Automation is already here in Steem. Steemvoter or Steemauto can vote for you. If you select your authors and timing correctly, automated votes may able to beat manual curation. Therefore, a passive investors in Steem can set their autovoter and earn curation even during sleep.
People fear that automation will create massive unemployments in near future. Even with today's technology, about 60 to 80% jobs can be automated. People argues that the benefit of automation will go back to top 1%. Even Bill Gates has proposed to tax on Bots to fund Universal Basic Income. We have democratic US presidential candidate who is running his campaign on UBI on the rise of massive automation.
Automation can be largely considered as a huge number of codes running on computational devices such as CPUs. In cases, automated devices may have moving elements such as car assembly line or arms of robots working along with humans.
It is rumored that TESLA have tried to automate most parts of its assembly line that created delays since it was almost unachievable with even with current technology. GM took similar attempt in 1980s and failed measurably.
However, due to Moore's law, computing devices are becoming cheaper and cheaper. Today one can buy a computer with $500 which more powerful than supercomputer of 20 years back.
With advent and improvement of 3D printing and ancillary technologies, future's moving assembly lines will follow Moore's law which means, manufacturing cost will be lower every year.
Even today, humanoid robot with arms are assisting humans in running factories. But tomorrow's factories may not have a single human.
Eventually, most of the automation software and hardware will be open sourced such like blockchains. Since somebody in somewhere will make opensource version of any popular automated devices.
It means that a single person or a small group can make an organization that would have required expensive hardware and thousands of people a decade ago.
The recent ethos are why build an expensive centralized datacenter, rather use the cheaper Decentralized Clouds. Let us use DApps to control our own data or even sell them to the highest bidder.
It means that centralized organization is becoming less competitive every day. They used to play monopoly of capital, can only able to buy expensive hardware/software and finally, hire talented people.
The current trend is that why a bunch of talented people will work 9am to 5pm (unpaid overtime till 9pm) for goal of a centralized organization, most cases, own by few elites.
In future, even people may not work anymore for any Centralized Organization since most of their needs can be fulfilled by the automated processes with help of bots and paid by UBI. Too much optimistic on utopia!
However, due to the open, creative, owner-model of blockchains (e.g. DPoS), DAO can be easily built on blockchains such as Ethereum or Steem. Ethereum already has three DAOs on working: TheDAO (The DAO - Home), DigixDAO (Digix) and MakerDAO (Maker).
Slock.it is building infrastructure for the future DAOs.
With explosion of automation techs such as AI, Machine/Deep learning, Smart Sensors, corporations of the future can be easily replaced the decentralized owners and bots. Therefore, in the long run, the upcoming automation can be destroyer of centralized organizations.
Now we can think of Steem chain, can we make literally Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Ebay, NASDAQ etc with SMT or SCOT.
With few more upcoming techs such as 3D printing, nanotech, VR/AR, web3.0, robotics etc., future Tesla, Boing, or Apple can be made by DAO. Too far fetched?
How long it will take to to DAO to have marketcap one trillion dollar to beat Microsoft? Due to exponential nature of technology such as Moore's law, this can happen in our lifetime. Moreover, Steem can be a hotbed for building DAOs of the future.
Disclaimer: This opinion is not a financial advice, it my personal perspective and opinion. Please seek professionals for financial decisions.
Image sources: Most images are open sourced (e.g. Pixabay, Wikimedia etc.) with Creative common license. Some images are used with due courtesy to respected owners.
Thanks for reading.
Cryptominer , occasional trader and tech blogger since 2013
