Why the specter of blockchain will be more important to human kind than AI?
These are the insights from a speech by Wang Feng, prominent Chinese blockchain investor, at Peking University.
Bitcoin and Blockchain are the technological spectres of our world today, and is slowly stepping into reality and changing our perceptions about these spectres today. While many dismiss it, some accept it and some speculate on it and some sit idle and merely observe the changes around them.
While many of us have heard about bitcoin, but very few of us have knowledge of the underlying technology i.e. blockchain. Blockchain is the underlying technology of bitcoin and is completely decentralised without any centralised organisation controlling or managing it.
Today more blockchain projects have begun promoting the maturity of the applications and the applications of the blockchain technology to industrial and consumer markets. Some people are of the opinion that “meeting of the minds” is the greatest value in the blockchain. But whatever happens next is unpredictable as this is not the world that we knew before.
World Wide Web (www) was originally created with the intention to make it easy for everyone to share information with each other online but centralisation has led to the internet not being open anymore. But Facebook, WeChat are closed systems that have isolated information, drifting apart and hindering the free flow of information on the internet, completely shattering the hopes of the creators behind it.
The blockchain technology model consists of a 6-layer structure consisting of a bottom-up data layer, a network layer, a consensus layer, an incentive /economic layer, a contract layer, and an application layer. This model will give us a freer, transparent and fairer world.
The AI which was a progressive improvement follows the trend of increasing productivity and growth in human history. As we all know AI includes robots, speech recognition, computer vision, natural language, expert systems and more. It improves productivity by letting the machines do all the work and letting the humans do less or no work at all.
But if this happens then our very existence becomes questionable because we no longer have the power to become a producer in the future. If we get carried away with the technological progress and lose our ability of being productive, we will completely be replaced by machines, and controlled by few monopolists who own the AI systems. With blockhain, humanity will no longer be under the clutches of the robot dominion and will bring about a new prosperity in productivity growth.
We are already aware of how internet has destroyed the traditional business and channels but is the strongest and the most centralized channel. On a e-commerce platform you are always at the mercy of the international channel that you are on. But with blockchain, producers can promote their products and content directly and judged within the community. If the content is good, everyone will be willing to share it because they too will get rewarded for it. They are not at the mercy of any internet channels resulting in the widespread promotion of good products and content and their prices will rise.
Thus blockchain increases human prosperity through changing the way that value is distributed throughout the world which is much more helpful than what AI can bring in the way of greater productivity. The core of blockcain technology is built on trust. Its unique ability is to establish trust among distributed nodes, an algorithm that powers the exchange of rights and interests.
The extreme centralization in our internet model today will lead to more negative social effects and externalities. One of the cases was of Facebook were 50 million user’s private information were disclosed and the data was used to intervene in political elections. The emergence of blockchain with its distributed and decentralized solutions will overcome this pain.
In the future even the internet companies will integrate blockchain technology into their products and similarly even the blockchain companies will also combine the existing internet technology and user base so they can expand at a larger scale.
Thus blockchain and internet will probably converge in the near future and many of us will pay more attention to blockchain and try to understand its difficulties and opportunities during its development phase.
