Breaking Down Buzzwords: Bitcoin, 5G, Machine Learning
Imagine sharing the ownership and costs of a lawnmower with all your neighbors. Instead of paying $200 upfront, you pay a few dollars only when you use it.
This is a very plausible future combining internet of things and blockchain. The costs of ownership for that machine, an “internet of thing,” would be authenticated through the Blockchain so that record of usage is posted to the Blockchain and recorded permanently so you charged for that single instance - instead of the lifetime of cost. Expensive items become affordable.
Naturally, second-order effects would occur. Perhaps Home Depot’s profitability decreases because it’s sharing a single product across many customers, but now a customer can also buy one-tenth of a leaf blower, and so on. It could unify communities because there’s a reliable, transparent system to share belongings.
We are in the 4th Industrial Revolution. The lines are blurring between the physical and digital worlds. We’re moving into the Machine Economy, where human interaction is not needed for machines to be purchased and operated.
The potential of technologies like internet of things, blockchain, 5G and machine learning is massive. With this kind of potential, marketers haphazardly throw these technology buzzwords on their company websites. CEO’s claim the use of these technologies in quarterly earnings calls. It’s helpful to know what these technologies are, and more importantly, what they are not.
Blockchain
What is it? A distributed ledger that records transactions between two parties efficiently in a verifiable and permanent way. The goal of blockchain is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed, but not edited.
It is...
Not a single entity in control of the events. If you open a bank account at Wells Fargo, they are the entity that owns your bank transactions whereas no one owns your transactions on the blockchain. It’s decentralized ownership.
Digital keys and locks: that prevent entities from provoking your access, meaning higher security.
Immutable: Once something is recorded, it’s pretty much impossible to change it.
Ledger of events: These events can be transactions, actual data events, etc. “Blocks” on the blockchain are made up of digital pieces of information. Blocks store information that distinguishes them from other blocks. Similar to how houses have addresses to tell them apart, each block stores a unique code called a “hash” that allows us to tell it apart from every other block.
Trustless: Instead of being trustful, it’s trustless. It replaces trustful systems with transparent ones. There’s no reason to create trust because it’s fundamental to the system.
Digital ownership: Today, if you send an image to a friend and a friend forwards that to another friend, it’s difficult to parse the original owner of the image, which is you. Blockchain provides a clear owner for digital things as they get circulated beyond the original owner.
Zero-knowledge proofs: Enables gleaning insights from data without revealing the entire dataset which enables more protection of the data. Here’s an example: you walk into a bar and show them your license. Your license has private information, like your address and birthdate. The bar doesn’t actually need all that information. They only need to know if you’re over twenty one. Blockchain enables data insights to be revealed without exposing the entirety of the data.
It is not…
Not just about currency. Nor is it replacing mainstream currency and banks
Bitcoin: which is a cryptocurrency that is built on blockchain.
A product: it’s not like a software that has plumbing that connects different applications. It’s a set of nodes that allows applications to be built on top of it.
5G
What is it: A fifth-generation cellular network. It is the next big advancement in telecom technology.
It is...
Network function virtualization
Faster - 10gbs a second. Faster connection on your phone than your at-home system today.
Reduced latency: helps respond faster. A real-world application of this is a surgeon in New York helping a surgeon in rural Wyoming perform surgery only she is specialized in.
10x battery life: for low power IOT devices which will decrease the price for connected devices, enabling more devices to be connected to the internet. The batteries that can last 10 years, and a 90% reduction in battery use for things like our phones.
99.99% availability: this will enable smarter autonomous cars (wouldn’t want your system to be a second behind when faced with a deer in the headlights), and allow rural doctors to video conference during surgeries with doctors in other regions for improved health care in remote areas.
It is not…
Ubiquitous by any means. The ‘5G’ label in the top right corner of your iPhone means nothing. It’s just words. It will likely roll out in large cities first.
The speed you get will depend on which spectrum band the operator runs the 5G technology on and how much your carrier has invested in this. Urban areas without access to the high-frequency spectrum may not receive 5G.
Machine Learning
What is it? A machine that performs a task without explicit instructions relying on patterns and inference instead. It is a subset of artificial intelligence.
It is...
Highly specialized (you don’t program machine learning on a data set for a bunch of things. A specialized application would be to perform machine learning on large data sets of x-rays and CAT scans to learn to detect cancers)
Dependent on the quality of data in the model. If you eat french fries all day every day, you will feel like crap and get fat. The same goes for machine learning - if you input bad data (french fries), the output or the machine’s task will be crap (low energy, obesity). Garbage in, garbage out.
Reliant on large sets of data. A machine learning application cannot learn to detect a cat face from a dog face using five images of each.
Predictive (or at least aims to be at this time)
Computationally expensive: could be offset by the maturity of 5G, however.
“We can know more than we can tell”
- scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi
It is not…
Taking over the world anytime soon. Robots are not destroying the world because humans can’t articulate into programs all the things we know and understand about the world. Computers rely on explicit instructions and information, and there is knowledge that we implicitly understand yet cannot explicitly describe to a machine.
Not without human interaction, like a data scientist. Machine learning is not set up by a computer, it is set up by a person.
Cheap. Startups investing heavily in machine learning may incur huge server costs.
Simple for machines to explain how they arrived at a decision using machine learning. Meaning the machine can’t lay out easy-to-understand steps for the human to arrive at the same decision.
“Although economic effects of ML are relatively limited today, and we are not facing the imminent end of work as is sometimes proclaimed, the implications for the economy and the workforce going forward are profound,…”
-MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson and CMU professor Tom Mitchell
Internet of Things
What is it? Interrelated computing devices, mechanic, digital, etc. that are provided with unique identifiers. The iOT devices have the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
It is not…
Controlling devices with your phone: turning your lights on with the Hue app (that is human-to-computer)
Interoperable without digital plumbing: requiring teams to put into place pipes that connect Nest with your local weather system, for example
Secure… yet. Technical barriers exist by companies often promising that security is “coming out in version 2”
Scalable… yet. Many of us think of iOT for devices, only. But it’s so much bigger than that. It could be rooms, campuses, animals - anything you want represented digitally. Imagine all the rooms on a campus being iOT… an algorithm could run to save electricity or determine which teachers have the highest attendance.
“Any great technology is indistinguishable as magic.”
It is...
Growing quickly
Contributing to a data explosion on a scale the world has never seen before. Which brings up hard-to-answer questions like “who will be the stewards of this data and make sure it doesn’t get into the wrong hands?”
Fragmented: Bluetooth, Wifi, Z Wave, and many more technologies are part of the iOT ecosystem. Essentially, every connected entity has to go up to the cloud and back down to receive or send information, which is a very roundabout way of making things happen.
Cloud-dependent: it communicates with data over the cloud causing slower latency
A world with autonomous cars and remote surgeries performed by robots is fascinating. It is fun to predict how things will play out, while remembering that none of us really know. Hopefully, it’s a fun ride.
