What people aren’t talking enough about — Additional notes inspired by Rob May’s article here. Rob and I go way back and this is the type of thing we talk about over beers. I feel obliged to add some notes of my own. I wish I vehemently disagreed on something. …

Creating universal systems of record — In Information Technology and tech startups, we talk about “systems of record”. It’s a system that is the source for a particular data that may also exist in other systems. That “system or record” is the ultimate source of truth. It’s the canonical record of data. We often talk about…

AI assistants will evolve into AI coaches as they get smarter — I’ve talked about the 10 principles of Intelligent Agent Design and augmented intelligence and how we were building exoskeletons for the mind. A key callout is that the sci-fi “AI as a sentient being” is far out in the future. …

And, why the world needs augmented communication — When we think about uses for artificial intelligence and automation, we often think forward to super-intelligent machines replacing humans. I think that’s ambitious. I think we’ll get there, I just think the next wave isn’t pure AI (artificial intelligence). If you want discuss opportunities, we need to discuss a different…

We’re all investing time or money — let’s make sure not to waste it — I started to collect a lot of criteria I thought was a good investment of my time and had a good chance of success based on experiences I’ve had creating a lot of products in the past (like social search, IoT, logistics, AI, and blockchain). For this post I’m just…

You might not be as decentralized as you think — One of the key design elements of designing a blockchain product is decentralization. There are several key components. I’ll cover them here with my notes so far on them. Note: these are very complex matters. Each of the items below has a bunch of work to be done. Prefect decentralization As I…

This is part of a series on the BotChain, a network for intelligent autonomous agent management. You can read more about it starting here. In this piece I want to focus on BotChain’s technology at a high level, keeping in mind that our goal is to build a network, ecosystem…

Improvements in technology may create something better that’s not a block or a chain — I think that in 10 years blockchain technology will improve to a level that calling it “blockchain” will no longer be a useful term. Let’s think about this a moment. Why do we call it a blockchain? I think the three most interesting parts of the blockchain are: Consensus mechanisms …

Technology can help us build things that last a long time — Blockchain technologies are allowing us to create the first “forever companies”. Or a better term may be “forever ecosystems” or “forever networks”. The lifetime of a centralized firm Let’s set aside startups for a moment. We all know they are innovation machines that will likely burn brightly and often have short lifespans. Fortune 500 companies are…