Digital Transformation: Interview with Don Tapscott, Author of "Blockchain Revolution"

Transcript

[Music] hi it's dawn in 94 I wrote the first best seller about the web in business and it was called the digital economy I invented that term I coined that term and in the book of that title and the book also had some other very big ideas you know that are just part of the vernacular today now the book held up

very well it argued that this technology the internet the web would have a huge impact on not just the way that we sell things and the way to we communicate between each other but it would bring about some profound changes in our industries and in our institutions like the corporation or like government and those chapters on each of those in the book the problem is that I said overall I'm very positive about this is an age of vast new promise and opportunity and

that the old media was centralized now radio television print media even mainframe computers they were controlled by powerful forces they were one-way one-to-many and the recipients were largely passive I said the new media is the antithesis it's interactive it's one-to-one it's many to many the recipients are not just recipients they're users and they are not in urged they're active and as such as new media has an awesome neutrality and it will be what we wanted

to be and I think that that can be wonderful but I also said that some bad things could happen seven of them actually and unfortunately every single one of them has happened I said we can privacy in a near remarkable way check I said it's possible that this digital age will be captured by some powerful forces big companies the government's and that the benefits could be asymmetrical and that we could have growing wealth creation but declining prosperity that

social inequality would grow check I said it's possible the technology would be so powerful that it will wipe out the whole sectors of the workforce well partial check on that you know the number one job type in the United States and 48 of 50 states is truck driver I think most of those will be gone in a decade I said I think this technology will bring us together because we'll all have access to the truth I said but it's possible the people could follow their own point of view and we'd all end up to

be self-reinforcing echo chambers where the purpose of information would not be to inform us but would be to give us comfort and that there would be a fragmentation of public discourse check so I mean I won't go through the press but it's kind of worrisome that the person who sold more books quartey's mine publisher above the digital age than anyone else and who's been its biggest champion is now writing that we have a problem Houston and that there are some big big social issues that we

need to deal with so this has been a big theme of what I've been working on now the next period is basically to draft a new social contract for the digital age have some of the changes have to surprise you well they all surprised me I said they were possible but I didn't say this is a likely occurrence on any of them so and it's very difficult for someone like me to say that and I have a lot of my technology utopian friends unhappy with me but I'm not a technology

determinist I don't think that technology creates social structures people do I don't think technology creates good models of governance and democracy people do I don't think the technology enables rich public discourse or not people do and unfortunately the digital age has largely been captured by some very powerful organizations and companies now this is not irrevocable and it's one of the reasons I'm so excited about blockchain technology the digital age has been captured by

some powerful forces and its largesse has been a symmetrically distributed and what's occurred is that this technology has generated a new asset class called data this asset class may be more important previous asset classes like land under the agrarian economy industrial plant under the Industrial Age or even money and this data is created by all of us quite democratically actually but it's been captured by a handful of companies by millions and the problem with that is

not just that we can't monetize it we can't use it to plan our lives better and our privacy has been undermined and that fear that I had in 1994 has was justified so the that's where blockchain technology comes in because it's not an infinitive information it's an Internet value where value can be exchanged peer-to-peer without powerful internal meters or big companies that can capture the value so what do you think could be done about this well as we transition

from the agrarian age to the industrial age we develop the social contract we figured out that that people are going to live in a city they'd need a social safety net it could just grow things to stay alive we figured out if they needed to be literate so we create a public education main law but you have to go to school the law we figured out that you can have one Royal company holding a little oil so we created an anti-monopoly legislation well I don't think that we've done any of this as we move to the whole digital age that we need to come up with a new

understanding and I talked about a number of dimensions for that social contract that are required and that we're going to need to do some work but the old social contract talked about jobs and full employment is the primary vehicle to distribute wealth another benefits like health care and Income Security and so on well that's not being disrupted they have a new period of structural unemployment that's about to emerge we talked about any quality being managed by governments that through policy tax redistribution of wealth and Saum we we create social safety nets to

protect people enable them to attire to be unemployed sick now oh disabled old well that's now being broken down to a third one was the whole issue of power in society no we had business and labor these pillars of the social contract and organized labor was viewed as an important component ensuring the voice labour and decision making and so on and we had sovereign government's that set policies within the jurisdiction that were in the public interest with a reasonable expectation of their effect to make them fair society well that's

now been broken down to corporations have become all-powerful governments are being viewed as you know wrong since wrong rigged and the best government is no government a no labor movement in the United States pretty much been wiped out so I think we're going to have to move to a new kind of contract when we talk about more democratic ownership of the economy a fourth one was democracy I only have this view that that people can vote it's fair and open elections to get governments to represent and the Knights in the public interest well that's now totally blew up in the

United States for example these institutions are increasingly accountable to their funders not to citizens so we're going to need to use blockchain technology to move towards a new model participative democracy but to smart contracts politicians and elected representatives are accountable to citizens not the big money you know so this goes on you know their whole number of these big transformations that are underway now just consider the idea of our individual freedom that we have the right to personal privacy security

autonomy of the individual oh that's me now we have loss of control of personal information identity growing cyber crimes and all kinds of fraud identity theft we have a large-scale commercialization of personal data off of our knowledge and we increasingly spend time in this digital world where the underlying algorithms are not clear to us in the physical world you know I'm holding a piece I'm holding a wallet right now if I drop that wallet it's going to fall now because I'm aware of the forces that govern that in this case

gravity but in the digital world I post something on page look I have no idea what's happening to it I have no idea why things are appearing on my screen that influenced me some people tell me that they think the biggest challenges of the future aren't technological what what do you think about that well I would formulate it differently I would say that this new paradigm in technology that we witnessed over the last few decades and rise of meaning at the web social media the mobile web big data and so on have enabled powerful

forces to strengthen their position and that well having many wonderful characteristics and benefits and sure enough grandparents and the grandchildren can see each other over distance and talk that the overall economic effect has poured in the developed world has not been a positive one that we have declining prosperity for the first time in modern history and technology is at the heart of that it's not the cause but it's a big enable that number one enabler so the solution is not technology the solution is a new

social contract made between people however the technology now that for the first time ever we have a peer-to-peer medium per value the technology can be the single most important enabler of a whole new kind of society and a new kind of organization of civilization now the Internet of information was about information and we publish that I send you a PDF of PowerPoint I'm sending a Khakee even with a website I keep the original that doesn't work well for assets it's long to copy an asset like money like

someone's song or like a vote but now we have a medium where assets can be managed peer-to-peer can be transacted peer-to-peer and that creates a whole new set of exciting and historical opportunities so this intersection between technology and society and our economy is it's a big one it's a complicated one and it's one that I've been working on since 1978 when I began doing research on and I think that most people don't get it you have technology determinants who are

wrong and then you have people say no it's nothing to do with technology that's wrong too there are complex interplay between the two do you think people understand this though because many people tell me they don't really care if a tech company pre-course their data in mind it it's naive it's dangerous and it's based on ignorance because privacy is not some nice to have characteristic it's the foundation of freedom and our our identities consists of data and

increasingly that data is not owned by us it's owned by others and one of the greatest historic challenges for this next generation will be to get their identities back so that they own them they control them and they can manage their own identities responsibly and this is one thing that I've not changed my view I wrote a book about privacy in 1995 but basically said that I co-authored a book was called who knows safeguarding of privacy in a networked age that was almost 25 years ago and people people looked at me and they were

like huh when we talk about it and that was a book that did not so well either it seems it's a pretty fine line between taking advantage of digital services and giving up privacy well not not really because when all is said and done you need to look at macro measures so what's going on in society today well we have declining prosperity in the developed world we have the emergence of structural unemployment we have the macro level a very dangerous

thing which is the destruction of our basic right to privacy we have unquestionably a fragmentation of public discourse that ends up with 20% of Americans thinking vaccinations are a bad idea that they read it on your dad we're going to have to have another plague before people figure out that science is actually not a bad idea we have climate change deniers in the face of the strongest evidence since Newtonian physics and then concept of gravity you know we have we have the

rise of fake news or the president can say that the his predecessor President of the United States wiretapped in now this of course is preposterous every law-enforcement agency says it's not possible let alone did it occur and 40% of Americans think it's true because he sent out a tweet so tell me tell me that everything is rosy it's not rosy the world is deeply in peril right now and you don't have to be a Luddite to say

that technology and more important the people who increasingly control technology have a role to play in that what has to occur that more people understand that this is happening you know over time hopeful that enough experience will cause people to change that ultimately ultimately people will act in terms of their own objective interests now right now that's not a kind 10 to millions of people in the United States who have been denied adequate health care oppose

universal health care they based on it weird or weird ideological reasons they do things that are antithetical to their own material interests now if this is a permanent trend and we're doomed because the means of demagogues and Nydia logs can cause people to do things now have the tools to cause people to do things that are against their interests and not ultimately will lead to some big big social disruptions and maybe even a

breakdown of civilization but I'm hopeful overall that the truth will out thing so ultimately the injurious effect of some of these things like the end of mind of a basic break informational privacy causes people to behave and to think differently and I think that you know that we're going to see a period of a deeper and growing disruptions and dislocations in society before people wake up my life right now is

very very very much consumed by this question that in the years that I have left to be effective and productive what steps can I take to ensure that this smaller world that my grandchildren inherit might actually be a good one and be a better one than we have today you