Taming of the crypto hydra has lessons for how to wrangle AI

IF HOLLYWOOD were to make a sequel, say, How to Train Your Hydra, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would be its sword-waving hero. Last week, the SEC slashed at more than a dozen crypto tokens, deeming them unregistered securities in its lawsuits against cryptocurrency platforms Coinbase and Binance.

These tokens might not exist years from now, but what will certainly persist is a cautionary tale for other technologies. As we begin to wrangle the “new” and strange creature that is artificial intelligence (AI), the crypto space holds sterling examples of what not to do.

Bitcoin, for example, was launched in 2009, but it took the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) six years to pronounce it a commodity and therefore within its bailiwick. The SEC’s current flurry of crypto exchange clampdowns should have happened sooner as well – perhaps at some point before the worth of the offending tokens had ballooned to US$120 billion on platforms with some 100 million combined users.