Imagine what happens when we put Artificial Intelligence inside decentralised applications or if we train AI to run a Decentralised Autonomous Organization
A digital revolution is arising and it is called the Distributed Web. It will enable people to interact freely with each other over the internet without the interference of commercial parties or supervising governments. This is not just about social media: The uprise of the Distributed Web enables the formation of entirely new social structures that define how we live our lives and how we will develop as mankind.
About 26 years ago Tim Berners-Lee published the first website on the internet. It has been a great invention. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired, once said the internet is the most reliable machine we’ve ever made, because it has been running without interruption since 1991. That is a cool way to look at it. What has made this possible? Decentralisation. Rather than one single computer that hosts the entire internet, the World Wide Web consists of many servers.When one shuts down, many others are still running.
Not reliable
When you browse the internet today, despite its decentralised nature, it appears to be unreliable. You do not need to be a web developer to know what the 404 HTTP status code means. On average a webpage exists for 100 days and then it has either changed completely or it disappears, regardless of whether other people were linking to it.
The problem is that the data and applications that travel over the decentralised internet are stored on specific central servers. This causes some problems. Hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of people (China, Russia, India) often find themselves disconnected from certain parts of the internet and hackers know exactly where to find the jackpot. Dropbox got hacked. JPMorgan got hacked. Yahoo got hacked. VK got hacked. LinkedIn got hacked. Uber got hacked. Servers are also down from time to time due to technical problems, scalability issues or denial of service attacks which leave the service unusable.
Time for change
For many years we have accepted these flaws but that is starting to change. More and more important social systems are being built on top of the internet. To a growing extend our lives depend on it. We are doing business more globally and digitally than ever. We need our internet applications to be more robust, reliable, secure, fast, to work everywhere at any given time and to be accessible to everyone.
The good news is: The technology is here. The Distributed Web is being built and the problems mentioned above will be solved.
How
Instead of us users depending on central servers, we will host pieces of web applications and data ourselves. We will share it mutually with each other. We will still have servers because they bring a lot of processing power and storage capacity to the network, but we just no longer really rely on them directly for an application to work. In the Distributed Web, data or even a website is not referred to by location (e.g. a domain name or an ip address of a server) but by a cryptographic hash of its content. So when you are looking for some application or some data, the protocol looks for any close by computer that has the requested data or application, using similar techniques as BitTorrent.
Users will experience a much better internet. No more downtime of applications, governments censoring information, lost information or hacked databases. Users can keep their personal data on their own device instead of on the servers of all the services they use. People’s privacy will be better protected.
Why will engineers and companies choose to deploy their websites and apps on the Distributed Web instead of hosting it on their own server like they’ve been doing for so many years? For a number of reasons. Hosting the websites, apps and data is free and more reliable (uptime is money). No servers need to be installed, configured, updated and secured any more. Also, scalability is no longer a challenge: Applications that become wildly popular will experience even faster loading. For companies and website- and app developers, it is going to save a lot of time and money. It enables even smaller groups of people to build great things, independently.
The Distributed Web will provide us with this super version of the internet very soon. The technology that makes it possible is already available. Two protocols that are gaining a lot of traction for sharing files and websites on the Distributed Web are Dat and IPFS.
More than just a better internet
A more extreme part of the Distributed Web consists of blockchains. Data that is stored on blockchains can never be removed from it again because all peers hold a copy of all data — not unlike other distributed protocols like BitTorrent, Dat & IPFS. This makes blockchain software quite heavy but cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use the blockchain because it offers a unique immutable way of storing data. That is what makes it safe enough to store a currency on it. The currency can also cross every border, it is really hard for governments to manipulate and there is no bank disapproving or delaying transactions. Whatever you may think of Bitcoin and the business people that currently fill their pockets like it’s 1999: Blockchain is a game changer.
Another popular blockchain based crypto-currency, Ethereum, is building a platform for others to release blockchain based decentralised applications. Their blockchain not only hosts a currency but also computer scripts which they call smart contracts. The programming language of Ethereum smart contracts is called Solidity and it looks a lot like JavaScript and it should be as easy to learn.
Because smart contracts are stored on the blockchain the network guarantees their execution. With a collection of smart contracts it is even possible to create a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). When people or things or other programs make a payment to a DAO, the blockchain makes sure that whatever the DAO was programmed to do, it will come through. It might send a driverless car to you for example. The organisation can completely be controlled by its shareholders and it has zero overheads.
Robots are coming
In the future, every thing and every company that we see around us will run distributed and some even autonomous because it saves people a lot of work, time and money. It also provides great advantages: Everybody in the world will be free to use any service and the service will be more reliable, safer and faster than it can be now.
Imagine what happens when we put Artificial Intelligence inside decentralised applications or if we train AI to run a DAO. Think about business sectors like logistics, manufacturing, trading. Computers can run (large parts of) organisations in these sectors and people do not have to worry that the computer might shut down. Of course there are many more sectors that can benefit from these technologies. Everybody realises that one day the robots will come and that they will take over the world. We may still joke about it, but that kind of future is coming really close.
Also read: Blockchain is booming, but will grow to become a major city? Or is its future that of a ghost town?
There are however many large internet companies that might suffer from the adoption of a true peer-to-peer Distributed Web. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba, SalesForce, to name a few, have built very successful business models around the way the web currently works. With the uprise of the Distributed Web they possibly have a lot to lose so they will delay it as much as they can. They can of course adopt the Distributed Web and use it in their advantage. Some companies will do that in time and some of them will not. As it works with big paradigm shifts: those that do not adapt are likely to be replaced by new players that grow explosively, each time faster than we have seen before.
Is your organisation aware of this transformation of the web? Are you adopting it? Or do you disagree this is happening? Do you know other technologies for the Distributed Web which I have not mentioned in this article? I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment below.
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