Socioeconomic Systems of the Global Village

 

Whereas data is the fuel for intelligence, the brain is the engine that takes in data, cross-references it with previous data, sorts it into categories, makes judgments, triggers actions in the real world, and puts it into storage.

 

Replicating the human brain is very complex and difficult to master. However, breakthroughs are beginning to take place in the Global Village that will give Residents the ability to mimics human intelligence in some form. As this ability increases, the socioeconomic elements that enabled the Industrial Park model will fade away. As they fade, socioeconomic elements with a global reach will replace them across the Global Village.

  

According to Adelyn Zhou, a leading voice in AI, there are seven of these  of AI elements:

 

Act- systems that act based off rules like a smoke detector or cruise control.

Predict- systems that are capable of analyzing data and producing probabilistic predictions based on the data, like targeted ads or suggested content.Learn- systems that make judgments based off predictions, such as self-driving cars that act based of sensor data coming in.

Create- systems that create based off data, such as designing an art piece, architecting buildings, or composing music.

Relate- systems that pick up emotions based of facial, text, voice, and body language analysis, such as voice to text application and facial scan technology.

Master- systems that transfer intelligence across domains, such as recognizing that four different pictures all represent the same idea/word.

Evolve- systems that can upgrade themselves at the software or hardware level, such as humans in the future having the ability to download intelligence into their brain like it’s software.

 

This global socioeconomic system will be able to take in new data, process it against global databases of stored information, make judgments that lead to real world actions, and receive feedback that can used to validate future judgements. This process is a software algorithm that is able to evolve spontaneously as it interacts with data.

 

Streaming songs from Pandora or suggested videos from YouTube is a current example of artificial intelligence assisting human activity. YouTube servers offer a wide variety of videos on the platform; users click on videos they want to watch; they give feedback on those videos, such as a thumb up/down or leaving metadata in the form of how long they watched the video. This feedback is used to update the software algorithm. 

 

The AI software can also take someone’s activity and cross reference it with the data of other users who like similar videos, to then suggest better selections. Effectively, it’s self-evolving algorithm changing based on input data. This type of AI is referred to as machine learning.

The software that supported the Industrial Park performed simple functions based off geographically limited manual inputs. The AI software supporting the Global Village performs complex functions based off inputs extracted automatically from access to global sources.

At this time, Residents of the Global Village are leveraging AI technology to improve their local community. One example is the transportation system in Pittsburgh. Instead of relying on pre-programmed cycles, lights have been equipped with sensors that monitor traffic movements and respond in real-time to maximize flow. It also happens to be the city where many automated cars are being tested, which use embedded sensors to monitor the environment. Data feeds from traffic sensors operate autonomously to adjust traffic flow as it changes throughout the day.

 

Once large amounts of data and intelligent algorithms can be fed to the system,  AI engineers will develop an infrastructure to accumulate and process this data with little to no friction. That new infrastructure is evolving around distributed ledger technology.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

Human intelligence is so remarkable because it’s collaborative. The social reservoir of knowledge is a result of intelligence interacting with other intelligence. Having barriers between two intelligent systems slows down growth because it inhibits connections from taking place. The more connections that happen, the more intelligent something can become. In order to maximize connection in the Global Village, all systems need to be able to easily interact with one another. When this is possible, both data and its value can move freely between producers and consumers.

To understand the term distributed ledger technology, think of it as a family of technologies centered around shared ledgers and decentralized databases. In most cases the data and its value need not be associated with individuals or specific corporations. It is sufficient if the picture presented by the data can provide guidance and trend projections.

Blockchain & Other Shared Ledger Technology

Blockchain, the most well known DLT, is a shared storage layer able to process its own transactions and store the results in a common ledger. It’s powered by a distributed network of computers all running the same open-source software. Besides initial setup and periodic maintenance performed by each individual running a client application, a blockchain is a completely automated and self-run network, able to reach perfect consensus, while leaving no central point of attack for malicious actors. Blockchain  technology may be the secure database robust enough to serve the entire Global Village. No central authority is needed for a public blockchain, anyone can use the network and build applications on top of it, and transactions are peer-to-peer (P2P), instead of having intermediaries between parties. Similar to how the Internet blew up for data transfer due to its permissionless nature; public blockchains could have a network effect explosion as the dominant databases and mediums of exchange for both the human and machine economy.

Blockchains are often differentiated by the way the network reaches consensus and who’s rewarded for helping achieve it. There are a variety of blockchain consensus mechanisms, such as Proof-of-Work (POW) in Bitcoin, Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) in EOS, Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) in NEO, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) in Stellar, and Proof-of-Stake (POS), which has yet to be fully achieved, but Ethereum is pushing to be the first. At this point in history, public blockchains are poised to become the main highway of interconnection and value transfer across the enitre Global Village.

Smart Contracts

The second most known DLT are smart contracts, which are protocols within the blockchain that mimic legal agreements and courtroom judges. Economies require all types of agreements and arbitration of those agreements based of real world outcomes. Smart contracts are able to recreate this in the digital world by using if/then statements to trigger transactions based on the contract’s state. The basic premise is that a contract is coded just like it would be written, using if/then parameters. An example would be a derivatives contract where, if the product hits a certain price, then the customer gets paid out, but if not, then the customer pays the other party.

 

While IoT gathers data and AI processes data, smart contracts are the software infrastructure that uses data to trigger actual actions, such as payments, transfer of data, or storage of an outcome. It’s comparable to the human handshake in a business deal or a human pressing the SEND button to trigger an action. Since smart contracts reside within blockchains, they gain all the security advantages that come along with it too. Smart contracts are really a functional transaction layer that triggers autonomous actions using data to create what can only be described as a self-run economy with automated movement of value. Smart contracts are the most likely instrument of consumerism in the Global Village.

Oracles

Oracles allow off-chain data, such as that sitting on the servers of big data providers, to be fed into smart contracts to interact with the contract logic. Oracles also allow smart contracts to push data onto other systems once the contract logic has taken place, such as a smart contract triggering a payment on an external system like SWIFT, PayPal, or sending files to another blockchain. Oracles are the connectivity layer that glues everything together so all systems can communicate.

The Evolving Global Village Economy

As we transition from the Industrial Park to the Global Village, the sociaeconomic trends continue to point toward  an interconnected global economy. The economy of the Global Village will be increasingly open, moving towards real-time, and being run by automation. Developments that grew out of the Internet have brought communication to real-time across borders and allowed affordable travel to the average consumer. Thanks to apps like Skype, Zoom, and Google Meet, remote work/learning is now accessable for the majority of Residents in the Global Village. Cultural and technological barriers are  disappearing, especially as voice-to-text  and translation applications become common. All Residents of the Global Village understand this reality and will transition from Industrial Park economics without difficulty. Companies and their workforces that resist going forward will fall hopelessly behind  and be obsolete by mid-century.  Jobs and careers that permeated the Industrial Park will no longer exist. Education Degrees will become meaningless for all but technically astute entrepreneurs.

 

Over the next fifty years, the economic model empowering the Global Village will use data as a resource of increasing supply thanks to global data providers, IoT devices, and the Internet. The data can be leveraged by AI algorithms that refine it and use it to take intelligent actions in the real world. These actions are facilitated by DLT technology that connect everything together, trigger the reconciling of trade, and record it all in a shared ledger. Once the networks are put in place, they run themselves and can grow smarter over time. The human economy is not going to disappear completely, but it’s safe to say that the autonomous economy is going to eat into it more and more each year. Robotics are going to displace manual labor and be data driven, AI enabled smart contracts are going to replace intelligent labor, such as lawyers, accountants, third party intermediaries, data entry positions, and insurance adjusters. It’s just the beginning too, as an immense amount of developers are likely to start flocking towards developing AI algorithms and smart contracts. The more people that get involved, the more velocity the movement gains. Eventually, every product and service produced will be linked real-time to the consumers requesting them. And it will all be held in balance by DLT technology. Economic disruption will be a thing of the past.