Could the promising brand new prospects brought about by the #blockchain technology and the like suddenly fall apart overnight?
It could. Nobody knows for sure what adversity lies ahead in the future. Beta, VHS, PicturePhone, PDA, Nokia… those were all once promising and huge for quite sometime.
However, you can have all well grounded, nicely reasoned, rigorously calculated reasons to have logical doubts about blockchain or the plausible new digital world it claims to enable. But don’t forget, we are living in a world that used to believe that the Earth is flat, gold is the only source of value and the idea of sending a person’s voice through wire is considered witchcraft.
Cycle of Acceptance can describe how people react to "bad news" (to the old world, new is bad).
What makes you so confident that this time is different? People may have different answers to this question. But for me…
This time, the technology is going to change fundamentally the way people engage with each other.
Previous technological advancements, even iphones, despite their tremendous influences on making the world as it is today. They did not change how society operates - they bring voices, images, videos, and computing capacities to individuals, making him/her so powerful, but did not change the game rules - big companies, political games, manipulation, capitalism, human miseries… all the same like 50 years ago.
Then blockchain comes along - maybe by accident, maybe destined - and enlightens us how the world can be a better place. A place with higher level of trust. A place where people are truly set free and empowered. The world #fintech is seriously misleading. This IS a much bigger thing: It could re-define how next century will look like. Actually I am a bit pessimistic about how lately tech advancements like robots, AIs, gene tech will affect the world - I don’t trust the human minds behind these powerful technologies because these minds are selected by old and dirty game rules. If technology progress is an inevitable fate of us, I will say that blockchain is the angel that can save us from a self-destructing spiral. Because equality, trust, and even collective good are encrypted in its spirit.
This new world needs us to be imaginative, to be bold, to be creative, with love.
Think about how smart contracts can re-define how people work together: modern companies, proven to be efficient in exploiting the division of labor, may one day be obsolete and replaced by project-based virtual collaboration among suitable people (and AIs, robots) around the globe. Think about how micro payment mechanism can make wonderful things happen that were once hampered by greedy middleman - say supporting any specific African children with any spare resources you have (of course this will require the elimination of digital gap somehow). Of course, think about how exchange/share of ideas can be coupled with value creation and encourage collective wisdom (yeah! #Steem rocks!)… You can go on and on. Then we will be surprised how we have being living a modern life in ancient ways for such a long time!
Thank you for reading so far. I hope more people can share their imagination about the future here.
This page is synchronized from the post: ‘Before the arrival of digital utopia, imagination is our only limitation’