The chairman and the co-founder of $414 billion e-commerce giant Alibaba, Jack Ma notes at the World AI Conference 2018, that artificial intelligence (AI), the blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT) might be worthless if they fail to target the manufacturing industry.
Ma’s speech at the World AI Conference wasn’t exclusive to the Blockchain technology, he included AI and IOT; three technologies that are considered to be the building blocks of the fourth industrial revolution by most. He stated:
“AI, Blockchain and IoT will be meaningless tech unless they can promote the transformation of the manufacturing industry, and the evolution of the society towards a greener and more inclusive direction.”
The Manufacturing industry
Ma points his finger towards an industry, that in China itself is valued at around $3.1 trillion and is a multi-trillion dollar sector in the US and other major economies. The industry of smart manufacturing has grown exponentially over the past decade, especially in the past three years.
The industries have been on a constant search for innovative ways and emerging technologies to cut back costs and improve the efficiency of the manufacturing process. Automation of hardware and machineries has already marginally synchronized the process and usage of robotics have eliminated manual errors while speed up existing operations.
In early 2016, the concept of applying decentralized systems to a variety of industries invited many blockchain consortia and development firms have started to concentrate on developing blockchain that rebuilds the supply chains. Blockchain firms like Hyperledger and Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) have developed both private and public blockchain-based systems to deploy supply chains of large-scale corporations on top of an immutable network.
Blockchain technology is still at its onset and has miles to go. Though its current major limitation is its scalability; the peer-to-peer networks currently handle just around 10 to 50 transactions per second. The issue could be addressed with second-layer scaling solutions and innovative consensus algorithms. This will enable developers to target some of the largest industries in the world like manufacturing and create decentralized protocols.
Currently, apart from finance, manufacturing is the biggest market which emerging technologies can target. Though these technologies are being employed in the industry, their full potential is still untapped.
Ma pointed out that the use of blockchain in the manufacturing industry as the primary data processing technology and decentralized database could mark the true mainstream adoption outside of the realm of finance.
At present, Ethereum-based projects like VeChain, WaltonChain, and proof-of-stake networks like Cardano and EOS allows developers and companies to build applications on top of the blockchain. All said and done it is important to note that the technology is in its early phase and implementing decentralized systems in the manufacturing sector would take some major work and time.