The Future: Ephemeralities running on Quantum Smartnetworks

The future could be one of pluralistic digital societies running on consensus-confirmed smartnetworks. There could be many kinds of entities, those with human-roots, technology entities, and any variety of hybrids. Blockchains could be the coordination mechanism between these entities, based on attestation variables like capacity and reputation. Further, eventually the digital societies of the future could be post-entity ‘entities’ or ‘whats’ – ephemeralities, presences, capacities, reservoirs, resources, like capacity in reserve: processing, memory, consciousness, ideas, associative processing, analysis, feedback, support, and critique. Perhaps all in the future is just capacity.

The ontological unit of intelligibility could be resident capacities in reserve, not resident entities already instantiated but available capacities, energy fields, potentialties. This is not even already-intentioned propensities (as contemplated by Popper ), but the uncollapsed waves and particles of quantum mechanics catalyzed into reality through intention, need, interaction, and imagination. Ephemeralities could automatically coalesce into actuality from virtuality to respond to a purpose, and continually meta-self-evaluate to monitor for ongoingness and finality of purpose.

Like photons, electrons, and maybe gravitons exist as wave packets at more than one place and time, only manifesting into reality when an observation is made, and the concept could be extended so that capacities too might coalesce into reality when an observation, conscious choice, or other motivator to action is made about the need for the capacity.

Quantum Smartnetworks
The notion of Quantum Smartnetworks is twofold. First, there is conceiving of some model, like blockchains, as a universal mechanism for measuring, administering, exchanging, tracking, monitoring, recording, finding, and interacting with all manner of granular quanta of anything; any entity that is dividable into essential quantized constituent building blocks. Second, there is the application of quantum principles to smartnetwork instances, in the sense of quantum smartnetworks as the orchestration of post-entity capacities or energies existing in potentiality (Deleuze’s virtuality) into reality.

Science fiction examples can lead the way, for example Accelerando features distributed trust networks and reputation markets, where one use of blockchain models could be digital copies “watching over their originals from the consensus cyberspace of the [smart] city [2].”

References 
[1] Popper, K.R. (1959). "The Propensity Interpretation of Probability" The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10, 37, 25-42.
[2] Stross, C. (2006). Accelerando. London: Ace.

Post-entity Society of Instances

In digital smartnetwork societies, entities wanting to conduct smartnetwork operations will likely need to be independently confirmed and validated through mechanisms like consensus trust. Consensus trust and reputation structures have been conceived as grounded in a fixed and persistent entity.

However, there is the possibility of progressing to a post-entity society. Humans are currently constrained to an embodied form, but this may not be the situation in the future, and there is no such requirement for technology entities in the realm of digital identity. Digital identity might become so distributed, portable, copiable, open-sourceable, sharable, malleable, and shardable, that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of entities.

The question would then be how to enable smartnetwork operations in a post-entity society, perhaps one in which ‘ephemeral instances of capability and creativity’ have replaced identity-bounded entities. The answer is that reputation could still matter. Even if not a full-fledged identity-entity, any instance, any measurable quantum, any participation no matter how ephemeral could still have a reputation.

Reputations could become a lot more complicated, measuring different levels like actor, action, and intention, and also line-item credit for contributions and new ideas; and calculate composite team reputations for sharded cloudmind group participations. All this is could be possible because blockchains give us much more granularity in record-keeping.

Immanence Reputations of Intelligent Instances running on Smartnetworks

One vision of the future is digital societies, comprised of different forms of intelligence like blockchain AIs, smart-contract DACs, and human mindfile uploads all running on smartnetworks. Verification of such digital identities may well be required for smartnetwork access. We are already living in a prototype of this world now, in the sense that access to digital properties requires digital identity verification. Many websites invite logging in with Facebook or Twitter as an already-established digital identity heuristic.

Also in the contemporary world, we are currently constrained to an embodied form, but there would be no such requirement in the digital societies of the future. Digital identity could become so distributed, portable, copiable, open-sourceable, sharable, malleable, and shardable, that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of entities. Instead of entities, personal identities, or embodied containers, there could be ephemeral instances; thinking, informational, actional, enjoyful, subjectivational instances. The question would then be how to enable smartnetwork operations in a post-entity society, perhaps one in which ‘ephemeral instances of capability and creativity’ have replaced identity-bounded entities.

One answer is that reputation could still matter. Even if not a full-fledged identity-entity, any instance, any measurable quantum, any participation no matter how ephemeral could still have a reputation. Reputations could become a lot more complicated, measuring different levels like actor, action, and intention, and also line-item credit for contributions and new ideas. Composite team reputations could be calculated for sharded groupmind participations. All this is could be possible through technology like blockchains that afford more granularity and accessibility in record-keeping.

Thus teputation might persist as a validation mechanism, even in advanced scenarios like post-entity digital societies. However, the trick will be to enact reputation assessment schemas that are not completely externally-imposed and outside the purview of the agent being evaluated. Preferable is re-envisioning reputation as a mechanism to empower the liberty and expression possibilities of the entities or instances being reputationified. This is an immanence reputation, one that is reflective of criteria self-determined by the agent and that accentuates its possibilities. The predictive analytics of the big data era could be applied to the development of reputational mechanisms to encourage agent futurity and potentiality realization as opposed to those that solely based on past acts.

Identity Authentication and Security Access 2.0

Identity needs to be authenticated in more granular, flexible, real-time ways as digital venues expand and the physical world becomes more digitalized. Technology is now making it possible to rethink and provide a 2.0 update to the whole area of identity authentication and security access services.

The ubiquity of cell phones, and increasingly smartphones, means that many forms of identity authentication can be moved from costly and easy-to-lose physical ID cards to mobile access platforms. QR codes, NFC, and other wireless-based technologies are already starting to be used for security authentication and single-use sign-on for website access.

Work identity badges, hospital access badges, and government and school IDs are examples of physical-world ID cards that can be moved to smartphone ID cards. Likewise many services linking identity authentication to resource-access and mobile payment can be automated, for example, event tickets, work conference room reservation and access, medical equipment and pharmaceutical inventory access, and rental car and hotel check-in and resource access. Digital ID cards can incorporate multi-factor authentication: for example, the visual look, a custom sound or image elicited upon being tapped, or information returned from an external server as the QR code is read.