"Decentralized Digital Society"
This thought suddenly came to my mind this Saturday and I decided to note it here. I would love to hear opinions from whomever had some time to read this note...
I have searched this term, "Decentralized Digital Society" on the internet, but I found only a few sites so far that use this exact term.
It seems that "Decentralization" is one of the core principles of the 4th industry evolution, for example, Industrie 4.0.
As it turns out, "Decentralization" is happening in every layer of technologies:
- Computer systemboard design ... decentralizing the specific computation tasks from CPUs offloaded to the dedicated components, for example, Smart NICs (for network offloading, encryption, etc.), GPUs (for HPC, machine learning, high dimensional graphics, etc.)
- Software Defined Storage ... decentralizing the data storage by leveraging the distributed filesystem architecture (e.g. Ceph) to distribute the data to the commodity servers instead of storing in the dedicated storage appliances
- Event Streaming Platform ... decentralizing the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) functionality to event-driven information systems by leveraging the microservice architecture and the stream-processing platform (e.g. Kafka)
- IoT - Edge computing ... decentralizing the data analytic tasks from the back-end daa centers to the devices closer to the IoT sensors on the edge of the platform
- Blockchain ... decentralizing the governance by leveraging the decentralized and distributed digital ledger
- Decentralized Grid / Energy ... decentralizing the electric generation to the distributed energy sources, for example, the solar panels + the batteries in office and private buildings
- Industrie 4.0 ... decentralizing the decision making and the production control system to achieve more scalable & flexible production, "batch size 1"
- Home-office ... decentralizing the workforce from the central office to the premise in or near the private properties
Source: Computersciencewiki.org: Centralized-Decentralized-and-Distributed-Networks
These examples have at least two benefits in common. One is the risk mitigation for the single point of failure and the other is the reduction of bottleneck effect and therefore resulting more scalability. The bottleneck effect causes inefficiency and therefore more energy consumption and eventually more pollution. This is especially true for traffic congestion and therefore more emission...
Urbanization is observed in many big cities in many countries in recent years, despite substantially high risks for the human society, e.g. air pollution, sound emission, heat, congestion, epidemic, etc.. Despite the evolution towards decentralization in leading technologies, our society is going backwards, meaning towards centralization.
Why doesn't the German government focus more on Decentralized Digital Society when they talk about the emission reduction, despite the proven benefits of decentralization? The government officials seem to focus too much on the auto motor technology itself, but the decentralization of the auto locations and traffics is far more important than the auto motor technology. I believe that the biggest effect on the emission reduction can be achieved in the shortest time if the German government actively subsidize the decentralized workforce, namely home office or BYOO = "bring your own office" in order to reduce the total amount of commuting traffics. This effect has been clearly observed during the recent pandemic period as the picture below shows.
The reason why I name it as BYOO is that many family homes don't have the extra office spaces in order to have efficient telephone conferences or work effectively. That is where, I believe, that the auto industry could help with the support of parking facility business owners. The German government should subsidize the program to provide the following solution to the BYOO workers:
- Auto manufactures and TÜV to come up with the specification for BYOO = "Bring Your Own Office" that will then be the qualification for the auto models to receive the German government subsidization at the time of new purchase
- The German government, the auto manufactures and the power companies to plan the financial model which will attract companies located in cities to decentralize their workforce away from the cities to the BYOO parking facilities closer to workers' homes
- BYOO worker with a BYOO certified car and the BYOO parking facility usage certificates to continue receiving the so called, "Entfernungspauschale" as if she or he would be commuting
- Auto manufactures to produce the BYOO certified vehicle models ("Car Office") which satisfies the safety as well as the ergonomic and provides the special sound technology for conferencing with, for example: Ergonomic desk (e.g. on the backside of front seats), Ergonomic seat (e.g. a special back seat) with integrated speakers and noise cancelling microphone in the headrest (in order to keep the speaker volume down for minimizing sound emission to outside of the car), Ergonomic lighting for desk work, 220V inlet & a few outlets, WiFi function which can then tap into the WiFi in parking facilities (It must be regulated that the office functions except phone can only be used when the car is parked), etc.
- BYOO Parking facilities with roofs equipped with solar panels and a charging stand per parking spot for E-autos
- BYOO Parking facilities accommodating the toilets and the food & drink stands
- BYOO Parking facilities eventually accommodating the day-care facilities
- BYOO Parking facilities to be located outside of the city in order to avoid the traffic congestion
- ...
This solution will also change the charging pattern of the E-autos owners from evenings to day time and the electric power generated by the solar panels can be efficiently consumed when the sun shines. The power bill for the BYOO workers with E-autos will also be transparently handled as business cost since the E-autos will be charged in those parking facilities during the working hours
I haven't done any business case justification analysis for this solution up to now, but I am convinced that a solution along those lines will eventually contribute to save both the environment and the auto industry in Germany. It would be really sad to see if the Germany auto industry would loose the #1 position and many German citizens would become jobless due to the environmental challenges.
This is just a small example of "Decentralized Digital Society" and I am sure that there will be more to come.
If you have reached down to this point, then thank you for taking your time to read my thoughts. And I would really appreciate your opinions...
Kozo Otsuka
Dear Kozo, I truly loved our conversations and this is a strong reminder, why and what I'm missing sometimes. I'm inspired again, thinking #futuremobility from a different perspective. Thank you #appreciation
It is important to note that decentralization is not a concept to be measured at all or nothing, and no system is completely decentralized. The question of how many different devices must be found in different locations to accept decentralization, and how many people or organizations would be sufficient to control the system, is similar to Sorites Paradox (The name “sorites” derives from the Greek word soros, meaning “pile” or “heap”) which tells us a single grain of wheat does not comprise a heap, nor do two grains of wheat, three grains of wheat, etc. However, at some point, the collection of grains becomes large enough to be called a heap, but there is apparently no definite point where this occurs.