Physical, then Digital, then Native Digital
Our Digital Future
Physical, then Digital, then Native Digital
We went from pieces of paper to a scanner/printer/fax to purely digital files that have no physical origin. We may go from movies to computer-generated imagery (CGI) in movies to entirely computer-generated videos, never originally filmed with human beings offline. We may go from physical cash to an online bank balance to cryptocurrency, which is inherently digital.
This is a useful progression to think through for many areas because you can see inherently digital versions often don't exist yet. The last twenty years has just been taking our existing offline versions of things and uploading them to the cloud.
As the fundamental medium changes, the form changes. Search engines and social networks are digital-native concepts which couldn't exist offline. There are many other concepts where the digital-native and crypto-native equivalents are yet to exist. What is a crypto-native equivalent of a diploma? What does crypto art look like? What does fundamentally digital login and identity look like? All these are coming.
Similarly, everybody is talking about machine learning and AI in the last few years as if it’s a new thing. That technology was being developed at Stanford fifteen years ago. Innovations take time to evolve and diffuse out to the public.
