I had a great hour or so earlier this week listening to Rowland Manthorpe from Wired talking about the future of money at the inaugural The New Normal session. Rather than the a la mode of talking about distributed ledgers and crypto currencies, Rowland focused instead on data – at the core of his argument was that banking these days is essentially trapped in a model based around the secure storage of assets when the world of money these days is basically one of the management of data.
What all of this made me more sure of than ever was that at the heart of all discussions about money and banking are issues of psychology and sociology, and those then in turn revolve around trust. Why do we trust the almost entirely abstract concept of cash? Why do we increasingly not trust those institutions that dominate the management of that trust (as a side note, have just bought this book exploring that topic)? Why (as per my recent rant about the lack of diversity of skills involved in AI today) are there no ethicists or psychologists or anthropologists involved in the discussion about the future of money – have we not yet started to realise that shit that is stirred when it’s all left to technologists?
Anyway, some random notes from the event below. Can thoroughly recommend the TNN format – next up is someone from What3Words.
mmitII 