By Ma Haobo

Repetitive work has restricted the development of humankind, but automation has helped liberate us. Cars and planes have replaced walking. Harvesting machinery has replaced manual labor. Computers have largely replaced the need for mental computing. Many jobs are becoming obsolete due to industrial robots and automated processing.

However, the operation of machines still requires human participation, and the degree of automation still needs to be improved. Humanity hopes for the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology and looks forward to being freed from this restraint.

AI helps humans control machines, yet it is unable to execute more complex organizational management and resource allocation problems.

Where there are people, there is society.

Where there is society, there is a division of labor.

Even if a man has mastered all 18 martial arts, it may be difficult for him to do well in the kitchen. humans as primitive have always taken “organizational” forms to mutually assist one another when going on group hunts. Man joined with man to form teams, to form companies, to form institutions, all to persist in striving for one goal.

In order to achieve this goal, the organization must motivate the participating members. Humans has invented regulatory systems and articles of association. However, no number of systems can hinder people’s desires and ambitions. In any domain where people are ruled, there are always opaque places — bribery, corruption, embezzlement, and false public interests. Public prosecution and audit institutions exist, yet they cannot completely constrain people’s profit-making behavior.

Humanity has invested enormous energy and costs in solving the problems of organizational management and resource allocation, yet the result has only been to control theoretical distribution within relatively reasonable perimeters. How can we solve this problem more effectively?

Blockchain has thus arrived. Regardless of the original intention of Nakamoto, Bitcoin now solves the specific problems of global value storage and transfer. It has countless miners working for it and serves scores of ordinary users. Anyone with a computer or smartphone can easily access this network.

Bitcoin created the first organization where the minority cannot interfere with the operating rules. Furthermore, this organization can make and distribute profits.

There have been three dimensions of improving humankind’s work efficiency, and they seem to all have ideal solutions:

Repetitive work => IT, automation

Thought-based work => AI, big data

Collaborative work => blockchain

Solutions for repetitive work have had the best results. Solving thought-based work via AI and big data solutions is a field that has reached a high point in public opinion during the time of IBM’s Deep Blue computer, followed by a quiet period where the technology continued to develop, and peaked during the time of AlphaGo nearly 20 years later.

We see an emerging technology requires the blessing of time in order to develop from creation, to precipitation, to explosive growth. Bitcoin as the first application of Blockchain has only been around for 10 years. There is still a comparatively long time to go before we see its real emergence and even a more developedapplication. We patiently await its explosive growth.

Faced with stagnant efficiency,

humans have ventually chosen blockchain.

Any advancement in technology is an improvement to the efficiency of humankind. When one facet is optimized to a certain degree, optimization needs to be carried out in other aspects. When we discovered that simply raising the frequency of a single CPU was not enough, humans began to optimize caches and pipelines and began to experiment with multi-cores.

When efficiency stalled again, humans decided to choose the blockchain.

Humans have chosen currency to help solve the problem of “collaborative work.” Any established organization can generate trust in the process of its operation. If the organization has trust, it can issue debt. Today’s currency is mostly debt currency. It is this endorsement of trust by the issuer that its debt is issued.

Any centralized company can issue its own debt, but the centralized currency will inevitably face the issue of secondary offerings and devaluation. The importance of blockchain is in its completely transparent decentralized organization that automatically distributes profits to participants.

The efficiency of distributed systems is lower than that of centralized systems, so the significance of blockchain is not to solve the problem of “repetitive work” but to solve the deeply rooted problem of trust which is intrinsic to human nature.

So I would say that blockchain solves the problem of collaborative work, thus liberating humankind for a third time.

About the Author -

Ma Haobo is the Founder of aelf and Founder/CEO of Hoopox. He is a blockchain expert and an early practitioner in the field of digital assets. Mr. Ma previously held the position of CTO at GemPay and AllCoin. He is a member of the Blockchain Experts Committee at the Chinese Institute of Electronics.