The Future of Identity — TEDx Special — Part 1
Identity in a Cyberphysical World
This is the first part of my special around “the future of identity” related to my TEDx talk in October 2018 — be excited :-)
The connectivity on the internet in today’s day and age is defined by a few all-powerful companies such as Facebook or Google. This has also popularised the saying “They know you more than you know yourself.” But, when we ask the fundamental question of what is identity in a connected world and what’s its future is? There are a few addressable issues that pop up with the current identity system and thus a change is needed.
But before we move forward, let’s see how the meaning of identity has evolved over the ages. Starting with the most basic ones that are “I am I” and “You are you.” Further, we are given names to identify ourselves. Next up is our life stories, which are stored with say our parents, friends, family members and every person that we have interacted with so far. Each one of them has an opinion or an image of us in their conscience.
All of us have our life stories and they become a part of our identity as well. Like the time when you finished school and got your degree, that time is going to be the part of your identity. Similarly, when the internet came into existence some four decades ago, it gave us the freedom to make our own identity. Which came with its own benefits and then some drawbacks such as misrepresentation of oneself for personal gains. As the famous cartoon by Peter Steiner portrayed a conversation between two dogs, with one saying “On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog” to the other. This happened because the internet lacked an identity layer.
However, as the number of users grew on the web another problem arose — the rise of large centralised institutions such as Facebook. These can be compared to the governmental institutes that issue various identity cards to the citizens.
These institutes give you an identity once you have given them your personal info such as email id, name, DOB and much more. You can now use this “id” to login other apps or websites, which will also have your data once you log into them.
This is where the complications start because now you’ve put your trust in a centralised institution, and so have many others. The result? A lot of data in one place makes it easier to steal for hackers or people with bad intentions. Facebook has been repeatedly and successfully being attacked in the previous five years and now the stolen data is everywhere and its original owner nowhere near it.
To solve this we need to go to the roots or as Leonardo Da Vinci said:
“To develop a complete mind: study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Leonardo’s inference revolved around the duality of science and arts. However, with the current scenario, we are dealing with a duality of physical and digital worlds. Da Vinci’s words echoing again in a slightly different manner but in the same context. Learn how to see and realise that everything is connected in the cyber-physical world. Everything is physically and digitally interlinked.
When we apply this to the current situation the most effective solution is to connect everything in the cyber-physical world. Which essentially mean connecting every human, machine and biological entity. With machines, it is already underway and the adoption is staggering with the Internet of Things (IoT). The next step is to integrate humans and biological entities with the help of digital twins.
Our identities, which currently are stored with centralised systems such as Amazon or Facebook, are theirs to be monetised. It consists of a variety of different information, which can be true, outdated, inconsistent, etc. This helped to understand the major drawbacks of the current identity system which are:
- They are not designed in a user-centric way, which means they favour the centralised system designer.
- Our trust is on this one system, which is usually susceptible to privacy breaches, identity theft and cannot automatically verify the user’s attributes.
- Connecting all the identities across multiple systems is almost impossible, which might be needed for a single transaction purpose.
- Thes systems were not designed for the next generation of identity.
To learn about identity in a cyber-physical world, today’s identity concepts should be left behind. When learning about identity in the cyber-physical world we must not be biased by our today’s concepts of identity. We must acknowledge that identity is fundamentally changing.
Digital Twinning and Agent-to-Agent Transactions
In the Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution every human, object and machine will have a digital identity. This identity with its assigned data and attributes is called a digital twin. It might represent a human, an object or a machine and can tell the entire story of the entity it corresponds to.
Every digital identity or digital twin will have an assistant in the form of one or many agents which are developed through software code. These agents will play a tremendous role in providing us with a variety of services and must be understood, configured and controlled by us. This control will also include a system that identifies and curates faulty agents in an interlinked world.
This identity is not a future concept as developments in this direction started a good 20 years ago. An initiative from a few people have over time attracted many new ones. The current enthusiasm in both the developer community and the users is overwhelming.
As a result, the concept of cyber physical objects was born. Which essentially means that Industry 4.0 will connect objects in the real world with an identity and its agent in the digital world.
In this new digital world the identity is not static like it is now, it is highly mobile and dynamic.
Moreover, these identities are easy and quick to process, update, group and aggregate. Whereas, in today’s time identity is made through a long process of bureaucracy and paperwork. The dynamic character will be achieved through software algorithms along an entity’s lifecycle.
This is going to save a lot of money for its users. Gartner has estimated that IoTs powered by digital twins will save $1 trillion a year for users and businesses. It also projects that half of the major enterprises will employ these digital twins for optimisation. The digital twin will be a very important part of the circular economy.
Developing identities from non human objects will solve the rising problem of mismanagement among our day to day appliances and in industrial systems. This stem into a disruptive agent economy which will change the world forever. Focus will shift from top-down process to the bottom-up entity-centric, dynamically defined multiagent systems.
Interested in the Future of Identity? Get in touch with us:
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Mail: connect@interlinked.ai
Website: www.interlinked.ai
