The New World Order of Ideology in Code: IoT, DLT, AI and 5G

We are all searching for new paradigms. Democracy is broken, capitalism questionable and the environment a disaster. Our views used to be simple to be identified, tagged, and sold to, but social media has obliterated that. We now live in a community of one, just me. All social media feeds reinforce my views, exclude challenges to my values, and allow me to live in my own bubble in isolation without the need to consider the opinions of others. This makes democracy unworkable as there is no majority consensus. There is no one Brexit UK, one Trump USA, there are truths all around us and we want to pick and mix just like our social media communities. In the good old days if you drank chamomile tea you were probably lesbian, vegetarian and a tree hugger; now you can can love soya latte, hate immigrants, vote Brexit but still demand European travel. The world is searching for a scalable and sustainable future that can accommodate a myriad of values. One nation unity has left the room and switched the light off.

Strategic responses are predictable. The Americans believe money is the currency of life, our sentiment data belongs to corporates in exchange for free services, and market forces will drive social change. The Europeans believe safety in numbers, the sanctity of legislation, treaties and GDPR’s my-data-my-way will safeguard us from bad actors. The Chinese believe in government patriarchy, they should own your data to protect you, and use 4^th Industrial Revolution Technologies of Blockchain, AI and IoT to implement homogenously across all BRI nations. Corporates cling on to various positivity instruments like CSR, Impact Investment, ESG and ethical supply chains to enact their good intentions. The fact is everyone is trying to the best of their capability;  even drug lords can do good. Just like people, there are no evil nations or corporates but there are shades of grey.

We have now all become used to technology being touted as the saviour. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba …. bring joy to billions for free by tracking our alignment, value and values in order to sell us more stuff. The science of digitally measuring happiness, hope, love, aspiration, and all such non-financial soft intangible assets are now well rehearsed. What DLT has done is to allow the transaction of those assets from A to B, just like any financial tangible hard asset – money, gold, diamonds – the assets of Christmas past. Tokenisation makes real the tracking and movement of value(s), injecting life into good intentions and virtues with unprecedented granularity beyond face to face volunteering, corporate ethics and national policies. So now we can codify ideology, and transact them at scale … just like banks but this time with our feelings.

Enter stage right AI offering us the ability to nudge our behavior in any direction we care for by incentivizing good behavior and removing negative options. That of course, is the heart of the Chinese Social Credit System. Western cultures will frown on manipulation of choices based on behaviours, but that is exactly what Facebook et al already do. Only they decide what jobs we get to see, and which postings are fed to us, and how our personal AI of Alexa, Siri, Bixby, and others guide us depending on the capability of our financial shopping basket. China puts government’s paternal  responsibilities of the society body corpus above those of the individual rights and freedoms including jay walking, carrying arms, or shooting children in playgrounds. Until now there has been no happy medium but with blockchain democracy you can have your cake and eat it too. Through smart contracts you can identify your alignment, be rewarded for those choices, and equally accept the limitations you have chosen in a transparent way.

But let’s go further. The world will not truly change unless every atom of our being embed our ideology – every product, process, project, organization, and people, have our values not just on our sleeves but in our things – the Internet of Things. In the immediate future what enjoins IoT to us will be our 5G phones which, as Professor Karen Pollitt-Cham eloquently puts it, layers our values into a “human centred network slice to nudge value driven behaviour”. Our phones will be a repository of our values alongside our value, already well accustomed to the Chinese WeChat Pay and AliPay. The resident AI (our ‘Ubot’) will guide us how to behave in alignment to the direction of what we hold dear, eschew things which do not conform to our wishes, and we will be able to imbue everything around us with our value(s) set.

To put it simply, our ideology can now be codified, transacted, nudged and embedded in the world around us. In a miniscule way, we started this process back in 2011 by measurement of non-financial value through the Social Earnings Ratio®, moved to transaction in 2016 through the Seratio® blockchain, visioned a world where AI Ubot would embed sentiment like love and hope into all our decisions, but to be truly adopted in time for UN SDG 2030, it needs the spread of 5G’a data slices to embed these values in everything around us so even our kettle can be driven by our values.

Naturally, there are dangers. The racist doorbell will not ring when a black man presses the button. Indeed, institutional racism is nothing but codified ideology but primitive and minute when compared to the guaranteed future ubiquity of 4IR. History advises that neither Chinese behavioural codes, nor West Coast marketing algorithms could be necessarily trusted as centralized guides arbitraging our moral compass. Herein lies the true advantage of the decentralized nature of IoT, that the pantheistic nature of small bits of ‘good’ code authored by billions of diverse contributors and embedded in trillions of devices, will safeguard the threat of dominance and control from bad actors or evil AI robots. In this pluralistic society there is no going back. DLT is conceived not only to provide us solutions to live in Hong Kong without embracing all Chinese values, or live in a frictionless trading Brexit Britain but embrace Europeanism, but also to expand our ‘me’ bubble to include everything around us.

In the future we will have a different relationship with technology which will, for the first time, industrialize doing good en masse; not a bolt on, not an afterthought, but mainstreamed and integral to our daily lives. Irrespective of whether there is higher meaning to our lives, whether there is a god metric or even a god code, what stands before us is our collective responsibility to make our society a better place for everyone regardless of values and ideology including at the extremes. This is an opportunity for universal participation paid for by the commercial interests of corporates, the blessing and regulation of governments, and our values. We pray, for the sake of mankind, that it will come soon but what is exciting for us is to finally see a pathway to a vibrant New World Order.

Olinga Ta'eed 

Professor Olinga Taeed PhD FIoD ^*

Director, Centre of Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance

Council Member and Expert Advisor, Chinese Ministry of Commerce ‘China E-Commerce Blockchain Committee’

This personal data thing, it’s just not working. Some claim that corporates want our data so they can sell stuff to us and governments want our data to control us. But companies retort that if you expect your commercial product to be free, and help create their jobs, economy and services to society, they must be allowed to get to know you to help (others) target you better. Like Google and their gmail, Facebook and their WhatsApp, bankers will tell you that free banking forced them to develop other more convoluted instruments that eventually ruined the world in 2008. Similarly, Sovereign States have a responsibility to protect their population and encourage positive social structures – so they see no problem with tracking our movements, rewarding good behaviours and identifying bad actors. Faced with 1.4 billion population, China openly uses a social credit system and defies ‘Land of the Free’ western ideology that hails individual rights preferring to protect the corpus not the few.

We have become obsessed with our personal data which is in the middle of this battleground but let’s face it, GDPR has failed – nothing has changed except we inanely press more cookie policy buttons and new T&C’s daily. We are happy to be in a selfless open and more sharing society, believe in open data, open source, open banking, but don’t see the incongruency with the rather self centred #MyDataMyWay. Things are set to become even more selfcentric – in blockchain we want to track your data to reward ourselves and to withhold our data if we’re not. Last month I sat in Shanghai whilst an entrepreneur pitched me with a system to token reward contributors of their medical data to resolve long term illness. STOP – what? So you would rather people die than share your data which is of no value to you whatsoever? Even if no remedy was found, your data would have helped create jobs and bring income to their families. So why have we become so possessive with our data and isn’t it misaligned to the open sharing world we are trying to create?

I think the issue is that we mistakenly think of data as a tangible hard asset like money, gold, land … things we can lose and others gain. Actually it’s not – data shows all the hallmarks of an intangible asset, a subject which I have studied for over a decade. Like all intangible non-financial assets, data value is dependent on the holder; you can’t spend it at Starbucks but it can be invaluable in the hands of others. Data transactions are directional – I love you doesn’t mean you love me. Indeed like love, happiness and hope, it is infinitesimally replenishable – you create more data tomorrow – you haven’t lost the asset by giving it.  Afterall we don’t stop smiling at a beggar because we think they’ve taken something from us? By smiling we have given them information about ouirselves – we have told them something about how we feel, the Holy Grail of personal data. We are happy to share with others on social media all about us, our inner beliefs, our core values, and then we’re upset that companies, governments, and others use it to understand or manipulate more efficiently? Doesn’t that happen every day with colleagues, friends, family when we share ourselves with them? What is it that we have lost?

If the dollar is the currency of financial value, I have wanted to know what is the currency of non-financial value. For years I promoted sentiment as the new currency of the millennium but in reality it has become impossible with current technology to come to a consensus on how to measure it. And if you can’t measure, you can’t bill it so all attempts to improve the world based on impact have hitherto failed. In the UK Social Value 2012, UK Slavery Act 2015, 2% CSR Laws in India, Indonesia and Mauritius, most United Nations MDG (and now SDG) initiatives, etc … the world is no better place; data is manipulated to be compliant, with honesty, integrity and compassion the ultimate loser. Data, however, is indeed universally measurable and thus a much better proxy to our intentions. What if we dispense with the misnomer that we can hold back the personal data ocean, and focus on the data transaction. I would be happy for my data to be used by governments, by corporates, by anyone if in exchange they agree to donate their upside (profits, tax, revenues, whatever) to civil society and undertake not to harm anyone in the process, including myself. To do this we would need an immutable ledger to track the use of our data – to tokenise not for personal gain but for societal gain. If you don’t want to surrender your information (which you cannot use in any case) then that is also fine … but don’t expect to receive the upside from the public and private interventions. Only blockchain can do this and provide the transparency for challenges.

A key differentiator of non-financial transaction is the basis on a social contract – eg in a relationship “you can have my love IF you make me happy, do not harm me or my children” – what we would call a smart contract with social dependencies. Intellectual Property, another intangible, has developed systems like Creative Commons which depend on simple attributes to safeguard the use; something very similar could be developed for our data. Permission to use our data, like a donor card, can be tokenized and withdrawn retrospectively demonstrating our alignment to corporate policy or government strategy, something we define as a Microshare Token. Making data consumption measurable, whether by corporates, governments  or NGO’s makes the impact actionable.

So in straight forward terms, what am I saying? Here is my data, please use it to get to know me. Try not to harm me …  and if you promise to use it for good, then I trust you with my data, my thoughts, my life, my hopes and my ambitions. I don’t wish to build a Mexican Wall of my life to repel all those seeking to know me whether for good or not.  It’s not my data, I will share it with you freely as I share my love, my happiness and my thoughts. Because I share it doesn’t mean I’ve lost it – I have new data tomorrow representing the new me. It is ever lasting, tomorrow I will generate more love, more happiness and more data. It does not belong to me, I give my IP to you freely to make the world better. Yes you made money by knowing me, or knowing me will make me more vulnerable to political influence. I’m happy for you. I hope it makes the world a better place. So don’t pay me, pay society… give them the money you would have given me for my data to others who need it. That is why data and blockchain are a perfect mixture. It’s a trustless system where we can share our data, transparently track it, contributing to a decentralized collective responsibility to be distributed to whoever needs it.

So let us put our data on the blockchain, not always insist on payment or recognition, but whomsoever uses the big data agrees by the principles of honesty, integrity, and respect of all those who put it there. And on our behalf, they agree to pay a percentage of the value they create from it to others … a social tax, a CSR, … and this we can track … through the blockchain, and permissioned through a token. Then it is a matter of compliance and not of ownership of our data. Companies decide which charities they pay, say 19% of their profits, and governments can give us 19% tax relief for using our data. Will this work and does anyone care? A straw poll of my children has swayed from my daughter Tigris’s condemnation of what I’m proposing, to my son Vien and spouse Elizabeth who use data to make their life seamless so find data intrusion of benefit in specific situations, to my partner’s daughter Alayna ambivalence “I don’t really care”. A blockchain data system could accommodate these broad spectrum of views.

* Opinions in this article are strictly my own. Art work by Tigris Ta’eed

Summary of the key highlights

8^th  Annual Session of Global Forum on Human Settlements

(30-31 October 2018, United Nations, Bangkok)

Blockchain as a technology has the potential to become one of the most pivotal routes to change for our societies.

The movement away from the centralised model of control which is the basis of almost everything we do, where we relying on a trusted centre.  Blockchain gives us the mechanism to de-centralise, to build organically, to create new structures of control and engagement.

This is a fundamental shift in how we structure ourselves in society.

With so much media attention on blockchain has focused mostly on the rise (and falls) of crypto currency valuations, it is easy to lose sight of the wider picture of the blockchain opportunity.

Add to that the uncoordinated nature of the non-centralised model, the slower approach that organics growth brings and the growing number of scams and mismanagement scandals and the result becomes a very fragmented environment.

We all intuitively know that an appropriate use of Blockchain technology does have real potential to make a change to how we operate cross-border and within societal groups, bypassing middle layers and removing the trusted centre, but we are yet to see mass adoption of real-world examples of this in practice.

And so, the really big questions are how far can Blockchain go?  How will it evolve?  What is required to create a step change in the way we live and operate?  What are the next steps?

My organisation, the Centre for Citizenship Enterprise and Governance, or “CCEG”, is a Think Tank that has had more than six years in the research and application of the movement of non-financial values, and over two years research and application of those research findings using blockchain technology.  We specialise in the tracking of the movement of emotional value, the things that give society well-being, contentment, happiness. That is those values that create engagement and good citizenship within communities.

This work is highly relevant to cities and human settlements.  As we understand, track and monitor the value sets of communities and individuals we become enabled to focused investment and channel our resources to materially to improve the well-being and contentment of citizens.

As we build the cities of the future, as we look to make significant change to those urban settlements that are not working, it is simply not enough to just create infrastructure and transportation links.  We need to create cities that inspire and generate high quality living, a healthy community and arguably, most importantly a content and happy society.

The blockchain technology can be used as a tool to engage the communities, to give people a voice and a vote. It can be used to delegate power and authority to empower community groups and organisations.  Through the use of Distributed autonomous organisations and/or foundations, blockchain can we used to develop the structures on which the cities operate and crucially the mechanisms for change and improvement.

Imagine a city where constant quality feedback from the millions of users of services and facilities are being utilised to adjust, refine and perfect city services for the benefit of the whole.  A city where the inhabitants are the owners, and the controllers of the core of the infrastructure, the architects of the future changes and the shapers of their own eco-system.  By their nature the citizens and not just engaged, they direct, drive and own the whole settlement.

These will be the cities of the future to which all others will aspire to replicate.

In our daily lives we procure not with money, but with our values. We buy cars that bring us ‘joy’, purchase clothes that ‘empower’, acquire services that make us ‘happy’ … and reject offers that do not match our ‘hopes’.  Institutional procurement is moving in the same direction – we no longer decide only on price, speed and quality … but factor in sustainability, modern slavery, and social value. The brands we represent can no longer afford to associate with brands that are not aligned to our values; because of the transparency afforded by social media these intangible assets can decimate our tangible assets in a heartbeat.

The decision metric of procurement is not the just the dollar, but how aligned we are to those we procure from and with. When we decide to cut 3% from or budgets to increase shareholder value, the likelihood is that a community suffers, and worst still across multiple layers in the global supply chain others enter into slavery conditions. Because of you, some will end their lives in abject poverty, and others will celebrate life. Your decisions can lead to the ultimate sacrifice – in your hands is the power that someone lives or dies.

Whether the tender is for stationary or a billion dollar bridge, the future of procurement is changing. Governments already recognise that it is the single greatest instrument to achieve national objectives, enacting laws to align their suppliers with their values. It is surely time for procurement professionals to break away from the equivalence to the mundane world of accountants, auditors and actuaries, but to take our place at the top table in driving world change.

The 4th industrial revolution has provided us with a single instrument called Blockchain that can simultaneously measure, transact and delivery both financial and non-financial value transparently and at scale. This digital technology enables us to establish structures for good by making our financial decisions contingent on our institution’s alignment to a set of non-financial values. If we are being brave, we could involve AI to direct our decisions or to even fully automate the process, bypassing unfair or corrupt procurement which is prevalent wherever scale is involved. Furthermore, through tokenisation every single product, process, project, organisation or even person which is part of procurement can be fully aligned to all the stakeholders in our organisation – shareholders, customers, suppliers, government, environment, staff and the communities we serve.

Further blockchain related reading:

GENERAL (transparency)

TECHNICAL (english) (chinese)

The Seratio Ecosystem is aided by AI to assess the complex analytical data available and to steer consumers, becoming their online friend and guide

Hyper-Reality by Keiichi Matsuda

Two important trends are making corporates re-think their strategies and relevance in our future economies.

Transparency

The hallmark of this decade has been the growth of transparency as an instrument to  openly display governance in our public offices, demonstrate corporate intentions, reflect the goodness within our products and even prove our own values to each other.

The public sharing of our actions and decisions is rapidly accelerating, particularly with the under 35’s. Social media and mobile apps  bring our lives under closer scrutiny, for many now on a daily basis. The things we like, where we socialise what we eat are all commonly shared on social media.  But what about the transparency of information to consumers?  Whilst price comparison sites and convenient middlemen layers have become commonplace, we remain sadly lacking in coherent, simple signposting for most of the goods and services we buy. To navigate our often intricate lives we readily embrace any kind of ‘Go-NoGo’ filters that allow decisions to be guided with least effort.

Arguably, consumer data, the value sets and preferences may become the most valued asset. As the trend for transparency continues, the analytics behind those choices and preference will shape the retail market push.  As important the trend of information to consumers will shape the markets, just as comparison sites have influenced and taken ownership of consumers in the insurance space, information and data providers of the provenance of goods have the same opportunity, to guide, advise and own the relationship with those consumers. Have goods been manufactured with slavery within their supply chain?  Are the suppliers and supply chain manufacturing those goods adding value to the world or detracting total value by stealing from their supply chain, or stealing from the environment?

The world is an increasingly complex place and consumers crave simplicity and convenience.  For this they are willing to sacrifice, security, privacy and price. At the same time, expectations of free services has never been greater.  The traditional model of “Make it Pay”  has been turned upside down by the media giants of the last two decades as they offer an app for our lives for free.

So it is somewhat surprising that the consumer “values” data space remains largely untapped. What is not just in our wallet but rather in our heads, our thoughts and our hearts remains opaque to retailers and suppliers as they seek greater levels of optimisation.

Decentralisation

The antidote to centralisation is perhaps an even greater challenge to a traditional corporate organisation to navigate. How to remain relevant as a central player and controller in the non-centralised world the new public seem to crave.  The traditional model of central controller is broken down in the de-centralised world of the blockchain. This gives rise to new models, new expectations and new philosophies.

The inside out model, fails completely when one tries to implement a blockchain solution with a focus on one key stakeholder. Distributed Ledger Technology ‘DLT’ was created for a peer to peer environment, deliberately to eliminate the need for a central controller. Whilst blockchain is hailed as the next revolution and an even bigger impact than the internet, the largely centralised corporate world is still struggling to create meaningful, viable, value added applications as the models strike at the very heart of its operations.

Solution

The Seratio Ecosystem has brought together a model which addresses these two key challenges.

The original start point for the ecosystem was born from academic research into the movement of non-financial value and the understanding of a total value model, taking into account social, environmental and governance measures to assess the impact of a person, project, organisation, city, region or country. As with any measurement system, once metrics were established, agreed, recognised and used, then focus and improvements may follow. The DLT of blockchain technology presented  an ideal opportunity to move from the measurement of non-financial value to the transaction of non-financial value.

Communities of people who share common values and share a trading economy have already formed their own currencies, outside of the traditional boundaries of government and regulation and without any central controllers; organic growth. Value sets are recognised, shared and transacted.  Community members prefer to seek out those with aligned values, those who share the currency and demonstrate their value sets. This has led to crypto-currencies imbued with values, carrying the attributes of the communities that created them making it more transparent both to those who prefer to operate within these large cohesive, vibrant and transactable communities as well as those who wish to supply and target them with loyalty and rewards programmes.

Recognising the value sets or ‘provenance’ of individuals the Seratio Ecosystem also builds in the provenance of goods and services. The complex system is filtered down to a simple score to direct and guide buyers. In essence, to enable them to buy the things they value, which may be pro a particular value set, for example women or students whilst being steered away from those goods and services which fall outside of their individual values, for example anti-slavery or environmental.

The Seratio Ecosystem is aided by AI to assess the complex analytical data available and to steer consumers,  becoming their online friend and guide.  By directing purchases in the online space and on the high street value aligned purchases can be easily delivered, with no effort on the part of the consumer.

The use of blockchain and cryptocurrency record and give transparency to the value choices. In the same way that social media has a positive ground-up impact and empowerment,  the blockchain has a similar effect demonstrating aligned values and for the first time linking that to the economic activity those values support.

Number by Robert Hloz

Next Steps

To scale the models,  we need to build systems and put into practice the ecosystem platforms within a mass market. We welcome new partners who are interested in transforming their impacts and become a key player in this brave new world.

Who will step up and become the Google of the Blockchain World?