Blockchain and Engineering

Thomas Wendling is an advisor to the Integrated Engineering Blockchain Consortium, a professional systems engineer at Jacobs Engineering, and a cofounder of CoEngineers.io, a blockchain engineering platform cooperative.

Of all the technologies that have the potential for disruption in the AEC/EPC industry, we seldom pay close attention to blockchain, because we consider it merely a novel administrative technology for data management. Even though infrastructure depends on data, greater information efficiency does not usually arrive with the potency to disrupt or transform.

We usually think of AI, virtual reality, drones, augmented reality, BIM, and 3-D printing as the technologies that will have the most impact on the built world. However, the work of a strategist in an exponentially changing world is to be a futurist, and to pay close attention to imaginative projections at least as much as current implementations of technology. In this article, I will play the role of that kind of strategist:

What is deceptive about blockchain is that it may not really be about technology at all. It may be about social science and the incentivization of behavior changes in the gig economy. Blockchain may have more to do with the anthropology of work and management science, because of its reorientation of trust in remuneration. It has already proven that people will work with unlimited zeal for a digital proof of ownership called cryptocurrency or tokens. Whether tokens have any worth is not disputed here. It is the fact that some people will readily work for them, and expend enormous capital and energy to earn them (à la Bitcoin) only if someone else considers that they may have worth some day. Coders, engineers, and architects are no exception.

Disruption on the Horizon?

Blockchain has the potential to reorganize engineering resources in a shared, disintermediated, distributed and decentralized way. The AEC industry’s most precious resource, its human capital, its engineers and architects, would be able to cross new thresholds of trust which identify how they interact economically with each other and get paid by those who need their services. Smart contracts can be used to incentivize and structure high quality engineering work. Blockchain technology not only allows atomization of the engineering profession, it drastically lowers the barriers against the phenomenon due to the faith of early adopters in the value of their own work and the ability to bootstrap the market value of cryptographic tokens with it.

Blockchain's true calling may be social science sandwiched between two layers of technology. Underneath, rests the blockchain substrate. Above it, artificial intelligence, particularly neural networks, which can manage an unstructured body of knowledge more effectively than traditional institutions.

Microtargeting of work assignments and matching of skill sets with microtasks through predictive scoring of engineers and architects that have proven their expertise in solving particular kinds of problems could be accomplished through deep learning algorithms on an immutable public record of work. The combination of blockchain with artificial intelligence could result in a more targeted, individualized approach to work distribution, and a supply chain to meet the demand for the right skill sets, while at the same time lowering the barriers of entry to engineers and architects wishing to establish a digital reputation in a new field.

The Modern Engineering Firm of the 21st Century

Even with partial decentralization, coexistence between engineering platform co-ops and traditional hierarchical engineering firms could be beneficial. A cyborg hybrid of blockchain cooperative combined with traditional centralization is a possible outcome, and would be disruptive. Disintermediation could leaven the engineering process and make more efficient use of the white space on organization charts, yielding higher productivity and quality of work. Traditional institutions may also feed a disintermediated entity, with whole companies or teams of distributed engineers participating in competitive design work if the purse of tokens is lucrative enough. A blockchain engineering cooperative could provide a liquid pool of engineering talent that acts as a buffer against volatile hiring cycles, allowing firms to “burst” when they need to, and cloudsource underutilized engineering talent that could make them more productive, efficient, and able to win more work.

The AEC/EPC Incumbent's Role

Whether engineering platform co-ops succeed in forming and coalescing into large enough communities to matter is uncertain. AEC/EPC firms should monitor and be involved in the emergence of any blockchain-enabled decentralization initiatives when they occur. The engineering platform cooperative concept needs AI to work, and this is one area where the global blockchain technical community is weak, and where AEC firms could step in and develop the technology to their benefit. Even if they do not have the AI chops of Deepmind or Google, AEC firms understand the anthropology of productive engineering better than the AI giants. If they do not fill this gap, the freelance blockchain community will reach out to someone, probably outside of the AEC industry, to build out the rest of their system. The AEC industry doesn't want to be disrupted by Big Tech when they can do that better to themselves. If disruption is in their cards, their positioning would minimize potential chaos, and help to define decentralization in a way that is beneficial to them and reflects the ethics of the engineering profession.