The news of Australian bushfires is heartbreaking. And the Australian PM’s response is infuriating. Not just in regards to the direct measures taken, but also as to the cause of the fires and its future mitigation. All the more because there are solutions that not only protect the environment against such disasters, but bring economic benefits as well.The irony is that the solution has...
Cattle herding and biological carbon sequestring with robots
This post is related to the post about Australian bushfires. It dives deeper into the possibilities IOTA offers regarding solutions mentioned there. Over time we’ll develop this into a usecase that can explored in a hackathon. [This post only contains some basic ideas on how to use IOTA, but does not go into the details of how to build it. It would require much more research in order to...
Natural ecosystems to inspire machine ecosystems
The Machine Economy track at the 2018 Blockchaingers Hackathon asks teams to build a machine-to-machine-ecosystem, that disrupts our current system, and that is beneficial to society. This is not an easy task and it can be hard knowing where to start. Maybe nature can provide some inspiration. Let’s look at how ecosystems are organized, and how nature is abundant towards all participants...
Emergence as a solution to overengineering
More is better. Our brains seem hardwired to it. Maybe it has to do with laziness, or perhaps just comfort. But we humans tend to overengineer everything, from our almost empty or often unused cars, to our ridiculously overpowered smartphones and laptops, which we use for Facebook and Candy Crush Saga. There are many examples, but the point is: a lot of our stuff is overspec’d and underutilized...
Envisioning a new society
We are all children of our time. Everything we have today is normal to us, but this is an illusion. Hot water from the tap wasn’t there 50 years ago, in some areas not even running water. Houses from the eighties have very few sockets, compared to the current demand. Cabling for internet or tv isn’t tucked away nicely into the wall. We are now taking steps towards a machine economy. At...
Algorithms inspired by swarm behaviour
With autonomous machines you almost automatically touch on swarming. But what is swarming? There are two ways of looking at it: how and why. By imitating the how, we might get some nice optimizations, but the why is where the real benefits are. Locust preventing collisions Locust filter out excess stimuli to have enough brain capacity to react to relevant signals. It only recognizes movements...
Biomimicry: information and the Machine Economy
The Machine Economy track on the world’s largest blockchain Hackathon challenges you to go way beyond the current paradigm. But how do you rethink a future ecosystem? Nature could be inspiration. It’s been scrumming and iterating its ecosystems for 3.8 billion years. There’s some interesting concepts to be learned from it, through Biomimicry. Biomimicry Biomimicry means learning...
Nature as inspiration for the world’s largest Hackathon
In April 2018 the largest blockchain hackathon in the world will be organized in the Netherlands by Blockchaingers. On 8 February a Deep Dive was held in Amsterdam for the track Machine to Machine economy (M2M) to prepare and excite the teams and other interests parties. I was asked to inspire the participants with a few examples from nature. Machine2Machine Deep Dive All speakers at the Deep...