The Future Of Identity — TEDx Special — Part 2
Understanding Software Agents and “Autonomous Digital Twins”
This is the second part of my special around “the future of identity” related to my TEDx talk in October 2018. Please find the first part here.
In the first part, we discussed the definition of identity in its current form, its future and the concept of digital twinning. We also listed how digital twins with a decentralised identity are going to change the face of the current identity system and have the power to turn the existing system upside down. Digital twins will be entity-centric rather than being the centralised system maker-centric. The next step in this process is making these entities autonomic and that will be done with the help of agents which will represent these in various situations.
Software agents are defined as computer programs, that act on a user’s or another program’s behalf in relation to an agency. The user of an agent can be a human, object, machine, plant or organisation, to name only the most common entities. For the Interlinked Protocol, we are providing protocol agents for various tasks, that the agent can accomplish on behalf of a digital identity. However, let’s dive deeper into agents and their relation to digital identities and have a look on their equivalents in nature.
Digital Twins and Agents
There have been rapid achievements made in solving major problems of todays digital identities. However, making them decentral available is still a challenge for the industry. In the near future, besides humans, every object and machine will have a digital identity. If the digital identity has related verifiable data, we name it digital twin. This digital twin will have ubiquitous digital companions in the shape of agents, in order to manage its transactions and interlinks. Hence, Interlinked is combining digital twins of human and non-human entities with intelligent software agents. We call this pair of data and software an ‘autonomous digital twins’.
Learning From Nature
The large-scale application of digital twins and agents can also be understood with the help of an ant colony. In this instance, the ants are agents, biological ones, of course, and perceive their surroundings with the help of sensory organs such as antennas for the smell. They process this information in their brains and act on them through their actions and behaviors.
Hence, the distinct smell of an ant is their identity. This smell is the identifier for the colony, called “passport pheromone.” Ants belonging to a particular colony can identify this smell and detect intruders. Also, this identity is innate to that colony and cannot be synthetically produced.
With this system in place, there’s no need for a centralised ant numbering system to keep a track of the ants of a certain colony. Every ant is responsible for flagging distinctions if it detects a change in any other ant’s odour from the one associated with the colony. It is a well functioning peer-to-peer ant agent communication system.
Ants cooperate among each other, just like software agents do in the digital world. In the real world, ants communicate and interact with other ants to optimise operation times e.g. for food supply in order to grow the colony. The best part is there’s no central authority, everyone just carries on with their tasks. Even the queen exists only for reproduction and not governing the colony. However, other ants protect their queen instinctively, because she is important for the creation of new ants.
Already today, software agents support us in booking movie tickets, alerting us when health data deviate, keep track of your business metrics and make mobility safer with assistance systems. This agent to agent communication will further increase in future, when more and more devices and objects are connected with each other.
There for, by designing the Interlinked Protocol, we draw inspiration from the idea of ant colonies. Hence, we are building an decentralized infrastructure for autonomous digital twins, that are the fundament for for secure, trustable and privacy-preserving transactions. The Interlinked team is working to bring this technology into commercial adoption, to realize new business models and solving problems along value chains.
Components of the Interlinked Protocol
The internet runs on an underlying protocol stack, known as the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. This protocol stack allows communication between systems across geographical domains, without the need to negotiate each time the communication flows. The Interlinked protocol provides supplementary components to the existing top layers of the OSI model.
By using existing internet standards and protocols, the the Interlinked Protocol can facilitate the agent-to-agent communication, verification of claims and manage communication sessions for the interoperability of digital identities.
For more information about the protocol design, please read our article about the most frequently asked questions #1, where we also give an insight to the technical realization.
In order to get more insight into the product and the future prospects of the Interlinked Protocol project, please feel free to join our Telegram channel, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also visit our website and subscribe to our monthly newsletter. Do remember to take a look at the events we are attending and get a chance to meet the team members in person.
