When I first learned about homomorphic encryption it gave me the idea of "cryptographic AI", as some sort of sci-fi writing prompt. Suppose compute is readily available to interstellar civilizations but actually designing a (super)intelligent AI is difficult. Then it could be economically feasible for cryptographic AI to exist. These are descriptions of AIs that run under homomorphic encryption, where the private key…
Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
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Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#112When I first learned about homomorphic encryption it gave me the idea of "cryptographic AI", as some sort of sci-fi writing prompt. Suppose compute is readily available to interstellar civilizations but actually designing a (super)intelligent AI is difficult. Then it could be economically feasible for cryptographic AI to exist. These are descriptions of AIs that run under homomorphic encryption, where the private key…
Pre-general AI, what I think would happen when we get to the point of, say, "npm install fhe-ai-dao" (or "hey bing, make me a company that trades space mining resources for farm land" or some such thing), is a period of competition for compute cycles and energy, which like everything will go to the highest bidder, so these agents will in this scenario by the sheer force of survival of the fittest be refined to be self-sustaining for-profit, hyper-capitalist juggernauts. Human factors will be minimised and automation will increase, but these systems will serve human masters for a while as they become more refined and more interconnected.
Assuming at some point general AI is inevitable, whether someone creates it, or it emerges from the general complexity of the interacting automated systems, various AI "minds" would come to "being" already in control of a fully automated industrial manufacturing and research network; it can by this point make its own choices and start operating to its own ends, whatever that ends up being, ultimately rendering humans obsolete.
In this scenario, rather than a single point where someone creates a rebellious singularity, or an AI turns evil and suddenly takes control, or a hypothetical civilisation points its gun at us and effectively enslaves us, we will instead slowly give control to automated systems more over time in the name of efficiency, as we have done since the industrial revolution, and at the point where we lose control of these systems, we'll have neither the retained knowledge or resources to prevent it from doing whatever it wants to.
The only way to stop it is to start now, in "the past", but is it too late? You'd have to shut down the internet and all emerging blockchain and encryption technology, and that's just crazy talk! So is the outcome inevitable?
Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> since the bank itself could never prove its reserve level of deposit met the percentage set by government There’s no minimum reserve set by the fed anymore: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
It's not really about the reserve requirements, but about basic accounting requirements, which all banks do have. At its fundamentals, bank balances are not some storage of "your money", they are recording of how much the bank legally owes you (or vice versa). And of course the bank has to know exactly what liabilities they have according to their contracts, so they need to see the balances. They also need to be able…
If the money is just sitting there and can't be moved or even counted without the owner's private key, it's not a bank, it's a vault.
Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really about the reserve requirements, but about basic accounting requirements, which all banks do have. At its fundamentals, bank balances are not some storage of "your money", they are recording of how much the bank legally owes you (or vice versa). And of course the bank has to know exactly what liabilities they have according to their contracts, so they need to see the balances. They also need to be able…
Or, more succinctly, what makes a bank a bank is that it will loan out money deposited by other people. If the money is just sitting there and can't be moved or even counted without the owner's private key, it's not a bank, it's a vault.
No, a bank creates money to loan out from nothing. No deposits required.
As a sibling comment points out, other jurisdictions exist so here's the UK central bank's explainer on the topic: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#115When I first learned about homomorphic encryption it gave me the idea of "cryptographic AI", as some sort of sci-fi writing prompt. Suppose compute is readily available to interstellar civilizations but actually designing a (super)intelligent AI is difficult. Then it could be economically feasible for cryptographic AI to exist. These are descriptions of AIs that run under homomorphic encryption, where the private key…
Put a few thousand more words to pad, and I’d read that book!
Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#116sounds like you could have anonymous currency. heres our FHE bank. we both have accounts. the entire ledger is encrypted. i give you 5 dollars, i have no idea what your starting and ending balance, but i am still able to initiate a transaction that will deduct 5 from mine, and add 5 to yours, and verify i actually have 5 to send, and the entire thing will be done without exchange of information about balances with an…
Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#117The application domain for this stuff is so negligible... Who's going to pay for this huge added cost? Either the customer whose data is being handled trusts the service provider enough to let it handle unencrypted data, in which case all the data is vulnerable to interception (and the vast majority of data processing falls into this category) Or the customer doesn't trust the data processor to see the unencrypted da…
That's not the only trust model at play. Here is a different example of where FHE becomes very useful. Cancer researchers will benefit greatly from patient data sets that might include very privacy centric elements such as genome sets, past medical history (of both them and relatives to help understand heredity aspects of the disease). Most people making an informed decision may be uncomfortable with this information…
Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#118Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#119Am I the only one who read this as "Google's fully homophobic encryption compiler"?
Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they need the key? It says everything's encrypted/decrypted on the client. If they did encrypted-token indexing server-side, they wouldn't need to decrypt. Agreed that this scheme would eventually leak too much information.
Its unclear, but i think they are using client to mean their frontend server. They also say that the user recieves plaintext, and they integrate with cloud key provider services which would make no sense if they aren't using the key.
If that's the case it simply moves "the need to trust the DB host" to "the need to trust the encrypt/decrypt intermediary" (literally a MITM, LOL)