They can be not “like” but actually “be” the superheroes they dreamed of or imagined.

In the near future, people can wear a red suit of armor and fly away, or turn green and smash buildings.

This may look like a science fiction movie.

But the world of “mixed reality” ― the merging of real and virtual worlds ― will soon emerge in entertainment, all because of blockchain, said Alexander Shulgin, CEO of Familia Group based in Moscow, Russia.

“Blockchain will transform, in general, everything from energy and finance to entertainment, our whole lifestyle,” said Shulgin in a recent interview with The Korea Times in Seoul.

“You will be the content, not just play in front of a computer, but actually be an athlete playing a game. People will be involved. Blockchain will create a whole new entertainment sector. Its impact on society will be as big as the invention of electricity.”

Shulgin, who heads the investment holding company Familia, is a venture capitalist who invests in blockchain and digital startups.

In the 1980s, Shulgin was a member of Kruiz, the first rock band in the former USSR, drawing inspiration from innovative rock and roll bands such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

Innovative tool

The investor and composer said blockchain will be used as an innovative tool, like metal, electricity, and computers.

Innovation has changed music over the years, he said.

“Inventors and innovators used metal to create saxophones. Then, we had jazz. Electricity helped create rock and roll as they plugged their guitars into electric amps. Pianos with electricity launched disco music, and computers created DJ music,” Shulgin said.

“Rock and roll was definitely innovative. Rock musicians were more like entrepreneurs and pioneers with three to four people starting a band from their garage. They did not particularly know what to do but had dreams to create and find something. Of course, many pioneers fail, but that was their role.”

He added blockchain will have the same effect where every object and character in mixed reality will be able to interact with and respond to people’s movement and action.

The technology backed by a decentralized network system will make that happen.

This is because each object and character will be running on their own blocks of servers.

“Those objects will interact with you. For example, if you shoot them, they will respond in mixed reality. They will respond in real time because everything is decentralized,” he said.

In augmented reality, people see artificial holographic images, but they do not “interact” with them as humans do when they meet, talk and bump into one another.
He compared blockchain to the solar system.

“It is like an interdependent solar system, not vertical or horizontal. It is interdependent,” Shulgin said, noting planets move and rotate, pushing and pulling within the system.

Shulgin forecast commercial blockchain applications and the content will start appearing in the market as soon as the fifth-generation (5G) wireless network becomes widespread.

This is because the market will need a powerful bandwidth to distribute blockchain content and enable people to download and experience it in real time.

“5G will help make that happen. You need a good strong bandwidth,” he said.

“It will start slowly, beginning in 2022 when the next generation 5G’s penetration rate reaches about 20 percent to 30 percent. Then, mixed reality content and applications will start to come out.”

Shulgin said the technology will not tear down the border between professionals and amateurs, and art and entertainment.

Rather, he added he hoped blockchain will help “find and fix the value of art” because it has become lost amid the rise of social media.

“A single photo posted online can get a million likes. Young people believe and understand that is value. No, it is not. They just monetized it,” he said.

“What draws the line between art and entertainment is art, whether tangible or intangible, makes a philosophical impact and helps change and move your soul. Entertainment is just having fun, sharing some time with friends. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that is not art.”

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/biz/2019/04/488_265338.html

Centralisation has always been dominant, submission, oppression or enslavement… Capture, growth, invasion… it all sounds a very male kind of start. To something.

Decentralisation has always been the agreement (or consensus) to do things in a calm, and more attractive way… like dew-drops, which are actually a decentralised manifestation of the world’s oceans.

Decentralisation is as beautiful as a young woman, as soft as warm white sand by the deep-blue ocean — and sand is also decentralised particles of rocks and tectonic mass.

It’s a kind of Yin and Yang, which encompasses both good and evil, beginning and end…

There’s an ongoing struggle in which one replaces the other. Decentralisation always replaces centralisation.

I’ve given a detailed description of this here. https://hackernoon.com/decentralization-of-everything-transforming-the-global-economy-and-lifestyle-c3f3529a0bff

Here, too, is another good example. Amazon is one of the world’s most centralised services — not only in the e-commerce sector, but in the digital world as a whole, and globally. It’s the dominant and all-conquering force in the market.

The e-commerce market is truly enormous

and the dominance of Amazon in this sector is impressive.

The implication is that in just a few years, more than Amazon will have conquered and occupied more than half of this market.

But could this really be described as a new ‘Defeat of Europe’? Is history repeating itself?

Does Europe itself truly have no defence to offer in this sector?

A decentralised service for this sector. A worthy response in defence of the market, and in defence of small and medium-sized businesses? In this case, we are on your side!

We’re here! GAMB — the Global Alliance of Merchants on Blockchain

The decentralised service for the e-commerce sector. A worthy reply and market defence for small and medium-sized businesses. It means that’s is us with you!

Here you’ll find a host of links that explain what GAMB is, the idea behind it, and its whole doctrine.

It’s a new European doctrine — a new model for development

Click, read, and support us! This needs your support!

About Gambio

Gambio — N 1 The market share leader in Germany

25,000+

Active merchants

$2.8Billion

Annual shop revenues in 2017

20.2Million

Shipments per year

75+

Countries

Revenue Over Time

$2.4Billion

Annual shop revenues in 2016

$2.8Billion

Annual shop revenues in 2017

$3.2Billion

Annual shop revenues in 2018 (projected

More info here https://medium.com/@gambproject

Cycles

Imagining life as eternal circular movement has been quite usual since antiquity. Ancient societies widely adhered to the idea of ages changing in cycles, as celestial bodies recurrently changed their positions, thus supposedly regulating events on Earth. This view of the cyclic development of everything existing in the world, besides such usual forms of cycles as solarand lunarcycles, sedimentary cycles and life cycles, has passed onto economic cycles made up of economic rises and falls, as well as to cycles of political change.

While Spengler and Toynbee took specific cultures (civilizations) localized in time as going through their specific cycles, the Marxist concept denies the idea of world history moving in closed circles, as well as the theory of its continuous mechanical advancement, progressively, along a straight line. According to historical materialism, world history flows as a whole consistent progressive process of change in the social and economic formations, in which movement does not follow a straight line, but a spiral, i.e. some of the features which characterize earlier stages of historical development reoccur, yet they do so at a new, higher level.

The word “centralization” came into use in France in 1794 as the post-French Revolution French Directory leadership created a new government structure. The word “decentralization” came into usage in the 1820s. “Centralization” entered written English in the first third of the 1800s.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the French Revolution began with “a push towards decentralization… [but became,] in the end, an extension of centralization”.

In early twentieth-century America, one response to the centralization of economic wealth and political power was a decentralist movement. It blamed large-scale industrial production for destroying middle-class shop keepers and small manufacturers, and promoted increased property ownership and a return to small-scale living.

Many books and other works dedicated to decentralization have been written. Daniel Bell wrote The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, while Alvin Toffler published Future Shock(1970) and The Third Wave (1980). Futurist John Naisbitt’s 1982 book Megatrends was on The New York Times Best Seller list for more than two years and sold 14 million copies. Many other books and articles were published in these years. Stephen Cummings wrote that decentralization became a “revolutionary megatrend” in the 1980s.

However, all of this has so far been a kind of volatility around the centralization trend, in the same way it has been with the business cycle or economic cycle and/or trade cycle, when we see the downward and upward movement around its long-term growth trend up to the moment when the technology capable of changing the World, its organization and way of life emerges. Along with the distributed ledger technology known as Blockchain, the time for a bigger cycle is coming into being. Beginning from the Renaissance, which followed a colossal European crisis which occurred for a number of reasons including the Little Ice Age, new breakthroughs in science and innovation, followed by the start of the Technological Revolution, the strongest centralization of everything has emerged, be it power, infrastructure, manufacturing, distribution, finance and media. This wave, this cycle was much bigger than the earlier cycles of centralization. By 2000–2010, the centralization wave reached its peak in social, industrial, financial and geopolitical spheres, and by then we could see the emerging blockchain technology to bring to life a decentralized public ledger.

That means it’s time for a global correction. In terms adopted by Nikolai Kondratiev, a genius Russian scientist, to describe the economic cycles he discovered — improvement, prosperity, recession, and depression — we are at the beginning of recession. If there are Kondratiev’s cycles lasting for a period of 50 years, as well as lesser cycles, such as the Kuznets cycle, Juglar cycle and
Kitchin cycle, then there must be bigger cycles as well. It is such a Cycle A, Wave A, cycle top, which we have come to now.

Genesis of Digital States

World System Theory (world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective)

Immanuel Wallerstein and his successors have tried to uncover such a prospect for a stable model of a geopolitical future using the old economy model and taking into account the transforming digital technology as the basis for the Future Media Space.

In his 1910 The History of Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge wrote that Persian King Darius I (550–486 BC) was a master of organization and “for the first time in history, centralization becomes a political fact.” He also noted that this contrasted with the decentralization of Ancient Greece.

Marxism added a stress on social conflict, a focus on the capital accumulation process and competitive class struggles, a focus on a relevant totality, the transitory nature of social forms and a dialectical sense of motion through conflict and contradiction.

This is the prerequisite for decentralization and redistribution of capital. However, all of this, along with other attempts to visualize the coming geopolitical transformation, was futile, for no one could envisage the emergence of such a technology enabling total decentralization. Halfway to such decentralization, a prerequisite for decentralized centralization emerges, which, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, is “a push towards decentralization… [but became,] in the end, an extension of centralization”. Stock market operators and traders know the laws of the Fibonacci sequence and Elliot waves, as well as other derivatives of cyclicity, which means they know that somewhere halfway between stormy growth and abrupt downfall there is a point of trend confirmation, at which it is confirmed by a volatility, jump-back or correction, which is known as ‘dead cat bounce’ in downward trends. Therefore, before full global decentralization, which is to be the biggest and therefore the most dramatic of all previous ones, “…decentralization…, is an extension of Final centralization”.

So, halfway into decentralization, which will lead to ultimate global centralization, there will be new digital Unions, the platform states. Instead of 200+ states and unrecognized territories, seven digital Unions will emerge
in the form of economic platforms.

Seven digital platforms will be the seven digital single markets joined not so much geographically, but based on commonalities in culture, traditions and mentality. Those will be relatively the same Unions in terms of number of people and resources, which at some point will be driven to merge to coexist within the new paradigm. A number of countries have skills and technology, other countries have resources, yet other countries have energy. Energy will play an ever-growing role because computing power of decentralized systems will require more energy along the way. Even today, infrastructures which use Etherium consume as much power as Cyprus, and those which use Bitcoin consume much more. What’s to happen when the Internet of Things, Industrial Internet of Things, smart cities, smart factories etc. become commonplace? When hundreds of billions of continuously connected devices are all around us, consuming huge amounts of energy, still more energy will be consumed supporting this infrastructure, as well as by Useful Data Mining, necessary for maintaining real-time data for our future Wisdom Economy.

The Digital Environment will account for up to 80% of the whole global economy. More than 50% of all services will be provided within the digital environment, and nearly 50% of all goods and products will be created and distributed directly within that same digital space. Every one of the 7 Unions, the Digital States, shall have its own standards protecting its economic sovereignty.

Softwarization, digitalization, robotization and automation bring immense risk of new luddites, where the unemployed masses will be a heavy burden on society. They will have to be paid Universal Income, and immigration of foreign people into the Unions will be quite painful both economically and socially for the existing societies. Therefore, firewall protection and one’s own digital environmental standards will create a strong border comparable to the walls and moats of the Dark Ages. Communications between unions will be managed using gateways. Today, we are beginning to see such emerging isolationism: Brexit, Trump’s policy, etc. All the existing tension in the world is a positioning attempt before the geopolitical transformation, decentralization and replacement of the whole monetary system.

Everything will be fairly decentralized for Society within such a Union, yet Centralization will go through its own metamorphosis, and Alexis de Tocqueville, if he were alive, would say that “a push towards decentralization… [but became,] in the end, an extension of centralization”.

Ultimate decentralization into 7 digital platforms is necessary to take the next step, which is total global decentralization utilizing Hyper Centralization of management and control and a unified Hyper Brain of all humanity in our little home called Planet Earth will have no privacy, and we will have nowhere to go in the same way a passenger can’t leave a plane midflight.

Only one thing will remain, and that is to be Happy in an absolutely decentralized Society. If we can, if the likes we accumulate allow it, which will become the social credit of trust, which we will be using to exchange things. For at this time, we will not be using money at all.

Originally published at Diplomatic World on December, 2017
See also digital copy of magazine.

Decentralization Of Everything Transforming The Global Economy And Lifestyle was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Musician turned crypto-currency investor Alexander Shulgin on five things everyone should know about songwriting, blockchain and how the two work together in harmony

Alexander Shulgin is one of Russia’s best-known composers, boasting scores of number-one records and accolades over a 30-year career. As well as successfully walking the line between rock and classical music, since the fall of the Berlin Wall he’s also balanced music with a life as an entrepreneur and investor.

Shulgin’s Familia Group operates in media and entertainment, and he also runs several venture capital funds that increasingly focus on blockchain and crypto-currency investments. “I first predicted the rise of e-money back in 2009,” says Shulgin when we meet backstage at TEDx Hong Kong. “It was published, you can check it!” he says with a grin.

Today, Shulgin is an in-demand speaker on the subject of crypto-currency, which he personally invested in back in 2011 to put his money where his mouth is. “I’m very happy,” he says, rather understatedly, when asked about the recent Bitcoin price jumps.

After Shulgin’s TEDx talk, we talk to the composer turned crypto-capitalist about communism, Bitcoin and how blockchain could be used to compose an album.

The first years of post-Soviet Russia were like blockchain 1.0

I was a musician in the 1980s and I started to move into business [after the fall of the Berlin Wall]. This was the first time I heard terms like royalty and merchandising, because in the Soviet Union everything had belonged to the people.

At that time, no corporate law existed. The first corporate law didn’t come in until 1993. In those early days, it was a jungle! A complete jungle. Everything was based on trust. It was a kind of a prototype for blockchain, because you had to [follow and trust] the transfer.

Investing is a lot like songwriting

There are similarities between writing a song and making an investment. When I write a song I have to use my imagination — I imagine the music then put it in the material world by recording it. Similarly, if a product or idea is totally new you need to imagine it; have a vision about something that has not existed before. Music has helped me do this.

The future implications of blockchain go far beyond fintech

In the future, the Internet of Things will be based on the blockchain ledger and become decentralised. Right now, everything’s connected to centralised servers — if the servers get hacked all the drones fall down.

This system also requires so much energy. If I send you an SMS when you’re right next to me, the message goes to some satellite 15,000 miles away then comes back down us. When these gadgets start using blockchain infrastructure and become decentralised, it will transform the world more than electricity did.

Crypto-currency will replace cash over the next decade

Crypto-currency will change the world. In the future, there will be no currency. In terms of [the redundancy of] physical cash, I think that will happen no later than 2030.

But the mental shift will come when the next generation grows up. For example, right now younger generations don’t know what a telegram is. Similarly, younger generations in the future will not understand cash.

There’s a seminal album just waiting to be made with blockchain

All new music styles have been made through innovation. If there was no electricity, there would be no rock ’n’ roll; if there was no keyboard, there would be no dance music. Technology is a gift to an artist. It means they can take the same seven notes and come out with something that is completely different. We’re always waiting for these new tools.

I think a blockchain with artificial intelligence could be used to create completely new sounds. It could create adaptive media, so the music listens to the sounds around us — background noise, conversation — and adapts accordingly. You will be able to mix music and reality; a new three-dimensional way to compose reality around you.

Originally published at Hong Kong Tatler

Over my long and diverse life and career, not one innovation, either cultural or economic, nor any branch of the economy has ever shown as much hype as that connected with cryptocurrency, and words such as bitcoin, etherium and blockchain. Over just a few months of 2017, the number of people involved in mining cryptocurrencies has reached hundreds of thousands. Both the wholesale and retail market have run out of video cards (used by miners to mine cryptocurrencies, including at home), while video card manufacturers’ shares have risen in value by 60 to 70 per cent. Miners and members of the new ecosystem have instantly become multimillionaires, faster than sports and showbiz stars. Nineteen-year-old start-uppers have managed to gather tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in cash by making successful Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), while those with a more conservative view were just stocking coins and waiting for their moment with their share of cryptocurrencies in their cryptowallets, feeling they were getting richer and richer by the hour. Successful currencies could bring in 100 per cent profit in just one day, while the more conservative ones, such as the bitcoin, have grown by a mere 2000 per cent over the last 20 months.

I did not witness the Gold Rush in California and Siberia 150 to 200 years ago, but I am fairly sure that mining nowadays provides a more effective rush.

Smart contracts

The new Distributed Ledger Technology behind mining has not evaded the media, either. This may be less surprising, because it was likely the media who first encountered the technology — remember BitTorrent, eDonkey and other P2P file sharing services?

As Etherium emerged, people started working on smart contract-based services, and of course we saw innovative decentralized offerings for the media sector.

But all of those offerings are still based on a small set of offerings normally stemming from the four basic pillars of the Blockchain system.

• Decentralized
• Identity — Cryptographic hash
• Trusted and Secured
• Transparency in any kind of usage.

Normally those are various kinds of metadata, which essentially is a database that serves to optimize content processing, fighting piracy, nano payments, content and crypto-journalism. This is a quite limited set of applications still afflicted by the fact that everything remainswithin the old paradigm.

All decentralized solutions are based on centralized global infrastructure.

It is as if we were painting innovative pink paint over black colored walls, whereas the time has come to repair the whole house. The right technology is already out there.

Decentralization of Everything

The new Blockchain technology is already being called the new Internet. It allows the decentralization of virtually everything. This has started with the decentralization of the financial system (thanks to the miners), and we can see the banking system has been shaken by that. The next professions in line are notaries, lawyers, auditors, consultants, etc. They will be affected through smart contracts. The essence of the Blockchain technology is in removing all of the middle men (i.e. third parties), and it is important to understand why the first “pioneers” making start-up offerings today cannot survive for long. This is because they are offering brokering services and platforms while decentralization presumes disruption of all intermediators such as any platforms and market places.

But the decentralized technology will finally provide the foundation for the decentralized infrastructure for everything — network, energy and, certainly, media.

Internet of Content (IoC)

Sure, everybody has heard of the forthcoming Internet of Things. This means billions of connected gadgets interacting with one another, as well as with people, which, from the gadgets’ point of view, will be no different from the way such interaction is conducted with other gadgets. And these 100 billion connected devices will interact with one other in no more than about 5 years. All of this will be thanks to decentralization, for a centralized system lacks security due to too many hackers, while online interaction is virtually impossible due to the volume of data that needs processing in always connected mode, which is essential for IoT. By the time this comes into being, we will have a decentralized ecosystem, next-generation communications technology, and thus, different standards and regulation principles.

This will be the moment to reconstruct the whole ecosystem and media. And now imagine the Internet of Content, which functions exactly the same way as the Internet of Things. All content files and their constituents (which are unlimited) can interact directly with each other and also with users via an interdependable interaction model. One can not only stream a ready file, but create something new while streaming, or allow the media to adapt parts of content according to one’s wishes and create unique content only for oneself. This is all done without any third parties. Global Peer 2 Peer in everything and more. This, of course, will mean elimination of all brokers, and a new model, a new ecosystem will be built. The same way outdated districts and infrastructures were brought down in cities, to be replaced with newer, more comfortable and magnificent buildings,now, new Smart Cities will be built, and the outdated centralized infrastructure will be replaced (just look how strongly centralized it is, both on the management and ownership side, and in production, storage and content distribution).

New model: Internet of Content.

Data Mining

The statement that Content is King becomes more important after the whole system is rebuilt and the IoC emerges. Data will be the new commodity. Just look at the data we have in 2017:

• Over 10 billion videos emerge daily in Snapchat
• Facebook now sees 100 million hours of daily video watch time
• People now watch 1 billion hours of YouTube per day
• In 2020, these figures will have grown several times over and will reach, as they say, 500 exabytes (1018) of global traffic per year.

If we are to imagine each unit of content forming a pile of user activity data around it, the successful content can be viewed as the Rocky Mountains, the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas with the most successful being Everest containing the new gold, the new oil, the new commodity, all of which being data. It will be an even newer gold rush for the miners, even bigger than it is with cryptocurrencies today. They will mine and serve up data to everyone who pays them with the currency effective at the time. For not only coal or bitcoins can be mined. Mining smart calculations will be of much greater importance. They will enable the Knowledge Economy, Smart Cities, and Smart Media.

PS. The only ‘if’ in there is that it will require a huge amount of energy. The support infrastructure for the Distributed Ledger Technology according to some extrapolations will require as much energy as Denmark by 2020. However, I think it will not be the biggest problem for those willing to invest in the reconstruction and creation of the New Media Space.

GRN: Greetings, Alexander! In your speeches, you have often said that robotization, decentralization and softwarization will soon replace over 80% of jobs. In your view, is it going to affect specialists working in communications, such as GR and PR, and if so, then how?

A. Sh.: Your question deals with industrial progress. No one has yet been able to halt progress. This is a normal way of life. Characteristic features of progress nowadays are robotization, softwarization and automation.

We are beginning to see that these events have partly taken place in many sectors already: mail, logistics, content management, and communications. Today, this is starting to come true for even more serious industries including industrial production and, of course, almost every kind of service delivery. This also means the new stage of industrial revolution which is called Industry 4.0 in Europe and Germany, and “Internet +” in China, or the sixth technological technoculture here in Russia. The term we use is not that important, as the idea behind it is the same, namely total automation. In Germany, let’s say, according to the road map for Industry 4.0 development, machines will replace all jobs by the year 2030.

Let’s take the quite controversial term Uberization (as in Uber, the taxi company). Uberization is somewhere in the middle ground between what exists today in automation, the decentralization being created, and full automation.

Taxi drivers work for the company, but are not on its staff: everything is automated and outsourced. Uber’s plans for driverless cars are still far distant, yet taxi fleet services are already gone: Uber has replaced them by automating processes of searching and paying for fares.

GR and PR are first and foremost B2B services. Can a machine replace them? Both yes and no. This does not mean it can’t replace it. The existing paradigm of “labyrinthine corridors of political power” will likely make it impossible, since this is connected with internal agreements, conceptual relations, etc. Today, GR and PR are often non-transparent. A machine can hardly replace and make the right choice within the existing paradigm.

Therefore, it means that in the existing environment, those relations can only be partly preplaced. However, the paradigm will certainly change as well.

GRN: In your view, what key skill should a communications professional have with regard to the future development of blockchain-based technologies?

A. Sh.: Let’s do it this way: I will not tell you what skills that professional will have. I think that in the very near future, everything will be automated, therefore such a profession will become outdated. But let’s presume that we will still need this type of service. So, what will a specialist do while the technologies mature? I think it will be everything a machine can’t take care of at any given time. That’s one. Two, he will deal with everything related to non-transparency. Existing electronic intelligence already has better capabilities than the average specialist in the industry on many accounts. For example, the speed and quality when searching for certain regulatory documentation has been far surpassed by AI. However, everything to do with non-transparency is not yet replaceable.

GRN: Could you please tell us more about we-government technology. How is it going to be implemented at the national and global scale?

A. Sh.: See for yourself, its development is ongoing, and some parts have already been implemented.

At first, they were developing the e-Government technology, modified processes to make document processing electronic, and made efforts to attain maximum transparency. The example of Estonia’s government is quite telling. However, we need to speak about the model of the State as such.

The existing model of governing a society was called the state, and it existed for several centuries, but it deformed, and is now ready for change because it does not represent our interests as citizens. How does this model work now? Let’s imagine a small town. Its inhabitants delegate certain rights, send a representative (a parliamentary official) to a decision-making center. He lays out the demands of the citizens to other parliamentary officials, with the other citizens’ interest in mind. Then he delivers the decision to the residents of the town.

Why do we need that today? It was necessary, useful and in demand at the time when there was no electricity, no high-speed railways and roads, and one person had to come forward and stand up for their interests.

Today, we can pick everything we need and vote online, making this or that decision. A machine can take care of the counting. Deep learning and big data technologies are developing rapidly, and it is time for us to understand that it is no problem to make a decision and implement infrastructure or social projects in the town without the delegate.

How do we explain to a 15-year-old why he needs a delegate when he does not understand what that is? We can vote and choose ourselves, we do not need intermediaries who care — or don’t care — about our interests.

In the we government technology, everything is ready for this scenario, and the one last thing we need is the blockchain technology to protect us from manipulation of data, guaranteeing transparency and protection.

With those technologies in place, we will be able to see our decisions through and be collectively responsible, while understanding who is for and who is against the decision.

GRN: How will the role and function of the state regulatory bodies like the Central Bank, FRS, ministries and administrations change with this blockchain technology?

A. Sh.: I think that the regulatory bodies will become unnecessary in the very near future. Today, there is some demand for them, but in general they are a kind of simulacrum.

Ask young people 15 years of age why they need visas to go to countries and why Central Banks exist. It’s easy to do anything in electronic form. Why do we need the state? The answer is we need it to protect us. However, in the future, private armies will take care of that.

Today, in 70% of cases, private armies do battle in conflict zones. This is cheaper than keeping military recruits there, youngsters who will run if war breaks out. A war cannot be won with cannon fodder now.

Again, it is technologies which win. And those wars are bloodless, for the time of bloody wars has passed. We need to try harder to make war a thing of the past. Yet there is no profit in it for “the departing state”. Therefore, the old model is not effective either. The functions of a modern state will be presented in a new format.

GRN: You have made a prediction that within 15 to 20 years there will be no more than seven “digital states” (or “digital communities”). How will the governing system be organized in those new structures? Which one of them can Russia be a part of?

A. Sh.: No later than 2035, we will have 7 states instead of the 250 we have today. Those will be 6 or 7 communities which will be digitally joined, and based on their own digital platforms and common goals. These will be clusters of the seven leading economies.

For example, one of these modern digital states will be created within what is called the Great Firewall of China, which is the Chinese Internet joining people together not just in China, but in the rest of the world. In the same way a Russian citizen, when he goes abroad for a month’s vacation, can continue to use Yandex, mail.ru services, read the Russian news and communicate with others using Russian social media. When a Chinese person goes around the world, he remains a citizen of his own digital state, that is, he uses Baidu, the WECHAT messenger and other Chinese services. It is almost impossible to imagine a Chinese person using Facebook or Twitter: he is a citizen of his own digital community.

In this sense, the past was offline: there was land marked out with a barbed wire fence. Here, it is not important where your body is; the main thing is the extent to which you are included in this particular digital space, where you are mentally and where you work. Today, over 7% of all the world’s GDP is created by the digital space.

In 2030, according to the World Bank, almost 50% of the world’s GDP will be generated in the digital environment. This is a big figure. If we forget that we will still have to take food offline, and the remaining half of the economy will be related to foods and health, the other half will still be in the digital environment. That is why the digital platforms will be so important, for they will be joining states.

Why would they join, then? They will join because they will be out of options to do otherwise. Today there exist two more or less formed digital platforms: the British Commonwealth, which encompasses around 60–80 states, and around 1 billion people, who all mentally share the Anglo-Saxon values. And Sinafon, which is the Chinese platform used by roughly 1.8 billion people. The Islamic world is scattered all around the world, yet it needs a unified digital space, given its common cultural character. India, which has 1.8 billion people (other estimates say at least 1.5 billion), has not yet decided, but there is a question whether Indians in the UK will use the English platform, or their own Hispanidad platform, which is nearly 50 million.

Russia is also building its own digital platform to create a Eurasian community taking space from Japan all the way to Germany. This is done first of all to protect the markets. If you don’t do it, then platform owners will overtake the market. Such small states as Japan (125 million people), for example, will not be able to make their own platform because the market is too small to make one, so they will have to pick a platform to join. It is very likely that Russia will join Europe under such a platform.

In 2014, the EU started its Digital Single Market project. I am not sure that this project will be a success because there are too many contradictions and no common values. What common values can a Finnish person and an Albanian have? Therefore, part of Europe will probably join the Euro-Asian platform based on the Eurasian Community we are creating. I would want Korea to be there too, but I am unsure. Korea may join China, or become part of the Eurasian platform.

In this sense, the unified space from Vladivostok to Lisbon exists, but if we take a closer look, there will be a bridge from Tokyo to Berlin, in which Germany and Tokyo are in the middle, with Russia and other states to left and right. This does not mean that countries will enter the digital community as a whole. For example, Uzbekistan may partly be in our space, and partly in the Muslim world. Likewise for Germany, part of it will join the Anglo-Saxon community, and Turks may mentally join the Muslim community, with some joining the Eurasian community. Management will be digital because the existing system presumes corruption and distrust from people.

Today, Russia is building its own platform, its own operating system, its own chipsets, the biggest in the world. So far, we haven’t seen too much success, though. Nevertheless, we are on it, and we will succeed.

Global processes point us directly to the genesis of new forms of communities. Such processes as, for example, the US elections, some call isolationism (building and protecting one’s market, setting up borders from those who will certainly not be part of your community), I would call protection of one’s own market, which will be fundamental for new forms of communities. This will effectively continue. We are going to feel the change in the air by witnessing fragmentation and division of the existing forms through elections in Germany, France, Italy. We will witness geopolitical transformation.

Its time has come.

Original: http://gr-news.ru/2017/02/21/aleksandr-shulgin-sovremennye-funktsii-gosudarstva-budut-predstavleny-v-inom-formate/

Why one of Russia’s largest venture investors is convinced that capitalism is dead, how Sberbank is helping all of us, and what business will look like in 15 to 20 years’ time. DK.RU exclusive.

Alexander Shulgin, one of the largest venture investors in Russia and a member of the Russian Government’s Council of Experts in the industrial Internet, IT and innovations fields, gave a speech at an event organized by the Sverdlovsk motion picture studio under the Kinohakaton project in Ekaterinburg. He presented his view on trends in the global economy.

According to Shulgin, the world is being transformed both in the economic and political sense. The newly forming digital economies have similar borders and properties as civilizations, with the Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic, etc. Alongside, the classical state is being replaced by the digital state, which has no distinct borders, yet presents requirements to businesses and citizens. This break point, therefore, is making ‘good old capitalism’ obsolete.

In his interview with a DK.RU journalist, Shulgin, while expressing slight disappointment with the fact that the Sverdlovsk authorities are less concerned with the obvious trends, speaks on what, in his opinion, needs to be a point of business focus in the “world after capitalism”.

The changes in the economy you predict create a huge number of social risks and undermine the state as we know it, with all its borders and laws. Do you think we should expect that the classical state will resist the coming of the new world?

— Both yes, and no. For example, if we look at how the states of Europe are standing in the way of the famous “uberization”, we’ll see a vector to it. Let’s take the taxi fleet sector in Germany as an example: the regular organizational model, where drivers receive and fulfill orders in a slow live queue, limits competition, but enables everyone to make money from the high price of an individual order. There is a whole model at work: Mercedes makes a taxi car, insurance offices are in, lease companies are in, encompassing a great number of people and entities. The digital economy simplifies communications between any driver and a potential passenger and destroys this model by removing the middle man. Keep in mind that this middle man deals with making and servicing cars, maintaining offices, fleets, employees, financial services related to credits and leases. It is also companies making parts, extracting, processing and selling fuel, and, of course, the drivers themselves.

The government says it is taking care of entire markets and saving jobs. Uber can provide services both faster and cheaper because there are no countless middle men and superstructures, but then, what do we do with these elements of the “economic superstructure”? Each driver carries a whole army of “white collar workers”. All of them are being paid a share from what we pay to the taxi driver.

Nowadays, when there is the alternative, people don’t want to feed as many spongers. This is a classic situation: those at the top can’t, and those at the bottom don’t want to.

Back in 2011, Sberbank was about to dismiss 280 000 employees because the software available at the time could allow it to replace a considerable number of jobs. However, by dismissing such a large number of people, we are creating huge pressure on the labor market and related industries, meaning that many other indirectly related markets will suffer (such as office rental and servicing). This means hundreds of thousands of unemployed added to those dismissed directly by the bank. This evidently creates social upheaval which needs to be mitigated, so Sberbank stretches these dismissals out over years and years so that the changes to the traditional economy do not happen so fast.

In other words, the classical state is protecting us from the rapid onset of a future which part of society is not ready for, smoothing out the bumps, allowing entire markets, and thereby, businesses, to operate in the old-fashioned way. This is good, is it not?

— Nobody’s saying it’s bad! Of course, we do not need a second shock therapy, because the first one, which took place in 1992 to 1993, has shown the consequences of a new economic reality entering the lives of an unprepared society. It is important to know that these changes are inevitable and they will happen not in some distant future some time in 50 to 100 years, but much sooner. Certainly, in the short time frame we can slow their progress, however it is not realistic to do so over a longer period of time.

I have seen a living example of an industry, in which I worked, undergo not even a revolution, but a super-revolution in just 25 years. This is a good example because many people can understand it. In the 1980s, in a town called Aprelevka in the Moscow suburbs, there was an audio disc records plant which used to supply its products to all of the USSR. This industry, this sector of the economy was providing over 700 000 jobs both in the town and the entire country. It included production of the necessary materials, the disc casting compound, delivery and storage, making the records themselves, their storage, delivery and distribution… There were specialist retail stores and sections in many cities. In the 1990s, the industry moved on to new technologies, CDs emerged, and production and servicing required around 150 000 employees. In another 10 years, wireless data transmission technologies emerged and have become part of users’ lives. Today, the whole industry employs a few hundred people, bringing insignificant income to the Russian budget.

You are giving examples of changes in the digital economy sector influencing residents of big cities. However, not everyone is living in a megalopolis. We cannot expect that ‘uberization’ will affect everyone in the same way it did the residents of major cities.

— First of all, speaking of megalopolises in relation to the near future is not quite relevant. There is an obvious tendency toward hyperpolises and erasing borders between city and suburbs within such hyperagglomerations. Modern Shanghai is a perfect example. So, if you think that there is a big city, and the rest is unimportant — cities expand quickly nowadays, creating a united space, and the share of the population they contain grows quickly. In our country, the example may be New Moscow as a hyperpolis megaproject.

Secondly, it is important to understand that people from settlements and villages currently at the previous stage of technology will find it much easier to move onto the new trend, because the “new economy” will be more adaptive for them than it is for the conservative society of today.

I well remember once talking to small settlement fishermen on one of the more distant islands in Indonesia, whereas today, according to some, Indonesia may become one of the Top 5 world economies. Their way of life is completely unrelated to what we call the modern state. To be more exact, it is not connected to bilateral citizen-state-citizen relations. They have no pensions, no state infrastructure, no support from the government. They will easily survive all the transformations happening both to the state and to capitalist society. Their children will easily make the move into the new way of life.

It is the same as they did in China 15 years ago, for example. They have skipped one technological step and, in place of their old houses, instead of building “Khrushchev-era” apartment buildings as we did, have constructed modern housing and communications networks, etc. Russia has very many people who do not feel a strong connection with the state. This relative ease of transformation is an important property of emerging markets.

The ‘old’ Paris and Munich will have a harder time adapting to the new economy than Bangalore or Jakarta.

European civilization is conservative, it lives in a big museum, and no one is prepared to willfully agree to reconstruct this museum. If that someone suddenly decides to go for it, can you imagine how many decades it will take?

It is very difficult for them to imagine that the monetary system, the cult of added value and the interest rate are leaving us forever, that capitalism is passing on like an outdated model. Capitalism as a system is no longer part of a notable number of innovative economic models.

Discussions on the ‘death of capitalism’ seem like a utopia in the existing reality. Entrepreneurs adapt to new technologies, they use all of these social and economic innovations to get richer. How is this new economy different from capitalism, in principle?

— There is a fundamentally new consumer culture coming. Against this background, capitalism has no room to grow and expand, nothing to seize. Capitalism means expansion, continuous growth, and conquest. It dies without new territories and markets. In this sense, the fall of the USSR and the “eastern block” has been the second breath for, let’s say, Germany at the end of the 20th century. Today, such potential is almost exhausted.

But new markets still emerge. We simply create them at the point where they meet the old ones.

— True, but these ‘new markets’ are being developed according to a different model, where the capitalist model is being replaced by a new, more social model. The digital world is the new ‘global village’, as Marshall McLuhan called it. We remember that there never was nor could be any capitalism in a village. A person living on another continent with the help of the Internet is just a short stretch away, and again barter, direct resources exchange and direct energy exchange take the spotlight. Co-operation of consumers and maximized natural exchange, collaboration, co-creation, co-ownership and co-usage — all of this replaces the old business models built on added value.

Blockchain technology, which is based on transparency, safety and faith in decentralization, is the new platform for the future business infrastructure.

The new entrepreneurs who use it will be quite different, in the same way a modern-day banker is different from a Venetian money jobber of the 16th century. Or an old mail office from an online messenger.

It is a very pretty picture, but I get the impression that all of this escapes the attention of the decision makers in our country. They are not ready to become leaders of this process.

— I think it is government’s job to prepare the ground for the coming changes. Now is not the time for such leaders. Their time is yet to come. But the coming leaders will have little in common with the conquerors of the past; they will be leaders in their own little communities inside the ‘big village’.

In the same way as the lead communities in social media, they will lead in their own yards, settlements and blocks. In the end, we will be returning to a natural balance in the bigger cycle. In the same way spring and fall do not come because a bunch of leaders say so, the new economy will emerge just because the time has come for it to emerge.

Oroginal: http://ekb.dk.ru/news/sberbank-i-emu-podobnye-ne-smogut-vechno-sderzhivat-vzryv-aleksandr-shulgin-237070964

Alexander Shulgin, Russian visionary, investor and composer, has been involved with new technologies all his life. One of his current specialties is venture investments in blockchain technology. A lot of people don’t know what this technology is about (blockchain is a distributed ledger technology utilizing a distributed, decentralized shared and reconstructible ledger, entries in which are controlled by all its users — editor). Yet this technology is becoming the future. In his interview with “Aktualnye kommentarii”, Shulgin explains the inevitable automation and decentralization of everything, how technologies will change the world and humans, how blockchain will influence election processes and what total decentralized automation will mean for humanity.

— You write about the venture market a lot in social media, and your latest related material talks about its meltdown. Those in authority are unwilling to recognize this as fact, so what are the consequences?

 — Recently, the Russian Venture Company held its latest investment forum. This institution, as you can tell from its name, is responsible for the development of the Russian venture market, and the venture environment is always part of an innovative economy. Generally speaking, the 2016 statistics we could see at the forum may indicate a collapse, since the market has shrunk from the billions to just 120 million in a couple of years.

Everything we know about the giants of Russia’s digital economy, whether Mail.ru Group (MRG), Yandex, or Kaspersky Technologies, had all been created before the government decided to help with innovation. When the government decided to do so, not a single company with a size of over 100 million dollars was created. That is, when the government was not helping at all, people’s natural initiative created companies with billions in capitalization (like the aforementioned Yandex, MRG and Kaspersky), but when it started doing so, everything simply crashed. It is possible that the same thing would have happened without the government’s help; it is not my place to categorically say that it would have flourished otherwise. However, it is obvious that the policies in place to render such support are unreasonable, because we haven’t seen any progress for several years, according to the analytical data I have just referred to. Just imagine that tens of billions of dollars have been spent under the auspices of helping young innovators succeed, and all we have is concrete boxes in Skolkovo, as well as a market of 120 million dollars.

We are still unable to offer anything new or special to society, the market, and the whole world. The question of why it is this way would be better addressed to the development institutions. So far, we have been adhering to a strategy of copying such American services as pizza delivery and e-commerce. We make legislative attempts to somehow protect this copycat and plagiarist market instead of teaching people to look forward and think original.

 — So, we are not coming up with anything new, we just copy, right?

 — If we are speaking of the venture market, we must allow ourselves not to be guided by the final products, since this is the model of continual catch-up, but by the people who have created world trends and tendencies, and by the successful models they create. That means looking at the causes and sources instead of the consequences. If we were to look at Steve Jobs, for example, the main phrase to guide us would be ‘Think Different’, which precisely means do not copy, do not be like anyone else, and, certainly, don’t be a mindless robot. The main idea behind success is thinking for yourself. However, no one listens to the leaders and visionaries. People tend to copy end results.

Passive copying does not provide an impulse for development. As we say, a pine tree does not produce oranges. Of course, the whole venture market will suffer decline in the near future. We are about to experience the next transformation step from one technology to a newer one, so products made previously will die away and lose their current appeal.

But, returning to what we were saying earlier, we should note that this is the first time in 10 years of state involvement, and primarily that of innovators selected and appointed by the state and top managers from the innovation market, that the results have been so unsatisfactory. The problem is not the sanctions, onto which people are trying to shift the blame for this meltdown, but the fact we are creating a secondary product. We are not only secondary, but sometimes even tertiary. Our venture market does not have visionaries, we have creative copy-pasters and servants eager to please, dressed up as ‘effective managers’, that’s all.

This is what our innovations market looks like today. It’s time to put an end to it and move onto the second stage, but we need to fully change our approach and principles, for the old ones are not enough for us to bring up a calf, or in the venture case, a unicorn, and to create a friendly environment. Even with the growing isolationism, while fully concentrated on the domestic market and those of the neighboring countries on which we have a strong enough influence, this approach on its own is ineffective and outdated, in both its form and essence. This is not effective and there is no reason to think that it will be effective tomorrow, even if there is quasi-demand for the copied products due to the coming isolationism.

Think about it, can the innovation environment and people who are part of it be just a gray mass? This is exactly what we have in our country. Name the modern Maskovs, Kurchatovs, Jobses or Korolevs who came to light during recent years. Volozh, Grishin, Kaspesky, Yan and Belousov have been all too busy participating in forums and interviews, but they are all a product of the 90s who came about at the dawn of software and the Internet. They have appeared before the government decided to help. Not a single leader and not a single product was born, but we keep hearing about startups and billion dollar companies going bankrupt, we hear about searches in Rosnano and Skolkovo, which have become a favorite topic for newspaper discussions, and we hear names of those arrested or suspected more often than new names of innovators. As a result, if we were to just imagine that the true task was not to help, but the opposite, then we can conclude that it has been well achieved! And if we see those development institutions receive medals and awards, it means that was exactly the case.

 — How does the venture market influence the country’s economy? Why are so few people aware of it?

 — This is because we have an economy that is based on resource trading. The only management model it utilizes is that of giving orders, using fear and counterbalances. It does not work like that in the innovation environment. We need a big and bright idea consisting of small correct initiatives which synergize and provide energy to create a big bang and enlightenment and, as a result, launch the innovation we need. This is something we do not have. Maybe this is because the authorities are afraid of visionaries, for they can be outside the system, unpredictable, non-linear. However, the time for ‘effective’ linear managers has ended, and it is time for the country to entrust itself into the hands of talents and geniuses.

 — Can blockchain change political procedures?

 — First of all, I want to say that I am not a political person, and I do not have a mandate to speak from inside the political processes, so I will speak only from the technical point of view.

In this context, of course, decentralized technology, databases and ledgers will help any person or entity have their own identity. Therefore, we will have a complete understanding of the fact that these self-guided unpiloted machines will not crash into one another because they will be able to ‘see’ each other safely. There won’t be any centralized servers, so there will be nothing to hack into. In the same way, with decentralized technology in place, we can speak of drones, nuclear power plants and other strategic infrastructure facilities and systems.

All of this will help us reduce a whole range of costs in industry, the mass market, and in the synergy of these sectors, which will start to interact with one another based on, initially, what we now call big data, and will later call the ‘feedback economy’, when everyone will know everything about each other beforehand, predicting preferences and actions coming in the very next second and providing the relevant service.

Whether it’s related to selecting a new gadget or picking a movie to watch, or electing someone to delegate your rights to, it will all be done easily and safely, in terms of consequences. But we need to know one thing: in this case, technology will always aim to remove any unnecessary links, i.e. the middle man. Who is currently the biggest middle man? It is the bureaucracy, and the biggest bureaucracy is the state apparatus. So, if we know that a particular person, a Mike or a John, has made his choice, and the decentralized system has registered this choice, which can’t be changed or altered, this will be an objective moment in any voting, betting or supporting someone to win a contest, or some other social elections. It will be transparent, reliable and unchangeable. This means that blockchain technology, as I say, will prevent countries from rewriting their history.

 — Is Russia ready to implement this technology? Are those in power ready?

 — What is power?

 — The Kremlin, the higher authorities, the people who control processes and exercise their administrative authority…

 — The main thing here is what they control processes for. You see, when attempting to answer the question of what it will be like in 10 years, we mistakenly presume that everything will stay as it is, and no paradigm will change, neither economic, nor social, nor generational. Yet this is not so. The monetary system will change, the map of the world will change, and, most importantly, we as humans will change. Today’s millennials will change: those born in the digital environment age, who are now 15–20 years old, will be 32 in 10 to 12 years’ time. And they will be the majority. Today, there is a problem with the younger generation in Europe, people are not eager to start a family and bring up children until they hit 30, same sex marriages are becoming increasingly popular, and the idea of canceling the family institution in general looms over us. All this restrains population growth due to less reproduction, which in turn leads to a lower percentage of young people as nations get older. There is a similar situation in America, where the population is growing because of incoming Latinos, African Americans and Asians. At the same time, the eastern hemisphere, where 3/5 of the world’s population live, has a younger population, so in 2030 we will see that over 50% of Earth’s population consists of young people to whom we won’t be able to explain what is a delegate and why we need one. We won’t even be able to explain what a bank is, since that person will have all his payments made instantly and automatedly, and will not need a Chamber of Accounts or any other simulacra of today.

The thing is that the younger generation can’t be told not just why they need a delegate, but why they need such a middle man at all, who, besides not providing any services, also looks at him as if he were a flea…

When these young people make decisions, even if we imagine they decide to run for what you call political power, they will logically not take the same route their grandfathers chose. They see this failing already. Completely. Also, we have missed out the “generation of fathers”, an important step in the generation chain. Nowadays, in social life, we have a generation of “grandfathers” and a generation of “grandchildren” who don’t speak a common language. Thirty years from now, today’s teenagers will be active, and they are used to communicating without the middle man. Take the modern-day messengers, for instance. The younger generation is not using email anymore. Many people do not need YouTube today, because it is an intermediary, a redundant link, and new technologies serve to provide a closer connection between people.

 — In one of your interviews, you predicted that the borders between countries will be gradually erased. However, we are seeing the reverse. Like Brexit, for example…

 — Oh yes, they will. But it will happen in the course of a different process. So far, it is called isolationism. Such experiments with isolationism have already taken place in the history of mankind, but it happened within small countries or North Koreas, and with different purposes. Today, the borders we know will be gradually erased by technology. In the end, we will arrive at a three-system structure. It will be the Great Firewall of China with all its digital ecosystems, the British Commonwealth, which is well developed already, because it was the first one to emerge with its silicon ecosystem, and likely there will be the third, the Eurasian platform, connecting everything from Japan to Germany. The three-polar world will be more or less resilient. However, coming to the three-polar world of the digital economy, with the three digital megamarkets, where more than 50% of all the global economy will be in the digital realm, will not be simple for many. All conservative sectors and industries will depend on digital solutions. This means that it is not important if it is energy, food or infrastructure: all of these sectors will increasingly depend on the digital environment. Cultivation, growth, delivery of, let’s say, foodstuffs, and cooking them so that potatoes make the journey from farm to fork will utilize new technical means to aid that process. The digital economy will help collecting the crops to a great extent, so the share of digital solutions in the traditional economy will grow to more than 50%. In the end, the time will come when we no longer divide the digital and traditional economy, but adopt the common term “mixed economy”.

Each of these three digital megamarkets must have and possess the technologies to ensure that the Digital State is sovereign, and those who don’t will be Digital Suzerains, or, more likely, Digital Vassals. Therefore, it is particularly important for us to create our own technological solutions which can help us protect our market. We cannot do it alone, as China has already done, but we can do so by co-working and co-sharing with the other technologically advanced countries of the Eurasian axis, such as Germany and Japan. This amounts to a well-balanced model.

So let’s leave all these little wars, tanks and guns in the 20th century and Netflix movies, and Belorussia’s ‘World of Tanks’.

 — Among Russian big data, what projects are most interesting?

 — Since I have just told you how the forthcoming unions tend to create a hitherto unseen form of isolationism, one of the main features of this firewall is to protect digital borders. So big data will certainly protect themselves within their own greater borders; in China they will be protected by the Great Firewall, the British Commonwealth will use its own, and we will be using ours. But it won’t be in the old way, like it was during the Caribbean crisis in the last century, but because it is one of the components of survival to create one’s own independent digital platform, to protect one’s own markets, otherwise our whole economy will move to someone else’s platform, thus making us highly dependent vassals. This sort of dependency is conceivably much greater than the energy dependency of some countries from natural gas pipes. Big data is an important component of such new technologies that we are currently missing and need to create. I presume that if, by 2022, we are unable to present a finished concept and, likely, the foundation for it, then we are not going to make it. That is why I am very concerned that everything is going the wrong way for us in the innovations field. The games theory suggests it is going the wrong way for us.

 — You’ve predicted once that in a few decades, the creative professions will be in demand, and the rest will be handled by robots. Is this prediction still relevant? When are we to expect this change? What will the Russians do?

 — First of all, I would not specifically focus on the Russians as opposed to other people, as if we were Martians or something. We are in line with world trends.

Therefore, in this aspect, we will be no different from anyone else, because look, we also use the latest smartphones and cars, for we are developing in just the same way and use the technology civilization has to offer. New products are released either half a year earlier than they are in some territories, or half a year later, but it’s not like we do not try meaningful new technologies or implement them if they are successful. We are part of the world’s technological development cycle.

However, now that we are talking automation, we need to keep in mind that it will go through softwarization, digitalization and robotization of every aspect. Machines are getting better at assembling, tightening screws, making bolts, and, in microelectronics, a human cannot do anything with his fingers (laughs). We are moving into this new sphere, the nano- and bio-sector, because the time when we hand-used turning machines to make screws is over, and today a good number of economic sectors are ready to move onto full automation, even though social issues may interfere. Because if we again take a look at the bureaucracy we mentioned earlier, then we can see, there is also state bureaucracy, large city-forming companies’ bureaucracy, transnational corporations, state and privately owned partnerships which can include large state corporations with private capital. So, when large corporations and businesses understand and reach the point when they can take responsibility for people whose jobs will become redundant due to automation of production and services, then this point will become a new starting point, a bifurcation point for the new state of the production mass.

If we follow the European roadmap (at least, the German one), by 2030 not a single job will have humans working in it; everything will be automated. Today, we can find YouTube videos showing entire workshops operating in Stuttgart with no human participation, producing machines which are better than hand-made ones. Everything will be automated, and every day we will see the dynamics of this process in action.

 — Will the chance of industrial disasters increase? Is it possible that predictions described in books of fiction on how the machines take over may one day come true?

 — Progress as a whole cannot be stopped. We can attempt to slow it down, which is being done today by regulations, for example, like the ban on uberization in some European countries (the term comes from Uber). If we look at Uber and the like, we will see that some countries make regulations, taxi drivers’ trade unions act to block this uberization of processes, slowing them down. Take Germany, for instance, where they do so premeditatively. But it is possible to slow it only a little, in the end progress will ultimately win, and it will win faster just like a spring going off.

If we ask ourselves whether an industrial disaster will take place, my answer is ‘hardly so’, because the human factor in such disasters is far more risky, and automation reduces the issue of failures, thereby lowering the risk of industrial disasters.

As to whether robots can or cannot break free, anything can happen in relativity (smiles). But I can reassure you by saying that neither our generation nor our children will see it in reality.

It will take a very long time for the machines to reproduce and come to understand that humans are evil, and try to fight us. However, while such issues seem too fantastic and fictional, I always remember the words of Jerzy Lec: “Be careful with fairy tales, because they come true.”

Original: http://actualcomment.ru/s-vnedreniem-tekhnologii-blokcheyn-strany-ne-smogut-perepisyvat-svoyu-istoriyu--1703311130.html

Alexander Shulgin, a well-known composer and head of the “Gruppa Kompaniy Familia”, in his interview with Vostochno-Sibirskaya Pravda says that a future without banks and money as we know them will be upon us very soon.

“There will be no money. A long time ago there was the natural economy which we abandoned due to emerging industrialization. Now we are about to take a step in the opposite direction. It was Marshall McLuhan who defined the future media environment as a global village. We needed money because of the distance between us, but if we are in the same village, it is no longer needed. Money immediately leads to new unnecessary social institutions, banks… In the new communications space, there is no need for money”, he says.

This is why, in his words, Alexander Shulgin’s investment business, the Familia company, has decided to invest in bitcoin mining.

“We have invested in companies mining the Bitcoin, and thus, as a company, have become the world’s largest part of the blockchain infrastructure.”

Moreover, according to Shulgin, in the future, “creative arts and technology will be developed in accordance with the blockchain technology principle, and works of art or other products of intellectual labor will be created collectively, while each person’s contribution will be fully documented.

In 1998, Alexander Shulgin established the Gruppa Kompaniy Familia , which today includes a number of companies involved in entertainment, music publishing, copyright, consulting, and other activities.

Shulgin is also a partner and investor in the iTech Capital venture fund, which invests in the digital sector companies of Russia , CIS and global companies , as well as a co-founder of the Swiss 5 Continent Consulting Group IT company (5CCG).

Let us remember that Alexey Kudrin, head of the Strategic Development Center and the Committee on Civil Initiatives, recently announced that in the future, blockchain technology may be able to replace a number of state functions.

There will remain just 7 digital states

We well see state borders erased, we will abandon the idea of a “physical state” with its government, physical borders, customs and other attributes of the old world order. In the future, instead of 252 countries, we will have just7 digital communities with common values and identity types which have come about historically.

We well see state borders erased, we will abandon the idea of a “physical state” with its government, physical borders, customs and other attributes of the old world order. In the future, instead of 252 countries, we will have just7 digital communities with common values and identity types which have come about historically.

Countries will strive to join communities of the same type as the British Commonwealth of Nations (The Commonwealth of Nations is an interstate joining of sovereign states which includes the UK, it former dominions, colonies and protectorates. Besides those, Mozambique, Rwanda, Cameroon and Namibia are also members ofthis union — editor).

It does not matter which space a body occupies; it is cultural ties and self-identification which are more important. Let’s imagine a Chinese person who travels a lot. Wherever he is, he will remain true to certain values, he is mentally connected with hisculture while continuing touse themedia services he is used to.

Neither Facebook and WhatsApp, nor Yandex and Mail.Ru, will allowhim to replace Badoo, QQ International, WeChat or Alibaba, not because they are a bad alternative, but because they belong to another branch of culture.

Besides the British Commonwealth of Nations, we will see such large digital unions as the Chinese (Sinophone), Indian (Hindu), South-East Asia countries (ACEAN), Hispanidad (the Spanish-speaking world), the Islamic world and the Slavic-Eurasian community. The question remains of whose satellites Japan and Korea will become, but I do not see a place for the European Economic Union, whichwill break up, and parts of the population will mentally adhere to the various communities described above. We will begin to clearly see this by 2035.

Work will become a privilege

Besides the metamorphosis of the physical sensation of state borders and statehood with which we are familiar, we will see decentralization of industries, transformation of the way of life toward mobility, without being tied to a specific location.

Global softwarization in all spheres, automation and robotization are on their way. Work will soon become a privelege.

Only those professions presuming qualities which cannot be attained by machine learning will remain, the ones connected with creative activities and emotion.

No matter how advanced AI may be, it is emotionless and unable to fantasize. Service professions will be replaced by robots. Drones delivering pizza, unpiloted transportation — all of this is the immediate future.

I like a slogan I made up while thinking about future trends: work is for robots, life is for people. Robotization will become a driver of social change. According to various estimations, machine labor will replace 70–80% of human resources. This will be a strong push to revise norms, the idea of success, good work and wealth. People will finally have the most valuable thing, which is time. This will mean time for self-development, happiness, and freedom to be oneself.

Gamification of everything

Why will augmented and virtual reality-based projects be in such high demand? Since robotization will free people from work, a logical question will emerge: what will people do? This is when demand for a new type of entertainment will arise. A concert, a theatrical play, a football match is only an hour or two, after which the curtain drops.

Cybersports, virtual reality, new formats of reality shows are something which can be played for days, nights and weeks… You simply put on your glasses or costume and enter a new world. Mixed reality (created my merging the real and virtual reality — editor) will soon become asclose, commonplace and irreplaceable for us as electricity in our homes.

We will see a new representation of “bread and circuses”. If people have enough breadand are involved in some activity or other, there will be no need for them to wage wars, fightand destroy.

When a person is happy, he lives, plays and wins, reaches hisgoals, meets people, creates something, whether it’s just a selfie or a grand project.

If we pay more attention, then we may see utopias and fairy tales come to life sooner or later. Gamification comes from fairy tales. Learning and working while playing is normal. It is only abnormal if a person gets up to 90% of his information through games as a child, and then is told not to play anymore, now that he has become an adult. You must go to school and study hard, and then workand work and work… When is there time to live?

The final purpose for any living person is to be happy. That is what technologies must help us attain. Do not confuse this with a fixation on material things, though; I do not mean that owning an iPhone 7 is what it takesto be happy.

P.S. Do not believe “visionaries”, or how does one distinguish a visionary from a “visionary”.

First of all, a visionary provides only original forecasts; you won’t be able to find any primarysources.

Secondly, a competent expert always has hisdescriptions clear and concise, describing what will happen and how. And importantly, he will also indicate whenitwill happen! Date and time are very important in a forecast.

Thirdly, when publishing a prediction under one’s own name, a visionary puts hisreputation on the line as a signature. Making predictions anonymously or using a pseudonym is not allowed.

I have a tradition: since 2005, I have been publishing publicly accessible predictions, and then later check at the beginning of each calendar year whether they have come true.

In 90% of all cases, my predictions come true to the extent and timing predicted. The crisis and market meltdown in 2008, e-money on 2009 ( there was not exist such term as crypto currency yet) the financially difficult years of 2014 and 2017, unification with Crimea, conflict with Ukraine — you can read all about it in my predictions on livejournal.

Technology predictions have a 99.999% rate of coming true, I am not joking or bragging! Use themand have fun!