Chelsea Manning wants to put the cryptography back in crypto

From regulating AI to giving crypto a makeover, Chelsea Manning shares insights and thoughts on the hottest topics in tech right now.

Chelsea is perhaps best known as a WikiLeaks whistleblower but the data scientist and activist is now working as a consultant to privacy startup Nym.

In this wide ranging conversation Chelsea talks about everything from AI ethics and the responsibility of individual technologists to ensure the products they work on are safe for the end user, to moving away from NFTs and Bitcoin in order to “put the cryptography back in crypto”.

“We’re held to a different standard than, say, a surgeon, and I wouldn’t want to go to a surgeon who has the mentality of ‘break things and figure it out later’,” says Chelsea.

“We’re in such a new environment and a new time. While we’re moving fast and breaking things, we have to think of the consequences of what that means.

“How we train the data, what training data we use, and understanding the limitations of what we can do ethically with this kind of technology are, I think, very important.”

Crypto is more than digital currencies

Chelsea moves on to the topic of crypto, saying “it’s unfortunate that crypto has become about about tokenized assets – things like Bitcoin, things like Aetherium, non fungible tokens, utility tokens, stable coins etc.”.

“I think that there’s a much wider number of use cases for the underlying tools, the components of a blockchain, the components of cryptographic primitives, the components of an elliptic curve Diffie Hellman computation and public key infrastructure,” adds the security consultant.

Chelsea Manning, security consultant with Nym was in conversation with Leo Schwartz, reporter for Fortune on Centre Stage at Web Summit Rio 2023.

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Main image of Chelsea Manning, security consultant for Nym, speaking on stage at Web Summit Rio 2023: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)