Introducing: The Age of Autonomy
Alexander Graham Bell’s introduction of his telephone in 1877, changed more than the options for communication. The telephone dramatically changed the way that businesses and consumers could interact. It enabled businesses to focus on their lesser angels, and reimagine their processes with a dictatorial centralized “truth” of transactions.
The consequences of ubiquitous communication resulting from the telegraph and then the telephone included the minting of new oligarchs, profiteering from mass centralization, and a surge of hierarchal, top-down thinking driven by more extensible communications. As a culture, we embraced and were defined by the capabilities of the telephone, as well as its consequences, and entered into an era of corporate streamlining and mega-corporations that has prevailed into the digital era.
Like the telegraph and telephone, Blockchain also known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) have a vast potential to disrupt and change the way businesses and consumers approach the delivery and consumption of products and services. In contrast to the telephone, DLT will enable the mass decentralization of processes and distribution of systems. This has the potential to generate the turnaround of decades of system design and technical architectural traditions.
However, the impact will be more than just technical. Many organizations will have the ability, and some will be compelled by the competition of their markets, to re-think their entire business model. This will be true for technology-heavy industrial and supply chain businesses as well as pure service companies such as financial institutions and social networks. Organizations that deliver a completely digital service will be impacted the most, as their cost and risk structures are currently tied to centralized delivery paradigms, and their revenues are bound to holding and managing the transactional “truth” of their interactions with consumers and businesses. In these environments, distribution of truth and autonomy will become an expectation and product feature of B2B and B2C solutions. lead to happier and more satisfied customers, and but the cost will be the old processes and value propositions, and control of transactions and the truth shift to the user.
A shift to DLT and distributed architecture will provide businesses with opportunities to:
- Improve operating costs and decrease liabilities and risks by distributing the world-state of transactions, “the truth”, to whom and where work, and transactions are occurring in the real world.
- Safeguard the truth behind secure (practicably un-hackable) transactions while providing increased transparency and without additional cost.
- Introduce the opportunity for consensus across participants in a processes versus yielding to a single authority for transactional execution and expediency.
- Increase customer satisfaction by leveraging the pluralistic aspects of distributed ledger technology making the consumer a more active and equal participant in executing transactions, as well as holding their own data and the “truth”.
- Improved transactional and system security through a built-in voting system that ensures that participants agree before transactions (and rule changes) are executed.
“It is has been my hands-on experience that the potential impact of distributed ledgers is so vast that many organizations will have the opportunity to entirely reimagine their business models as they are freed from expensive command-and-control paradigms of the past century of technological traditions.”
Conversely, ignoring the impact of blockchain will be similar to companies being reluctant to embrace telephones in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Procrastinating late adopters will likely suffer from new strategic threats leveled by competitors that have embraced the impact of distributed ledger technology. The advantage of the cost improvements alone will lead to their competition being able to offer lower fees and new features with organizations that are less distracted by the complexity of the technology and processes they use to serve customers. This negative impact will be similar to the late adopters of the Internet, except that in today’s world, the time to react will be significantly shorter.
“The Age of Autonomy” is my medium publication focused on the impact of the new opportunities created by autonomous and distributed systems. Planning, developing, and deploying DLT and other technologies as Smart Products. The Age of Autonomy includes:
- A special focus on what I call, “Smart Products 2.0” the movement in the development of Smart Products from centralized client-server technologies to distributed technologies like Blockchain DLT, Robot Operating System (ROS), NATS distributed messaging, and others.
- Strategies for applying blockchains to your organization, and reimagining your business.
- Pitching your projects to management and investors
- Driving social change with blockchain’s using built-in “consensus methods” to safeguard the truth and create transparency
- Considering the impact of blockchain and the unintended consequences.
- Tutorials for developing distributed applications.
- Other technologies to get data into and out of your distributed systems.
This series will endeavor to bring these concepts and issues into focus, and describe how you can achieve the potential benefits. It is my hope these articles will be provocative.
