IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 42
progress of intelligence, and also
for the longer-term transition to a
world of multispecies intelligence
living cohesively and productively in
digital societies.
Basic Substrate for Computing
Blockchains are much more than
the already extraordinary scope
of potential activity that has been
envisioned for their deployment in
reinventing currency, finance, economics, government, legal services,
science, and health - blockchains
are a basic substrate for computing itself. Blockchain technology is
the secure decentralized computing
ledger that underlies Bitcoin and
cryptocurrencies, and more profoundly is a next-generation globalscale decentralized infrastructure
and mechanism for securely updating distributed computing nodes
with ongoing consensus truth
states. As a general computing
substrate, one specific new kind
of application that blockchains
might enable is blockchain thinking, the idea of putting thinking on
the blockchain, or more specifically, using blockchain architecture
to instantiate thinking machines.
The objective would be to formulate thinking as a blockchain process, which could have benefits for
both enhanced human biological
thinking, and machine thinking or
artificial intelligence. The decentralized nature of blockchains makes
them an equality technology, one
that can be used to expand freedom, liberty, possibility, actualization, expression, ideation, and
realization for all entities in the
world, both human and machine
[20]. This article is intended as a
forward-looking highly-speculative
application of blockchain concepts
in a new and explorative manner,
and does not consider the immediate feasibility, appropriateness, or
impact of such implementation.
42
Blockchain Thinking:
The Vision
in a standardized compressed data
format. The data could be captured
via quantified-self tracking devices,
wearables, intracortical recordings,
consumer EEGs, brain computer
interfaces, cognitive nanorobots,
and other methodologies. Through
the transactional logging of these
data, the basis for thinking could
be instantiated in a blockchain
- and really all of an individual's
subjective experience, possibly
eventually consciousness, which
could allow consciousness to be
more precisely defined. Once on
the blockchain, the various components could be administered
and transacted, meaning engaged,
for example, in the case of a poststroke memory restoration.
There has not yet been a good
"health data commons" model with
the appropriate privacy and reward
systems for the public sharing of
personal health data and quantifiedself-tracking data, and likewise mental performance data. Blockchains
might provide exactly such a structure for creating a secure, remunerated, owner-information controlled
health data commons. At the individual level, personal health is a big
data problem that needs effective
universal orchestration, security,
and access mechanisms like blockchain technology. At the societal
level, the argument for blockchain
technology is even stronger: medical research needs access to "big
health data" for discovery too. The
promise of the machine learning
revolution has thus far not been
realized in the context of health,
because data is still siloed (locked
away in private data stores), and
in any case digitally un-interoperable (there is not yet an effective
health XML). Blockchains could be
employed as a secure large-scale
data management mechanism to
coordinate the information of millions and billions of individuals.
Definition of Thinking
Thinking has always been intuitively
conceived as computational, it is
just that now perhaps blockchains
provide the additional functionality required to better realize these
ideas. A fundamental definition
could be that thinking is a situation where "there are inputs which
are processed and turned into outputs." In fact many reality processes have this underlying structure of
input-processing-output, including
operations as diverse as manufacturing and political elections. For
the context of blockchain thinking, the definition can be qualified
to situations that involve thinking,
cognition, mental processing, and
understanding, in ways that are
not exclusively limited to humans.
Inputs include both data from outside the system like sensory data,
and data retrieved from inside the
system like memory. The inputs
are brought into a specific location
for processing, or processed where
they are stored. The outputs might
include taking an action, storing
something back into memory, conducting a transaction, or making
a note or trigger for some sort of
future action.
Personal Thinking Chains
Blockchains might be used to work
with digital mindfiles (uploads of
full human mind files) in the future,
and their current prototypes, digital
identities (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.,
profiles), through their asset management, property registration, and
access control features [19]. There
could be "personal thinking chains"
as a life-logging storage and backup
mechanism. The concept is "blockchain technology + in vivo personal
connectome" to encode all of a person's thinking and make it useful
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
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