As digital transformation engulfs nations, its potentials for unlocking prosperity with real time data driven intelligence remains unmatched. Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain hold great promises for governments to drive inclusive led economic growth and development for the benefits of their citizenry, security against internal and external threats, having a healthy workforce, building an educated populace, anchoring food security, and broad sustainable environment.
Different countries are investing in various capacities and deepening their capabilities in AI and block to fix different paralyses they are confronted with. The two major powers United States and China currently lead in these efforts while other countries in the Western hemisphere, East Asia and SouthEast Asia are not left out in the race for new intelligence.
I propose a roadmap for nations across the world to build intelligent economies leveraging these exponential technologies.
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Human Capital Development for the Intelligent Economy: Every nation should invest a significant amount of her national budget on training her citizens in artificial intelligence, blockchain, critical thinking, product development, and emotional intelligence. With a large talent pool in these skills, they will develop AI and blockchain enabled solutions for different frictions. Their citizens could also become outsourced to create intelligent products for other nations earning massive revenue from that.
Acquisition and Development of Infrastructure For the Intelligent Economy: Hardware to power the intelligent economy such as deployment of drones, robotics, and sensors for real time analytics across different verticals such as agricultural farmlands, natural resources extraction fields, roads and public parking spaces, land borders, airports and seaports, facial recognition and identification cameras. Also, data centers for local hosting of their data and software like satellite imaging data; intelligent cloud platforms should be developed which will integrate artificial intelligence and blockchain for governments to offer smart services as important enablers.
Integration of Chief Data Scientist and Chief Decentralized Officer into Economic Management Teams: The Chief Data Scientist of the nation, at regional or state level, is responsible for aggregating various data through artificial intelligence to offer unbiased insight analytics which will support progressive economic decisions to be taken by the government, while the Chief Decentralized Officer will be responsible for creation of blockchain solutions to support the intelligent economy, and as such, their roles are very important.
Industry Adoption by Governments
Mapping For Social Investment Programmes: Artificial Intelligence can aid in citizen mapping with the aid of geospatial technologies for governments to have real time data on the economically disadvantaged citizens so that their social investment programmes will be more meaningful while the integration of the blockchain will monitor the process to ensure it is transparent and secured, limiting corruption with automation.
Healthcare: Intelligent Electronic Medical Record powered by artificial intelligence and secured on the blockchain which will contain the data of all patients in the country, and can be updated real time by only doctors permitted by their medical association, to carry out their services such as records sharing, prescription sharing to their colleagues and personalized treatment to patients on the network.
Food Security: Artificial Intelligence will help nations in predicting farming outcomes based on real time geolocation data, and the prices of basic agricultural commodities which are consumed and marketed by marketing boards, while blockchain can be integrated to track from the smart farming process to the final consumer in the agribusiness value chain.
Education: With millions of people without access to quality education across the world, governments can invest in AI tutors to educate their citizens using familiar languages in skills and courses which will make them globally competitive while those who are beneficiaries of this initiative can be embedded into a blockchain network to monitor their learning outcomes.
Licensing and Identification: With artificial intelligence enabled real time identification of citizens and their property, the blockchain can aggregate this data and create a distributed digital secure record.
Infrastructure Development: Artificial Intelligence through image and object recognition can engage in predictive maintenance of infrastructure while blockchain can be used in tracking the reconstruction process.
Security: Artificial Intelligence can be utilized by internal security operatives to predict possible crime scenes and those with propensity to commit crimes and give real time feeds autonomously while the blockchain can be used to register and track illegal migrants into any country and renewal of passports and visas to citizens and foreigners. The defense forces can use AI in identifying terrorist threats and autonomously nullifying them while utilizing blockchain for monitoring their armament supply chain.