Introduction
I often wonder what areas of human daily actions can be digitized and/or automated? From mundane actions like homes chores,teaching to economies and governance, so in this blog post, I will try and explain why we need them and how we might go about doing it. I call it the digital infrastructure
Is it nececcary
I would like to argue that yes, automation and digitization is indeed paramount to our societies if we are to pull ourselves by our bootstraps and exceed our current limits. Think, for example about how there are a lot of inefficiencies that clog or slow down the system in orders magnitudes away from ideal perfomance, if these were to be eliminated we would have more prosperous and “happier” societies not to mention richer. If these are the dreams we desire to make real, we need technological infrastructure that is designed attentively
How do we get there
1. Economies
Transferring value has long be done using papers and rudimentary digital forms i.e having a database of money, but with the advancements in computers and the mathematicians who made it possible to computerize money, nations economies even planetary economies can be as seamless as it can. Imagine a worker/miner on planet mars for instance, how would they get paid, how would they transfer funds to their loved ones back on the planet Earth, how fast can they do it. This is cross planet payments, something that will happen sooner or later. This is an extreme example but I had to move scales a little bit up higher to show that if it can be done by nations the benefits would be enourmous.
A more interesting idea is how to implement this, I think mathematical functions and infrastructure need to be built around transparency,ownership and trust. Money is after all a man made concept it can be attached on any substrate. We transfter millions of bits each second, why not money. By that token, the technology used to tranfer this bits needs to be stable,decentralized and not be interfered by adverseries
2. Governance
Consider how much money is lost to corruption, take for instance developing nations whose conviction and democracies or forms of governments have not yet matured. So many funds are lost to immoral individuals who are nothing but short-sighted. To address such issues public ledgers need to be adopted and funds directed for development of nation should be auditable by anybody i.e Who received this funds from whom and how is it being utilized, have the contractors been paid e.t.c and at the moment I don’t see anyone trying to solve these problems using technology.
Look at voting for instance,so much money is spend on the voting systems and processes that are semi-digitall, if they could be digitized and with the right infrastructure(trust,openness e.t.c). We could save the money on do something important with it not to mention the time wasted during these processes
3. Education
This is a slighgly different topic and might have been under governance but I think dedicating it here is the right thing to do With the advent of A.I systems that can distill knowledge into smaller spaces, and allow for easier querying we could have infrastructure that allows teachers to teach more students i.e one teacher(with such a system) can impact a lot of students(with such a system) as compared to individual teachers with students. This will boost education especially in developing countries
4. Life
Health, life-expectancy e.t.c can all be improved in the same way, imagine a digitall companion who always watches your health, your vitals e.t.c and reports this either to a doctor or informs you in order to act on that information. This can improve the health and life expecancy of i individuals by orders of magnitude
Conclusion
In conclusion, I think we shouldn’t fear technology but adapt to it when nececcary and fast at that if we want to extend beyond the stars and beyond the flesh