that I described for instance becomes possible so we have to ask ourselves what should we try to do about Rogue AI accessing crypto assets well oracles are going to facilitate llm use and if we're not careful potentially can facilitate it in the scenario that I described but they'll play another role oracles are going to act as Gatekeepers between AI tools and blockchain assets so we can potentially flip the scenario that I described on its head and instead ask how oracles can enforce AI safety when it comes to crypto assets and this is something that my colleagues at chain link labs and in Academia and I are taking very seriously and are starting to explore and something that I hope others like you will also give serious thought to that's it for my talk if you'd like to learn more about my novel it's a website URL and QR code there and I'll be offering complimentary books and signing books if you like at the chain link Booth later this afternoon and I'm looking forward to seeing you there thank you GM everybody