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Editorial

FORGET BLOCKCHAIN AND BITCOIN—

AI IS WHERE YOU SHOULD BE FOCUSING

IN COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

ANTONY SLUMBERS
The Blog

THE GREAT DOTCOM BUBBLE peaked in March 2000.
Over the next 18 months trillions of dollars of investment
capital evaporated. The great Bitcoin/Blockchain bubble
feels very much like it did in 1998-99. One cannot move
without being accosted by someone screaming that you
just have to get on board today. Of course, such bubbles
are tenacious things, and just as the smartest man ever,
Sir Isaac Newton, eventually could not resist going all
in with the South Sea Bubble (only to lose most of his
money), today I am seeing many smart people bowing longed ‘winters’ but over the last few years has advanced
down before the call of crypto. in leaps and bounds as a combination of improved algo-
rithms, massive computing power and unprecedented
If you are one of them, you most likely will lose your access to vast quantities of data has enabled theory to
money as well. Not because you are wrong per se, but move into practice.
just as in the Dotcom Bubble, you are probably a decade
too early. Most of the ‘crazy’ ideas that raised hundreds Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google sums up the current situa-
of millions of dollars in the 90s blew up—not because tion perfectly: “We are now witnessing a new shift in com-
they were bad ideas but because the technology did not puting: the move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world.”
exist to enable them to actually happen. There were many
1990’s simulacrums of Netflix, for example. Artificial Intelligence has had a storming half decade.
In just five years, it has gone from the world of science
Blockchains will have huge utility, as will crypto curren- fiction to mainstream discourse. Autonomous vehicles,
cies (the two MUST go together by the way—a Blockchain robots that can perform backflips, computers that now
without a cryptocurrency IS NOT a Blockchain), but not rule the roost at Poker and GO as well as the long since
for a while. There are real technical hurdles to cross vanquished Chess; all around us we read of one new
before this happens. So my advice is to put no more than breakthrough after another. According to Gartner’s famed
5% of your wealth into the crypto market and forget about Hype Cycle, Machine Learning (a subset of AI) is now
it. If you are lucky and invest in the winner you will do at ‘peak hype’, meaning that we can expect widespread
extremely well. But there will be many losers—and no, you adoption to be just two to five years away.
are not bright enough to know which will be which. No
one is. In three key areas, AI has enabled computers to rapidly go
from ‘Useless to Utility’. Computer Vision (face and image
Put your real effort, and money, into AI, Artificial recognition), Voice recognition and NLP (natural language
Intelligence, because this is an area whose time has processing) have all moved from being 20-30% error
come. A term first mentioned in 1956 at a conference at prone a few years ago to now being on a par—or even
Dartmouth College, AI has already gone through two pro- surpassing, in certain circumstances—with human ability.

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