Things haven't been going so smoothly around here for the last... years, so one has to take small wins as they arrive. I took the car for the mandatory inspection (that the Police reminded me about with a fine a few days ago) and was expecting it to go much like everything else has gone, poorly. But, the car passed with only a couple blown bulbs to repair. It is a relief as even though I keep my car in pretty good condition, it is eight years old and things start to wear.

It is actually pretty good that they have the mandatory inspection as it means that cars on the road are in relatively good condition and in decent running order despite their age. but, I hate the idea of mandatory, especially since there are costs involved to get the inspection done by private companies.

Whenever I hear the word compulsory it almost sounds like a challenge to not do something. It has some kind of reverse psychology effect on me that rather than inspiring action, drives procrastination. This is especially true when it is being delivered by an authority that I do not trust to make good decisions. There is very little that governments do well enough that others couldn't do better.

One area that is going to change significantly in the close future is the role of blockchains in keeping track of citizen interactions. An entire lifetime from start to finish will be recorded and searchable. This will create a lot of streamlining and reduction in administration but at the same time, it is a little scary to think that all of it will be available on the same chain.

However, if we take out the idea of bad actors (obviously always a problem), the potential to simplify all manner of processes that are currently complex and rarely interact well together is huge. The other massive potential is of course the unifying of processes across countries. It is no surprise that some nations handle administrative processes better than others and some have very little at all and bribery is the oil.

Perhaps a cleaning up of processes would bring with it more transparency as well as more ability to visualize what is actually happening in a population. When it comes to the near inevitability of things like universal basic income being incorporated, blockchain technology is going to prove instrumental in delivery and tracking, as will the many algorithms (bots) that trawl the data points.

I am also interested to see if everyone's medical data for example was connected to the same chain and was comparable against the data of other countries, cheaply and easily, would patterns emerge that indicate how to approach illness or dysfunction of various types. Would seeing the food purchase habits of populations compared with medical information at a granular level give the ability to better counteract things like childhood obesity? Most likely.

With a lot of data points observed over time cheaply and easily, the amount of real-world issues we would be able to tackle with effective strategies would be massive and that would improve the allocation of resources as well as create jobs in the process of improving lives.

Of course, this is without bad actors... most likely, the technology that could empower will be used to enslave and the delivery method for information that could educate will be used to advertise. Instead of facilitating health and spread of wealth, it will be used to create narrow wealth, no matter the human costs.

History has the tendency to repeat and humans are predictable by nature.

Well, my car doesn't need it's next compulsory inspection until 2020. I wonder where we will be then?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]