The Way of the DAO: Toward Decentralizing the Tactile Internet

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in adapting blockchain technologies to the specific needs of the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to develop a variety of blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) applications such as smart cities and Industry 4.0, where smart contracts play an important role. After briefly reviewing recent progress on BIoT, we explore the symbiosis of blockchain with other key technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, while putting our focus on the emerging Tactile Internet for advanced human-to-machine interaction. Our interest is in exploiting the concept of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which executes smart contracts and requires the involvement from humans to perform certain tasks that autonomous AI based software agents and robots themselves cannot do. In our search for synergies between human-agent-robot teamwork (HART) and the complementary strengths of the DAO, AI, and robots, we decentralize the Tactile Internet by leveraging mobile end-user equipment via partially or fully decentralized multi-access edge computing, and crowdsourcing of human expertise to decrease the completion time of physical tasks in the event of unreliable feedback forecasting of teleoperated robots. Finally, we aim at enhancing the human capabilities of unskilled crowd members by using our proposed nudge contract.