Author: Max Thake

Welcome to 2030: I own everything, and life’s actually pretty good

https://forkast.news/welcome-to-2030-i-own-everything-and-life-actually-pretty-good/

Welcome to 2030. Welcome to my city — and yes, it is mine as much as it is everyone else’s. Contrary to the “you’ll own nothing and be happy” prediction propagated via the World Economic Forum, I own things here. I have a stake in cars driving around its streets, electric vehicle chargers, solar panels, a vertical farm. And yes, I do own appliances and clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but to us here, it makes perfect sense. Yes, there was a time when everything was turning into a service, Netflix-style, with a subscription, but we weeded those out of the market one by one. We didn’t ask for things to become free. We just wanted a stake in the world where, back then, everything was owned by a Big Tech company — and consumed on their terms.

And we got that stake.

It started with a car-sharing service that brought 200 Teslas to our streets. I had to get this strange digital wallet to use it — a Web3 wallet — and buy some tokens, but honestly, sitting in one of those things as it was navigating the streets on its own was one of those sci-fi turned sci-fact moments. 

Of course, 200 Teslas was not enough for the whole city. So all kinds of dApps (decentralized applications that aren’t run by Big Tech companies) popped up which let you ride and rent everything from e-scooters to regional VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft. Other dApps made it possible for anyone anywhere in the world to invest in vehicles here and other European cities, and get a cut of the revenues they generate. Now, there are about 2,000 Teslas in the original fleet, and I have a stake in all of them. All of us do. 

Sure, public transport is still a thing, but it’s more centered around autonomous trains and trams. Buses have more or less faded out since there are so many street mobility options. VTOLs are great too, our community is thinking of co-purchasing another one and opening more inter-city routes. E-bikes help as well. I own one. When I am not riding it, I rent it out. There’s a dApp for that.

Every now and then, I like to cook for myself. I have a few appliances and borrow what I don’t own via a dApp. You hardly have to move a muscle. You just specify what you need and the robots take care of everything else — picking it up, dropping it off, and taking it back again.

This circularity has done good for the industry. Many things are built to last. The community won’t buy stuff that won’t. Smartphone batteries still have the lifespan of a butterfly, but now, we recycle them efficiently. We have a ton of green in our city, including robot-run vertical farms that everyone has a stake in. That’s where we get our fresh veggies from, delivered daily by co-owned drones, of course. 

Shopping? Still a thing. Sure, my smart fridge is better at making shopping lists than I will ever be and my delivery drone follows them to the letter, but sometimes I like to do it myself, in one of the non-automated shops. I like to support human-run businesses. Call me a retrophile, but I believe there are some things robots just can’t do. 

It feels as though we’ve found some sort of equilibrium: We have all the accuracy and efficiency we’ll ever need, if and when we want it.

Artificial intelligence has squeezed the job market, big time. Most coders I know lost their jobs to ChatGPT 7 and 8, as did lawyers, accountants and even baristas, replaced by AI-infused robots. Customer service, delivery, taxi and manufacturing jobs are semi-extinct. In our city, though, things didn’t get too rough. We all have a stake in everything, and it pays off to own things now that these things are generating us extra means to get by. 

It’s almost as if the more jobs AI and robots take, the more we all earn, and the more time we have to do what makes us happy. 

It’s not as neat in some other parts of the world, though. When millions can’t put bread on the table in an economy where assets are concentrated in the hands of a few, things get ugly. Yesterday, I saw videos online, the dirtiest sweatshops, where every bit of decency is squeezed out of the workers to attempt to give the operation an edge on more efficient robot manufacturing lines. So much has changed in America over the last decade. I think the introduction of central bank digital currency was the nail in the coffin. 

We all own everything, and we all have our privacy, too. We can check the provenance of anything from text to produce via the blockchain. As for data, I can choose what I reveal and what I sell, without fearing any of that will ever be used against me. Bar some catastrophic regress, my children will never need to protest a Cambridge Analytica scandal. They’ll never have secretive companies peeping in on their most intimate moments, creating digital models that predict their behavior better than they can. 

Overall, life is good and there’s plenty to look forward to. It’s certainly far better than what it could have been. There’s still unrest in the world, but I think we’re getting there, one step at a time. I’m just glad we never had to give everything away and leave ourselves at the mercy of the 1%. Mercy makes for a thin line to tread, and as a community of co-owners, we look out for one another the way they would never look out for us.

For the Internet of Things, It’s Either Web3 or 1984

https://blockworks.co/news/internet-of-things-web3

Let’s set the scene: The year is 2030, and the Internet of Things has become ubiquitous. Sensors are everywhere, everything’s outfitted with a chip, and you’ve already interacted with twenty IoT service providers before you brushed your teeth this morning without even knowing. 

After your morning cup of coffee, dutifully prepared for you by the smart machine that knows your taste better than you do (it also knows your daily routines and may or may not be selling this info), you head for the hairdressers. Via an app, you find and unlock the nearest shared electric vehicle and hit the road as it happily sells off more of your data to Big Tech.

An hour later, as stylish as ever, you head back for the vehicle — only to find that it rejects all of your attempts to get in. You try to hop on the bus, using your phone to pay, but the transaction doesn’t go through. Even a nearby vending machine refuses to sell you your now much-needed emotional support chocolate bar.

The pieces moving today

All of the things that you tried to do during your hypothetical day in 2030 relied on transactions involving devices. These devices were leveraging central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), controlled by that self-same central bank. And your friendly central bank was only happy to help when the local authorities, upset by your involvement in some recent protests, wanted to teach you a lesson. The rest is history.

The above scenario may feel far-fetched, but my humorous hyperbole reflects the worst possible future scenario imagined by CBDC critics. The number of connected devices is growing fast, both in business inventories and on the consumer market. The rise of artificial intelligence — yes, that includes ChatGPT, which Twitter can’t get enough of these days — and the way the technology enables connected devices to be more efficient means that more processes will be automated. And this doesn’t just go for things like smart factories: Amazon’s autonomous shop and the fully-automated McDonald’s in Texas are both harbingers of just how much automation we will be dealing with daily. And it’s worth noting that my scare tactic of a morning routine is already more or less approaching the status quo in China.

The fact of the matter is, we are relying on connected devices in more daily activities. It’s not the problem, really; the real problem is the digital infrastructure that the apps — and thereby the increasingly intelligent vehicles, machines, and robots — run on. That’s why the paradigm of machine and human economic relations we are fast heading into needs to run on Web3 rails, with everyone in charge of their own data and assets. The machines are not the enemy, but our legacy methods of running them are.

The interactions between all of these internet-connected devices and the wide world out there include a transactional component. Sometimes it’s about selling your data, and sometimes, it’s more direct, like when you’re using your phone to pay at the grocery store (which is becoming ubiquitous). In today’s world, most of these transactions involve a traditional banking account at a certain point, either the user’s own or an omnibus held by a specific platform for its business needs. In the future, though, these accounts could instead be virtual wallets with CBDCs, digital tokens issued and managed by central banks.

And as wonderful as that might sound, CBDCs and their inherently centralized design enable the issuer to directly control your spending behavior. Digital currencies are programmable, malleable, which makes any sort of control possible. You can set limits on how much a person can keep in their account in order to stimulate economic activity by forcing purchases and investment. You can limit their ability to purchase non-eco-friendly goods, or build carbon offsets into transactions. Oh, and only one plane flight per year. For some, all of this may still sound appealing, but this slope is oh so slippery. Why not just ban everyone you don’t like from buying food?   

Recent years already saw cases where governments sought to hamper citizens’ ability to transact as a punitive measure, like China’s social credit system, for example, or Canada’s action against trucker protests. You may feel differently about the people involved, but the mechanisms at play are similar in their logic. We enact our financial freedom by choosing what we purchase and from whom. If this freedom depends on the goodwill of a third party, it’s no freedom at all, and being excluded from the real-world economy is a direct threat to one’s livelihood. 

Take these trends, put them together, let them simmer for a bit, and there we are — that doomsday scenario is looking way more realistic. You may have heard about the Social Dilemma, where tech experts from Silicon Valley sounded the alarm in an hour-and-a-half long informative yet dystopian documentary about the dangerous impact of social networking’s manipulative underbelly, “brought to you by Big Tech.” We’re next heading towards what you may call “the connected dilemma,” where we either leverage the Internet of Things at the cost of giving away even more intimate data about even more aspects of our lives, or keep some slither of privacy but remain in the Stone Age, comparatively speaking. 

But IoT apps don’t have to be built on centralized Big Tech — they can be built on Web3 instead. IoT-specific decentralized applications (dapps) enable any user, whether human or machine, to securely interact and transact with others in a peer-to-peer manner. They can do so with full sovereignty and ownership over their identities and their data, meaning user surveillance becomes a thing of the past. On an even better note, if the currencies we choose to use are built on decentralized tech, the potential for monetary censorship then stays in the past too.

And so, this leaves us with a choice, not a dilemma. It’s no longer a case of ‘choose privacy, but live in the Stone Age, or ‘choose the latest tech but give up your most intimate data.’ It’s a case of choosing to build and use apps which run on decentralized foundations. On Web3, not Big Tech. If we get that right, we can have our cake and eat it too. 

Max Thake is an entrepreneur, writer, and co-founder of peaq, a blockchain network powering the Economy of Things, and EoT Labs, a software development and incubation organization supporting open-source projects focused on the Economy of Things. peaq empowers people to manage and earn from vehicles and devices as they provide goods and services to people and other machines. Max has built multiple organizations, teams and brands during his years in the blockchain space. He operates at the intersection between the humanities and sciences and enjoys explaining technological complexity in simple terms and using it to solve problems.

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