Data and Knowledge Trees in AEC

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

Infrastructure data is fragmented across tens of thousands of governments, utilities, industries, and standards. But, if we look toward the future through the lens of an ongoing platform revolution, the digital twin of infrastructure that might emerge after the confluence of blockchain, IoT, and AI will likely connect the built world and allow optimization of the biggest system on Earth through portfolio level data that is generated using standardized protocols and peer-to-peer transactions. This is of course already the dream in progress for IoT, but as GE’s recent digital strategy pivot has shown, narrow reliance on specific kinds of sensor data that were once thought to hold promise has not panned out.

Blockchain protocols, such as Proof of Useful Human Work (PoUW) or Proof of Brain (PoB) could allow IoT information to take on many more forms besides sensor data. There are types of infrastructure data that require curation, peer review, engineering judgment, knowledge and even competition to assure quality and usefulness. Such blockchain protocols can serve simultaneously as platforms for delivery, storage and marketplaces for such data.

The “Google” of AEC will be bigger than Google

These blockchain protocols are free market mechanisms based on digital tokens that would reward only dataset success, and would distribute the risk of data usefulness among tens of thousands of data producers, making it unnecessary for any one first mover to invest billions of dollars in developing a fixed set of data analytics software and models. The useful content and data will find its way to the consumers who demand it, and the transaction patterns, which will evolve from a dual process of natural selection and AI, will develop into complex fractal business structures that resemble knowledge trees, more like banyan trees with multiple trunks, rather than oak trees. The functionality of these organisms is encoded and replicated on a blockchain like DNA in its ability to assure resilient progeny.

Listening to chemistry Nobel laureate Dr. Frances Arnold on Science Friday last week, she made us realize how easily we can now map, edit, and even write DNA, but that we still don't know how DNA encodes biological function. We can write DNA, but we cannot compose it. It's nature's way of encrypting biological function. Blockchain is itself a kind of DNA in the way it can encrypt, codify and replicate complex (evolving) business, knowledge, and data supply structures.

CoEngineers.io, the peer-to-peer tech memo publishing platform that is being developed by the Integrated Engineering Blockchain Consortium, hosts the creation of blockchain-based engineering content and data, and aims to measure the value of such data into existence (monetization) through free market token economics. The virtuous cycle of attracting data producers, curation, attracting data consumers, and network effects can be presented in the context of a platform startup; a two-sided network of content and data producers and data consumers in a positive feedback loop:

Tokens serve as nucleation points for the accumulation of value. They are a free market mechanism that can measure value of engineering content and data into existence (monetization), incentivize high quality of valuable engineering information (curation), and amplify the power of this cycle even when it is still very weak with few members in the network.

Platforms are one of the most important economic and social developments of our time. They are a new business and organizational model that enables new ways of creating value through collaboration. They are peer-to-peer, many-to-many networks which provide members access to vast new sources of information and knowledge, and they are becoming a big factor in harnessing the gig economy. They can eliminate fixed costs and create new markets as new producers of information start producing for the first time.

If you think that platforms are going to stop with Amazon, Google, Uber, and Air B-n-B, you are probably not a futurist. They are only beginning to transform the economy, and now amplified by blockchain, they can impact every sector, especially information-intensive and highly fragmented industries, such as ours. The “Google” of AEC will be bigger than Google; there would be no Google if there were no power plants, transportation, manufacturing, communications, roads, water, and sewage. AEC firms are ideally positioned already to become several of the major trunks of such a platform.

Special Thanks to Dr. Frances Arnold of the California Institute of Technology, and to Daniel Robles of the Integrated Engineering Blockchain Consortium