Digital Nations: Empowering Citizens in the Age of Blockchain

Co-authored by John O’Connor, CEO, RealFI and Tamara Haasen, President, Input Output Global

The world around us is changing rapidly, and we’ve shifted into a new reality. From climate change, war, and global movements designed to create more equitable opportunities for all people, we’re seeing a diverse set of beliefs, stories, and visions for humanity compete for prominence in the next decade and beyond.

We find ourselves in unchartered waters. We have entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a fusion of hypercomplex world systems and frontier technologies, which, remarkably, could provide us the ability to consciously design our physical-digital-biological reality. Ultimately, if we want to steer civilization toward a higher-quality existence, we need new paradigms in how we approach and navigate this complex world.

We no longer live in a world of scarcity and need to learn how to manage abundance more efficiently, effectively, and equitably. We need a new type of leadership and new contributors to help shape this evolution.

The advancement of AI has already pushed the world to examine the new skills we will need in this new era, and it’s clear that people who can think creatively and default to constructive dialogue will be valued.

The good news? We already have access to the information, tools, technologies, and platforms we all need to work together and improve the systems of the world for everyone, everywhere.

However, in order to incubate humanity in a balanced way, we need to define our collective why, our human purpose. We need a vision that aligns us, and our interests, in this next stage. The alternative? A world where its people continue to feel untethered against the competing interests of political leaders, international organizations, and big tech.

To discover this collective purpose, we need higher-quality inputs and outputs that can only be realized through meaningful participation.

The blockchain movement discovered this early. It recognized that in order to achieve this, we needed to build immutable, tamper-free, decentralized systems that would imprint the outcomes of what we call participatory governance and innovation actions.

As we embrace this emergent wave of thinking—one informed by the growth of exponential technologies—we must accept that our society will forever be shaped by a global-citizen mentality. In this new world, looking to singular sovereign nations as the sole form of governing institutions is no longer viable. Our next decade will inherently be shaped by the formation of digital nations, where individuals collectively have the power to incubate new forms of governance, currency, and ecosystems to ideate frameworks that embody our shared priorities for the future. Separate, yet together.

In this new world, individual participation not only becomes possible, it is essential. We require systems designed with integrity to capture and record opinions without fear of being manipulated, while empowering everyone to take back ownership of their digital identity, beliefs, attributes, and beyond. In this new reality, you have the authority to choose when and how you participate, and when you leave.

And value will no longer be constrained by antiquated thinking. Value is not derived from what centralized institutions assign to it; instead, value moves more freely between decentralized marketplaces and ecosystems of exchange of digital assets, ideas, services, property, and beyond, interconnected by data that we own and store using our digital identity.

The truly remarkable aspect of this system is that new ideas can also be adopted by conventional sovereign nations to enhance their own digital infrastructure, systems, and capabilities. Progress can be recorded in new ways, applying advanced measures like the Human Development Index, impact indicators, and many other innovative and alternative methods to monitor civilization’s progress without causing disruption to a nation's existing developmental trajectory.

As we move through this new era of global transformation, humans are indispensable components of the system. Their needs cannot be reduced to algorithms, nor should they be. It is only through the application of our human intelligence and emotional capabilities that the beauty and creativity within these world ecosystems come to life and hold real meaning. These global systems are used by the people and remain powered by the people, and it is only through the application of human wisdom and vision that we can build computing and artificially intelligent systems safely and sustainably.

Published by

Milken Institute
It is only through the application of human wisdom and vision that we can build computing and artificially intelligent systems safely and sustainably. RealFI CEO, John O'Connor, and Input Output (IOHK) Global President, Tamara J.N. Haasen write about the human impact on evolving technology in Power of Ideas.