PL: Past, Present & Future | Protocol Labs
PL: Past, Present & Future
Protocol Labs
Protocol Labs
Oct 30, 2023
Protocol Labs: Past, Present and Future
Within the next few years and decades, major technological advancements will bring massive scale changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be a human. Artificial general intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, augmented and virtual realities. These developments will shape how we live, work, play, interact — exist. Conversely, if we aren’t careful enough, these technologies could also cause dire unintended consequences, including mass extinction or basically, enable us to accidentally wipe out our entire species.
The future is a tightrope, and it’s more vital than ever that as we develop these groundbreaking technologies, we are intentional in baking in good outcomes during the R&D process.
On September 28, 2023, at the PL Leads Summit in Iceland, Juan Benet, founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, shared his vision for how PL is responding to these changes by creating an ecosystem for projects, teams, and companies to build technology for today and the future. It will require a new way of thinking, an ambitious vision that includes building an innovation network with a comprehensive research and development pipeline, fostering world-class teams, promoting open source technologies, and utilizing the crypto and venture capital model to support and grow projects. The goal is to reshape economies and governance systems globally while ensuring safe outcomes and addressing challenges, such as securing the internet and digital human rights.
So we're going to do this in four sections. First off, talk about the mission and vision of PL — kind of the why, the what, and the how we do that. We're going to take a brief look at PL’s past, like the first 10 years, we're going to look at how the network operates now in the present, and then we're going to look ahead to the future.
The Mission and Vision of PL
PL’s about driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. That is a broad statement. It comes from thinking about the massive-scale changes that are going to happen, have already been happening, and are going to be accelerating for humanity in the next 100 years and so on.
Things will be built, implemented, deployed, that will change what it means to be human, even more than it already has. The goal of the network is to both accelerate some of those changes, and to navigate towards safe outcomes through those changes.
In general, the kind of broader vision of PL is to build this innovation network. This used to say, an R&D company, and that shifted in the last three years. The rest of the picture remains the same, which is to build a full research and development pipeline across the entire thing, from early research all the way into product building, and deployment and scaling. We want a world-class set of teams and network. We are very strongly into open source and open technologies.
Securing the Internet and Establishing Digital Human Rights
PL started with IPFS and Filecoin, projects about securing the internet, and establishing digital human rights. We also discovered through crypto and smart contracts that it was possible to deploy new structures that could shift how economies work globally and how governance systems function. This broad shift combined with emerging technologies like advanced AI models and brain-computer interfaces comes with challenges that need careful consideration.
R&D Pipeline and Innovation Network Model
The ordering of these technologies is significant in determining capabilities that can be unlocked globally. Our thinking around R&D is that it happens in a broad larger scale pipeline, going from early research into applications. The hardest part about this pipeline is that usually startups start very late in the journey, towards the latter half of it.
We want to accelerate certain lines of technologies while ensuring safety. We envision a network-oriented structure to address these challenges, fostering cooperation across various fields of development.
Future Goals and Initiatives
The most pressing challenges will stem from the rollout of technologies like artificial general intelligence and brain-computer interfaces. We believe it's crucial to create an environment that simplifies the genesis of these initiatives. In pursuing our individual goals, we anticipate significant advancements in secure publishing and distribution of content.
Overall, the future remains uncertain, but through collaborative effort and innovative funding mechanisms, we aim to reach our project milestones and ultimately reshape the technological landscape.