The founder of the leading smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH), is making the case for crypto privacy in the face of artificial intelligence (AI).

In a new blog post, Vitalik Buterin says that as AI bots get better and better at scraping data, so does the need for privacy.

The Ethereum co-founder says that zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and obfuscation technologies are far better than what the cypherpunks of the 90s could have imagined.

“Today, however, privacy can no longer be ignored. AI is greatly increasing capabilities for centralized data collection and analysis while greatly expanding the scope of data that we share voluntarily. In the future, newer technologies like brain-computer interfaces bring further challenges: we may be literally talking about AI reading our minds. At the same time, we have more powerful tools to preserve privacy, especially in the digital realm, than the 1990s cypherpunks could have imagined…

Without privacy, everything becomes a constant battle of ‘what will other people (and bots) think of what I’m doing’ – powerful people, companies, and peers, people today and in the future. With privacy, we can preserve a balance. Today, that balance is being rapidly eroded, especially in the physical realm, and the default path of modern techno-capitalism, with its hunger for business models that find ways to capture value from users without asking them to explicitly pay for things, is to erode it further (even into highly sensitive domains like, eventually, our own minds)…”

While he supports limiting some privacy – such as for large corporations or powerful individuals – Buterin says that the much bigger risk is an erosion of privacy, especially for regular people.

“Society has always depended on a balance between privacy and transparency. In some cases, I support limits to privacy too…

But from a macro perspective, the most pressing risk of near-future technology is that privacy will approach all-time lows, and in a highly imbalanced way where the most powerful individuals and the most powerful nations get lots of data on everyone, and everyone else will see close to nothing. For this reason, supporting privacy for everyone, and making the necessary tools open-source, universal, reliable and safe is one of the important challenges of our time.”

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