When you go to a web site and are asked to distinguish between a moped and a motorcycle or some stairs and ladder in order to prove that you are an actual person (rather pointlessly, as it happens, since robots are already better at doing these puzzles than people are) don\u2019t you wonder if there might be a better way? I mean, couldn\u2019t someone just tell the social media site, the internet dating app or the online review service that you are actually a person?<\/p>\n
an article written by David Birch, author, advisor and world-class keynote speaker on digital financial services. He will deliver a keynote speech at\u00a0Banking 4.0<\/a>\u00a0with the topic: The Real AI Revolution: (Hint: it\u2019s not robots in branches).<\/em><\/p>\n Pretty soon people will be in a minority online, if they are not already. Nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots last year and for the fifth consecutive year, the proportion of web traffic associated with \u201cbad bots\u201d grew (it is now a third of all traffic<\/a><\/strong>) while traffic from real human people continued to fall. We\u2019ve been fighting hard with spam filters and firewalls and what not, but AI means that our defences are about to be overwhelmed and pretty soon the majority of internet traffic will be bots talking to other bots. Without some significant changes in the infrastructure the web will be unusable and fade from human attention.<\/p>\n (The Canadian author Cory Doctorow has a nice turn of phrase around this. He notes that since \u201cbotshit\u201d can be produced at astonishing scale \u2014 Amazon has had to cap the number of self-published \u201ebooks\u201d an author can submit to a mere three books per day \u2014 we are facing a crisis of\u00a0\u201dcoprophagic AI\u201d<\/a><\/strong>.)<\/p>\n Whether it is about writing books, submitting reviews, finding a date online or anything else, the problem of knowing whether a user is a person or not is a problem that has plagued the Internet from the earliest days and there are plenty of initiatives underway to try and do something about it from Mr. Musk\u2019s blue ticks to Worldcoin\u2019s eye scanners, but none have yet transformed the mass market.<\/p>\n I think that the solution has been obvious for many years though. Why not have some kind of certificate that attests to the fact that you are a real person and that can only be used by you? This is what identity people call a \u201cverifiable credential\u201d and I am very much in favour of the use of verifiable credentials that contain important attributes that are necessary to allow transactions to occur but that do not contain any personally identifiable information. A simple virtual identity with the credentials IS-A-PERSON and IS-OVER-18 would\u00a0serve most people for most purposes most of the time<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Given that there are good reasons for thinking that the existence of an IS-A-PERSON credential might be the trigger for the evolution of a more comprehensive identity infrastructure suited to the modern age \u2014 because for advertisers, journalists, voters, shopkeepers and to many others, the IS-A-PERSON credential will be an essential prerequisite for all kinds of transactions \u2014 you might imagine that the problem has already been solved, but it has not.<\/p>\n I remember seeing identity guru Eve Maler, the former CTO of Forgerock, give a keynote at the Identiverse conference and say that IS-A-PERSON is the most important credential of all. She is, as you would expect, absolutely right. So who will provide this critical element of digital public infrastructure?<\/p>\nThe Botnet<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Who Says?<\/strong><\/h2>\n