Happy Friday and welcome to the Future in 5 Questions. Today, we have Sheila Warren — the CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, the leading advocacy organization for cryptocurrency and blockchain groups. She’s also the co-host of Money Reimagined, a CoinDesk TV show and podcast. As part of her decade-long career in tech policy strategy, Warren founded the blockchain and digital assets team for WEF, the group that hosts Davos. Read on to hear her thoughts about why crypto really matters, the ChatGPT hype cycle and why the government needs to let people play around with new technology. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. What’s one underrated big idea? That crypto governance is applicable across a variety of contexts. Decentralization and removal of intermediaries are things that apply across every industry, across every jurisdiction. It really is a fundamental element to how we build community. Given the focus from policymakers, the press and the crypto industry itself on financial services, I think we lose sight of the underlying, novel revolution in our ecosystem — which is fundamentally about a new way of governing ourselves and our communities. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? ChatGPT. There is no question that ChatGPT is fun as hell and there’s a tremendous amount of potential. For computer programmers, it is already becoming an invaluable resource. You don’t have to go to Stack Overflow anymore — you can just ask ChatGPT. But in many other areas of research and investigation, it remains juvenile. It’s all about what’s being fed into it, so it makes sense that the use cases are disproportionately skewed towards technologists and engineers. But if you talk to a sociologist or someone who studies literature, they will tell you that it's entertaining, you know, but it's not giving you actually useful information. It's a little bit like the early crypto days when people were like: “Blockchain for everything!” Now, it's like: “You can use ChatGPT for absolutely everything!” That is not true yet. And it may never be true. What book most shaped your conception of the future? Can I pick two? They go together. “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson. The book walks through all these spaces that I've lived and worked in. So like India, San Francisco, Davos and Boston. It talks about a vision of the future that I think is already upon us. It starts with this horrible climate disaster in India and then their government says, no one is coming to save us, so we're gonna take these fighter jets and blot out the sun to stop this heatwave. So the UN decides they need to have this ministry for the future that actually represents the future. It's a really critical read for anybody in tech or in policy. The other one is “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid. That book really changed the way I think about how we treat migrants as a society. By migrants, I mean people who are fleeing from somewhere. It's incredibly well written but really harrowing. The author doesn't really say what the impetus for the migration is, though it's implied that it's political in nature. But when I think about the polycrisis we’re in, I also think about the increasing number of climate refugees. I mean, right now, migration out of Sub-Saharan Africa is at an all time high. And people aren't aware of that. What could government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? Using it. A running joke is that the government is a generation behind, in terms of what people are allowed to use. In the United States, we have rules out of the Office of Government Ethics that you can't engage with crypto, even if you're responsible for a crypto portfolio. This is true across different kinds of technologies like AI, biotech and certainly the blockchain. Government should recognize that it's extremely challenging to regulate an innovative space to begin with. It's even more challenging if you literally have not been able to play around with the technology. What has surprised you most this year? That there remains such an appetite and interest for understanding crypto and blockchain technology in the U.S. Congress, despite the events of November, the FTX situation, and all of that. If anything, our engagement has significantly increased. That there's a new Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion, led by a Republican is very interesting. I'm really appreciating the fact that there are so many folks in the government taking this so seriously.
| 
