Future of Identity in the Cyber-Physical World
Spherity’s Vision for Digital Identity — Transcript of my talk @ TEDx Königsallee, Düsseldorf Germany, on new forms of human identity & digital twinning for Industry 4.0
We all have a natural identity. “I am I” and “You are You.” We all were given names to identify each other. We all live our own life. We all have our own life stories.
With the invention of letters and books, our natural identity and lifetime stories started to manifest on stone, papyrus, paper and documents.
- Our identity card says when were we born and where do we live. However, the home address printed on our identity card doesn’t change when we move to a new home. The information stored on these documents are static.
- We have government agencies and trusted third parties providing certificates about events in our life. Our birth or a university degree.
- Our story is told by other people in newspapers and books.
Leonardo Da Vinci already taught us:
“To develop a complete mind: study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Leonardo was enlightened by the Duality of Science and Art: The study of opposite fields and the combination of insights to discover something groundbreaking new.
The biggest life-changing duality in our time is the duality of the physical and the digital worlds. A convoluted cyber-physical world. By diving deep into the intersection of the physical and digital world, humanity enters a new phase of significant enlightenment and change.
Da Vinci’s words echoing again in a slightly different manner but in the same context. Learn how to see and realise that everything is connected in the cyber-physical world. Everything is physically and digitally interlinked.
Information systems and the internet took our lifetime of stories to the next level. However, on the other hand, our personal identity is now stored in many corporate databases and literally everywhere on the internet.
Moreover, digital identity and transaction systems are foundational elements of digital economies and societies. These systems support trade and transactions, provide individual humans or machines with access to services. They enhance the fusion of the biological, physical and digital worlds.
Governments have owned citizen identities through the issuing of social security numbers, identity cards and birth certificates. A system that we are now very used to. The largest internet companies, such as Google and Facebook, have been reaping most of their profits from collecting, aggregating, analysing and monetising our personal data. And we didn’t even blink an eye while handing it to them.
The sum total of all this information on documents and in systems is our identity. It consists of true, outdated, inconsistent, life-saving, embarrassing and fake information.
This has helped us realise that our traditional concepts of digital identity systems are pretty much broken:
- They are not designed in a user-centric way, which means not from the perspective of a user but that of a centralised system designer.
- We are dependent on centralised systems that are often subject to privacy breaches, identity theft and do not provide the ability to independently verify a user’s attributes.
- It is almost impossible to connect identities and their data across multiple systems as it might be needed, on demand, for a single transaction purpose.
- These systems are not designed for the next level of identity in the cyber-physical world.
When learning about identity in the cyber-physical world we must not be biased by our today’s concepts of identity. We must acknowledge that identity is fundamentally changing.
Duality in the Cyber-Physical World — Digital Twinning and Agent-to-Agent Transactions
Every human, object and machine will have a digital identity. A digital twin. The digital twin represents a human, an object or a machine and can tell its entire story. It stores data about its creation, relationships, events in life, health and death.
Every digital identity or digital twin will have one or more ubiquitous, digital companion in form of agents. Agents are formed by software code. These agents — such as Amazon Alexa — provide services to us. These agents must be understood, configured and controlled by us.
Simultaneously, we need to prevent the risk of malfunctioning agents that can harm us. Humans will put systems in place to curate safe and block faulty agents. To make sure the agent code is safe and ethical.
Agents start to interact with each other. And, hopefully, they support and improve our lives. In a world where everything is interlinked.
But what exactly is an agent?
A simple agent? Let’s learn from the science of nature!
Let’s look into an ant colony. Ants are biological agents. They perceive their environment through their eyes and noses. They are processing information about the environment with their brain. And they are acting through their movements and behaviours.
Ants have a natural identity, as we humans have it as well. They even have a nuanced security system — and no fake IDs:
- The ant-centric identity is their odour.
- The identity of a colony is collectively defined by the odour of all the ants in the colony. A colony odour.
- Ants can verify the colony odour, known as “passport pheromone,” and distinguish intruders.
- And, there is no need for a centralised ant numbering system in place at all or a physical system that counts the number of members as each ant will keep a track of this scent.
And, ants cooperate among each other:
- Desert ants regulate foraging through communication via the so-called “Anternet.”
- Ants communicate and interact among each other to optimise operations costs — their water supply — and to protect, feed or grow their colony.
- Again, there is no centralised system that controls cooperation among ants.
Exactly like the ant agents, we want our digital agent companions to cooperate in a way that improves our lives and serves the greater good for society.
Identity and Agents in Industry 4.0
Agents shall book us a trip, take care of our health, make mobility systems safer and provide services to us while taking care about the environment and our households.
Digital twinning and agents are core concepts of the 4th industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 as the digitization of the entire industrial space is called here in Germany.
“The 4th industrial revolution is powered by the fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds.”
Identity in Industry 4.0 it is not a future concept. A group of visionary people from the industrial sector started working on it 20 years ago joining more people on the way and it’s here now.
Industry 4.0, for instance, introduced the concept of cyber-physical objects: Objects that exist in the real world and that are connected to an identity and agent in the digital world. But the cyber-physical object is not just buzzword. It is a serious German engineering term.
Fundamentally changing Concept of Identity
In this world, identity is not static anymore. It is extremely dynamic. Identities will be
- Easily and quickly created, updated, split, cloned, merged, grouped and aggregated.
- This will be done using software algorithms along an entity’s life-cycle or value chain.
The research firm Gartner is saying that within the next few years:
- Internet of Things (IoT) powered by digital twins will save consumers and businesses worth $1 trillion a year in asset maintenance.
- 50% of the major enterprises will use digital twins of the organisation to optimise process efficiency, effectiveness and customer outcomes.
- Digital Twins will soon power the circling economy.
Giving identity to non-human objects has far-reaching benefits for all sectors in our life and economy. This results in an agent economy that flips the way of processing transactions upside down. From top-down, centralised systems, to bottom-up entity-centric, multi-agent systems.
Let’s look into an example
In a manufacturing device, you would want to replace a broken part of the machine. You specify the quality requirements, authorise the machine’s agent to identify the broken part. Then you have to seek the CAD design and manufacturing parameters from verified OEM data files and create a transactive identity (digital twin + agent) of the spare part before it is even produced.
The agent of the spare part finds, for example, a local 3D printer that is able to print the part in line with the required quality specifications, books and schedules a pint job and provides the manufacturing/configuration data to the printer. Job done! Without the unnecessary human intervention which eats up a lot of time.
Future of Cyber-Physical Objects in Industry 4.0
The 3D printer then submits manufacturing and quality testing data to the spare part’s digital twin to provide proof of the manufacturing audit trail. It restricts access to the data to the owner and authorised supply chain actors only.
The spare part agent might decide to share or sell these data to an optimisation agent. An agent that aggregates data from many similar parts to improve the CAD design or manufacturing parameters for parts that will be printed in the future.
The spare part agent books a self-routed delivery path in a logistics network and re-routes in case of delays in the network.
Before deployment of the part into the machine, the machine’s agent verifies the claim that the part was produced in accordance to specifications and quality requirements. It verifies the audit trail. And now the machine can prove it is equipped with OEM designed and properly produced spare parts. This proof gives the machine a higher reputation in the manufacturing market.
Identities can be grouped and aggregated to form an identity on a system level.
They can be grouped into a smart home identity and a system of machines. They can be combined to drone swarm identity or aggregated into an identity for a fleet of self-driving cars. A fleet of digital twins, operating in concert, allows for the benefits to extend from an individual to the system level.
Businesses can not only predict and mitigate failure at the level of an individual part, but also optimize physical asset use and allocation so that the efficiency of the system as a whole is increased. System-level optimization will produce the biggest impact of this trend in the near future. And, eventually server our society.
These new identity systems can be used in a number of ways such as:
- Humans with their identity want to access the vehicle fleet for mobility services.
- Transportation goods interact with their identity for logistics services.
- And energy grids for energy storage services, etc.
This requires a flexible — or so-called interoperable — identity system to allow all these entities to transact among each other.
The self-driving cars want to make sure the entire network service is resilient. These cars interact with each other and with their environment via intelligent agents. They will interact in a similar way as the ants do to ensure the integrity and resilience of the system and its service in case of a threat or disruption.
New Forms of Life
The fourth industrial revolution is much more than just digitising our lives and processes around us. It is much more fundamental.
“It is changing not only what we do and how we live, but also who we are.”
It is creating new forms of life. Or as Ralph Merkle puts it:
“Bitcoin is an example of a new form of life. It lives because:
- It lives and breathes on the internet.
- It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive.
- It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform …
- It can’t be stopped.
- It can’t even be interrupted.
- If a nuclear war destroys half of our planet, it would still continue to live, uncorrupted.”
NeuraLink, which is one of Elon Musk’s ventures, is a company aiming to connect our human brain with the internet and to computation services. This might one day significantly extend our mental capabilities.
Exoskeletons and CRISPR/CAS gene editing extend our physical capabilities, compensate disabilities, heal diseases or even drastically change our DNA.
All of this is transforming who we are. There are soon new forms of “personhood” approaching us. From self-owning machines to a self-owning piece of lands, natural resources like a river or even an iron mine or living non-Human species.
“In New Zealand, Lands and Rivers Can — legally speaking — Be People.”
An example is the Whanganui River, which received its own personhood. It is treated as a legal person with its own rights to protect the integrity of its ecosystem.
This eventually leads to concept of Nature 2.0, the symbiosis of biology & machines.
How does this so-called Personhood work in Nature 2.0?
Fast-forwarding into the not so distant future of connected: Agents and agent cooperation are the answer.
The Whanganui River forest, its sensor capabilities and satellite monitoring data are connected to a personhood agent. The Whanganui River’s personhood agent perceives changes in biodiversity, threats from wildfires or damages from a hurricane.
It can make decisions to create a work order for a swarm of firefighting or seed-planting drones, depending on the requirement. These seed-planting drones take care of afforestation and start repairing the self-owned forest.
This is not science fiction. The first start-ups are already working on the concept of a self-owned forest by combing legal, social and technological innovation including blockchains, DAOs and new forms of governance. Driven by fusion of technologies and interdisciplinary teams. This new world is full of opportunities for individuals and will serve the greater good of our society.
Transactive Identities and Self-sovereign Services
The new identity systems will be more entity-centric, more user-centric. It creates entirely new digital identities that start to transact among each other. I, as an identity owner, control the access who interacts with my data, my resources and my services.
I define the terms and conditions of these transactions. It is not the terms and conditions of Google and Facebook that rule transactions in the digital world anymore. My transactions are ruled by my terms, just as they should be from the very beginning of the internet revolution.
Our ubiquitous, interlinked agents are exchanging data, physical resources, financial values, self-sovereign services and optimize the entire system. Spherity is working on a privacy-preserving, entity-centric identity system for humans, machines and agents.
The technologies that are needed to build the future identity system are already present such as:
- The Internet of Things (IoT),
- Modern cryptography,
- Biometry/Physical Unclonable Functions,
- Blockchain and
- Artificial intelligence.
These technologies will be of significant importance for our lives.
However, this new world also comes with a couple of new risks. We already witnessed how the Stuxnet virus destroyed equipment of the Iranian nuclear programme. This was just the opening shot for a new form of cyber-physical malware that comes with the ability to destroy assets or cause harm to humans or our assets.
If agents are either not programmed in a safe or ethical way or their underlying infrastructure is not secure they can cause significant damage. Damage on a large scale. Moreover, we cannot let big enterprises to drive this innovation that are biased by their main objective to reap out profits from human or machine identities.
We are therefore in urgent need for informed and responsible leadership to determine the right direction and implement a future identity system through a movement of creative commons. An identity system that serves the greater good for society. This is the mission of the Spherity Digital Identity cloud-edge solutions.
Let’s go back to Leonardo Da Vinci’s and apply his quote in today’s time:
“To develop a complete mind: study agents in the physical world. Imagine their cooperation in the digital world. Learn how to see. Realize everything is interlinked in the cyber-physical world.”
Be a part of the Interlinked movement and get in touch with us.
Medium: Spherity
Mail: info@spherity.com
Twitter: @spherityproject
Website: www.spherity.com
About the Author:
Dr. Carsten Stöcker is founder of Spherity GmbH. Spherity is a scalable decentral platform for the fourth industrial revolution providing secure identities and digital twins bridging the physical, biological and digital spheres. He is a physicist by training with a Ph.D. from the University of Aachen. He also serves as a Council Member of Global Future Network for the World Economic Forum. Prior to founding Spherity GmbH, Dr. Stöcker worked for innogy SE, German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) and Accenture GmbH.
Carsten.Stoecker@spherity.com | Twitter: @CarstenStoecker
About Spherity:
Spherity provides blockchain infrastructure solution for
- Decentralised identity
- Digital twinning
- Connecting physical and digital worlds
- Bridging existing enterprise systems
- Privacy-preserving agent-to-agent transactions
- Token for service and value exchange
