I came across this quote quite by accident today:

"This is not an information age. It's an age of networked intelligence."

Don Tapscott, a blockchain evangelist, said it.

What do you reckon he means by networked intelligence?

Thanks to the Internet, there has certainly been a surge of easily available information which aids in improving one's knowledge. There has also been a surge in the exposure to unfounded, incoherent opinions. Neither knowledge nor incoherent opinions lead to intelligence every time, networked or otherwise, albeit I still haven't a clue what is meant by networked.

Blockchain is a funny thing. There have been many attempts by various blockchain vendors to sell the idea to those in my supply chain in order to, amongst other things, aid in establishing a robust and transparent chain of custody, which has been extremely difficult to do on a large scale for a variety of structural and operational reasons.

Blockchain is invariably presented as some kind of a magical wand to cure all the problems including the prospect of people mucking about with the data along the way. It all sounds good, but as with most things that sound too good, it begs a few basic questions that turn out to be difficult to answer.

The whole construct relies on the premise that the data first introduced to the blockchain has integrity. Therefore, it needs to rely on an external system / process to ensure the integrity of the original set of data. What doesn't seem to be recognised is that that's where the biggest challenge lies IRL and that record keeping is just a secondary challenge which can be overcome without blockchain as a matter of will and additional man-hours, not means.

All blockchain does is to hold and pass on the data. It's just data. In our case, that data is about a physical product, which is not inseparable from the data. It's easy enough to make a switch. Now an inferior product is associated with the existing data. Kid's play. The data itself is worthless. It's the product that has any value (in our realm).

That data is supposedly incorruptible, free from interference from unauthorised parties. In one word, secure, they all say. Yet, we see crypto exchanges being raided, and the design of these decentralised chains make it extremely difficult to trace where the stolen data flows, but centralised chains are subject to manipulation by controlling parties.

A fancy database is not the networked solution they say it is. It's not intelligent, completely reliant on human beings to uphold the integrity and security of the data. Just a tool that might get you to a solution, provided all the other variables are sorted.

And just because you have access to lots more information, both valid and invalid, doesn't mean you're more intelligent. I thought intelligence is what you do with information, not just accessing it.

Thoughts?