_ on current trends – by next year, 1% of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99%._
Oxfam

To refer to the vulgar disparities in wealth as encapsulated in the quote above as inimical to human growth and potential, would be, to use the old adage, a gross understatement. What it is, more than anything else is dangerous. Space and time do not make it possible to go into details as to the reasons this is the case. What can be discussed at length, at least on this platform, are the technologies that are emerging out of what is being dubbed, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, i.e., the incarnation of artificial intelligence. These technologies if properly imagined, can be positioned to cure the ills of this economic imbalance that is afflicting not only the developing world but all of humanity.

The extent to which this is possible depends on the extent to which these technologies are made available to the 99%. With this in mind, a group of overly technologically proficient individuals has emerged to make the fruits of the fourth revolution available to the global workforce, in particular, those who reside in the developing world.

Video Summary

Effect. AI is the name. Decentralization is the game

The question for the uninitiated is what is it and what does it do?
The name of this ecosystem is The Effect network. “It is a decentralized network that provides virtually all of the services required for a healthy and accessible Artificial Intelligence market. This network will replace several existing services in the current AI market and it requires no commissions, has a low barrier to entry and provides fast growth to its users.”

One of the hallmarks of this platforms is that it is working to upend the present system and by offering “an alternative to services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, OneSpace and Guru.com. The difference between Effect.AI and the aforementioned platforms is that it will operate fully on smart contracts deployed on the NEO blockchain, and in so doing directly connect supply and demand without the need for an intermediary party.”

But what does this mean for that member of the 99% who lives in Indonesia? As stated in their extensive literature? The operative word here is decentralization. This is simply because at the heart of the problem is the concentration of power and influence. Presently, only a handful of businesses and corporations control the AI industry, which means most of us will not have a share of the USD 15.7 trillion pie, which, according to PwC, is what the industry might be worth in 2030. It would be somewhat of a banality to delve into the downsides of what will happen if most people are denied a share of the AI bounty. Instead, it would be great to look at solutions, in particular, the one Effect.AI has come up with.

Effect Force to Yield Many Social and Economic Rewards

As the ecosystem grows, it will have many economic impacts and benefits. There will be numerous jobs in the form of tasks which can act as a source of income for network participants. This will not only bring more human intelligence to the Effect Network, it will also improve the lives of many, especially those living in developing nations who struggling to find a stable income.

This is why the Effect Force (Decentralized Mechanical Turk) or M-Turk for short, is so important. As the initial phase in this project; it will bring the Effect Network to the public. Using the Effect Force component of the platform, “developers and companies will be able to connect AI developers with the global workforce.” Through this initiative, delegates will assign jobs to people all over the world. This will allow participants to instantly earn EFX tokens, the currency of the ecosystem. Because much of these tasks will be done at the micro level, the opportunities for making money to supplement one's income becomes even greater. This means that a domestic worker in Brazil or Malaysia can take some time off work, say, during his/her lunch break to engage in some micro-tasking to earn extra money on the side.

Demo Video

I will employ a Use-Case Scenario to give a better illustration of how M-Turk works. Nala is a 25-year-old custodian at a local hospital in Johannesburg. This widowed mother of two is finding it difficult taking care of her preschool children now that the household income has been reduced to one. One should have mentioned that she is actually a trained driving instructor who lost her job in a recent down-sizing initiative. Of course, her hands have been tied economically and she has been meaning to get a second job for a while, however, working 10 hours per day while raising two children on her own does not make it easy.

A friend told her about Road-Match, a private, peer-to-peer, blockchain innovation that is built on the Effect.AI ecosystem. Road-Match is a company that creates software for smart cars to recognize signs. The car manufacturer is seeking to enter the South African market and has asked Road-Match to create location-specific software to train their AI to identify the nuances in the road signs and signals in South Africa because their AI is not able to achieve these things just yet.

Through the use of crowd-sourcing technology; Road-Match was able to design a task and make it available to qualified candidates in South Africa. Nala was among the successful candidates. She was able to complete the task and be compensated with EFX tokens.

This scenario not only shows how Effect.AI is assisting people in developing countries. It also illustrates how, by re-defining this relationship between someone like Nala and AI, Effect.AI will go beyond merely upending a system for upending a system’s sake and put power where it never was, in the hands of the people. By giving individuals, many of whom are on the economic margins, a slice of the, soon to be, USD 15.7 trillion AI market, it is only fair to assume that these individuals will become economically empowered. Drawing oneself out of poverty means that people, instead of being preoccupied with where the next meal is going to come from, will seek to innovate, and out of that it is anyone’s guess what people will come up with.

But not only will Effect.AI helping to alleviate poverty through Effect Force. “The result is that this will improve data and by extension the respective AI applications.” What Nala did was to train the AI using what is called, Human Intelligence Tasks or HIT’s for short. In doing this, she is both assisting in the development of the space and digging herself out of her economic woes.

Effect.AI Update

Built for Expansion

Though they have a wonderful project, Effect.AI is not resting on its laurels, and will continually seek to improve their product by continually testing and seeking ways of improving software like the one Nala worked on. One such area has to do with bugs and errors, which any seasoned engineer will tell you, are more than an annoyance. They can bring down a platform. This is where Effect Force, ups the ante. Using their ecosystem, companies can pay users on the Effect Network to find “bugs that are hard to see in a regular test environment…” and demonstrate that their software will be able to “withstand heavy usage”.

This is just one of the problems micro-tasking can solve. Think about millions of people working on the same thing. The likelihood of not solving all the problems of that software is almost nil.
The decentralization the Effect Network team speaks of will not only take the obscene wealth and power that is concentrated in the hands of a few. It will also bring the global south into the mix. This is an area that has long been neglected and this economic lifeline will breathe life into an oft forgotten region.

Conclusion

By building their product on the NEO platform, one of the safest and most secure ecosystems, Effect.AI has created something much better than the centralized systems we have now, seeing that it is, faster, cheaper and more effective.

One of the ways to gauge the seriousness and long-term viability of any project is to look at the rollout period. Now, to many, this may seem long, however, with a project of this depth and complexity, it makes sense. The team of sagacious individuals which just oversaw a successful ICO is acutely aware of this and is making sure that someone like Nala from Johannesburg can benefit from this multi-trillion dollar industry.

Additional Information

Effect.AI Website
Effect.AI Whitepaper
Effect.AI LightPaper
Effect.AI YouTube
Effect.AI Medium
Effect.AI Facebook
Effect.AI Twitter
Effect.AI Telegram
Effect.AI Review/Explanation Video

Written by: @nicholas83

Date: 5/13/18

For the @originalworks writing contest

effect2018