Technology advancement has taken place on a global scale. Many and many more countries have received and integrated the advent of technology within their economies. Now, blockchain technology and smart contracts seem primed to advance the lead up to the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
World Wakes up to the Chain
Programmers and computer experts are continuing to develop more innovative ways of doing things. Of particular importance to this article are the advent of smart contracts in blockchain technology and its potential threat to humanity. According to law professor Adam Kolber from a law school in Brooklyn, human lives will be under threat soon due to blockchain-based overlords.
In this era, we see robots and machines programmed to perform certain complex duties on their own through artificial intelligence. When you look at this from a Sci-fi perspective, not everything will be haywire once we conform to robot technology. Now using the same analogy, a smart contract is like artificial intelligence but only programmed for Blockchain systems. It is in the same way that things won’t go well when the smart contracts work at the disadvantage of humans.
Kolber is convinced that smart contract is too much responsibility for blockchain and refers to it as “artificial responsibility.”
Bugs Found
To explain the danger of this artificial responsibility bestowed on the blockchain, he takes the example of the distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs) that allowed strangers through a voting system to fund venture capital proposals. He explains that as a result of our willingness to endow the system with artificial responsibility, a bug in the DAO led to the loss of $50 million.
He, however, points out that the delegation of critical task such as finance to smart contracts is not the major problem. The greatest threat from smart contracts in blockchain as illustrated by the professor is their incompetence but not their intelligence. Smart contracts will be incompetent when they interact with the artificially intelligent internet of things. Kolber warns that the interaction shall create new risks through hacks and coding mistakes.
The major takeaway demonstrated by professor Kolber, is the fact that the integration of smart contracts into blockchain will not only give it too much responsibility but will also make blockchains more vulnerable. The fact presented is that smart contracts could be intelligent but not enough to outweigh the internet. As a result, smart contracts in blockchains shall make it vulnerable when the interaction with the internet of things finally occurs.
