🇺🇸 English version
If the words above seemed like just a collection of buzzwords, you might have fallen for the marketing of Big Tech companies and consulting firms selling these technologies in every possible way. Indeed, simply stringing them together doesn’t amount to innovation. They don’t naturally blend.
However, certain synergies are conceivable, not in their purely commercial aspect but to improve daily life while shaping a new ecological and more democratic social contract.
Blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) have in common that both rely on optimization algorithms: facilitating monetary transactions and data transmission of all kinds for the former, optimizing a predefined task for the latter. With AI, optimizing public services such as transport, energy, healthcare access, and job searching, to name a few, is entirely achievable. Instead of viewing society as a mass of individuals moving chaotically to maximize their individual profit, it's now possible to quantify and qualify everyone's needs and aim to calculate an optimal allocation of services that maximizes collective utility.
Blockchain, on the other hand, is a means to automatically trigger actions based on data transmitted to the system. Money transfer represents only a tiny part of possible uses. Among the most interesting are the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), an essential component of smart cities, where the consumption of resources, energy, transportation, and infrastructures is regulated according to actual needs. Coupled with AI, IoT outlines lifestyles that are both frugal and comfortable, economical for the user, and efficient for the community.
The metaverse, still an embryonic technology today, refers to something much broader than the marketplace highlighted by the former Facebook group renamed Meta. Far beyond a space for gaming and consumption, it could be a real civic agora, where the most innovative governance models could be tested and implemented as blockchain allows. Instead of a world governed by biased AI and a purely commercial metaverse, the foundation of an energy-efficient economy might be achievable within the framework of decentralized democratic governance, horizontal, and offering new modes of consensus. It would provide facilitated and equitable access to public transport, health, education services, whose human resources are no longer subject to the tension currently observed worldwide.
History seems to show that any feasible technology will one day be implemented. There are several ways, good and bad, to make blockchain, AI, and the metaverse work together. With its various traditions of organizing community life and local democracy, the African continent has a wealth of experiences and perspectives to contribute to the debate on the use of these new technologies that shape our living together every day.