Most people who spend time to read about tech and how it is transforming our world easily get lost in the weeds of jargon and fast paced seeming changes. So like everything else in the world, they want some big megatrend that can quickly serve as a lens for them to grasp the essentials for their work, business or social reflection.
Most people who don’t work in and think about tech for a living still understand that every industry and sector and domain of our life is being completely transformed by tech, or is becoming technologised.
But how can one summarise the how, why, when, where and what questions?
If they read the occasional tech coverage in the popular press, they are likely to have come to three rough meta-views for appraising these trends:
A. Everything is about data. Companies that can collect data about everyone, everywhere, everytime, are winning and are dominating everything. They would have seen all the backlash against the Googles and Facebook and, maybe, even noticed China’s social credit scoring system and seen how it all fits together.
B. Another mode of simplifying what they read and hear may center on powerful computer programs (or “algorithms”) that are increasingly far smarter than anything humans have ever built and will soon outstrip human intelligence.
They may wonder whether the race to build these powerful algorithms is the be all and end all of the age-old human need to out compete each other at all levels. And they may also ponder what happens to all those people, workers, companies and governments who lose out in this race and become displaced, marginalised or infiltrated and their purpose altered.
C. The third big bracket that casual followers of tech may put all they are witnessing around them is “platforms”. Big Western owned systems like Google and Facebook to which everything is connecting. 46% of them are based in the US. 80% of global profits go to the US.
Only 5% to Europe, 1% to Africa and LatAm, and the rest to the Pacific. Concentration of power may come to mind. A new global colonialism or feudalism with a few uber-bosses based in the global north.
The thesis of my essay is that these three big lenses are seriously limiting and incomplete.
The most important way to look at the impact of technology on economic and political evolution, including on work, business and life, is to focus on, first, the protocols and links that are connecting the data sources to other data sources and algorithms.
These are called, integrations.
Second, one must look at how these integrations are becoming heavily and densely tangled, a process I call, Hyper-integration.
I argue that the big platforms are losing control of hyper-integration but that is cold comfort for small players, such as startups and developing countries, since they are not any better placed to deal with the increasing cost and complexity of hyper-integration in their current state either.
Hyper-integration forces everyone to think and act around alignment instead of disruption. The days of small entities upending the status quo are going to be few and far between for a while.
However there is an opportunity to smartly figure out the pattern of the integrations as it affects your own domain and do a better job of aligning as collectives.
This has the merit of both preventing your marginalisation as a country or as a company and making it easier to thrive on far Limited resources than would be the case if your policies do not recognise this hyper-integration trend.
A typical case in Ghana is the highly promising, yet chronically delayed, financial services interoperability framework. Banks in the country have refused to enable full cross-platform debit functionality among themselves and other operators within the ecosystem due to an unmitigated spectrum of risks.
A whole host of start-up and new venture driven innovations have been suspended in limbo on account of this. Other similarly powerful prospects are blocked by a demand for high floats.
The end-to end-payment rails ecosystems that the likes of Mastercard and Visa are able to deliver across the globe should theoretically be feasible at local levels to serve distinctly local needs at lower transactional cost. The national switches are in place and policies have been made.
What has been missing is the polycentric integrations into other institutions such as identity management platforms, escrow platforms, arbitration platforms, credit referencing platforms, collateralisation and securitisation platforms, state guarantee and insurance platforms, and other heterogenous nodes to take care of high residual risks and the fear of fraud.
And those fears are valid. There are instances of payment platforms being hobbled on account of fraud. Mobile money systems have now been so contaminated by fraud that telecom operators have had to mount special communications campaigns to address them.
Some banks have been blocked from interoperability frameworks for taking advantage of settlement loopholes left by incomplete integrations. No wonder then that banks are willing to endure slower growth than ride all the massive promises of new business promised by a wide swathe of potential suitors in domains as diverse as informal pensions mobilisation and microgrid micro-subscription platforms.
Click here to read the full report
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This article was published by Bright Simons for the Center for Global Development as part of a series on Technology, Comparative Advantage, and Development Prospects
The post Bright Simons writes: A farewell to disruption in a post-platform world appeared first on Citinewsroom - Comprehensive News in Ghana, Current Affairs, Business News , Headlines, Ghana Sports, Entertainment, Politics, Articles, Opinions, Viral Content.
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