Aug 09
10
The Reason Why P2P Is Going To Be Critical Technology
The use of P2P in enabling information to flow quickly and efficiently at the edge of the network without requiring central distribution or control is going to become more and more relevant to maintaining social cohesion as time goes by.
Currently we live in a world that has famously been called “flat” because of global trade flows. Those global trade flows that have enabled everyone in the world with any kind of reasonable discretionary income to purchase consumer goods were built on the back of cheap energy on the one hand and digital technology on the other.
The period of cheap energy is over. The demand for cars by millions and millions of Indian and Chinese workers who are not as affluent as their American counterparts, but who equally are not as impacted by the GFC, will ensure that the price of oil keeps on rising. And we should also remember that most of the new discoveries such as the oil sands in Canada will cost a lot to refine and will not yield light petroleum of the kind used for cars. Also, there is zero money going into building new refineries – another reason to believe that supply of hydrocarbons is not going to increase.
The digital technology that is less discussed but is equally relevant to global distribution of goods is that which drives complex supply chains, globally and domestically.
These supply chains currently are built around the concept of centralized distribution nodes. In a world of cheap energy this makes sense. You bring all the goods to primary warehousing points to check inventory, quality, etc and then ship out either to retail or to other sub distribution points and then on to retail.
This concept sees goods that we consume in our daily lives travelling huge distances before they reach us.
As energy prices rise, these supply chains will become extremely costly to maintain. The miles travelled not only will drive up the final cost of sale to the consumer. More importantly they will increase massively the carbon footprint of the consumer. Regardless of anyone’s political persuasion sometime soon we will all have to account for our individual carbon footprint. This may happen because of regulation by government, but more likely will happen because of peer pressure from our families, our co-workers, our communities – with people taking account of the kind of cars we drive, the kind of heating we use and a host of other things that will signal whether we have green credentials or not.
Kids at school will be the first to truly pressure parents at home. And from that will come a perceived need by supermarkets and other consumer goods retailers to show the carbon footprint of every good that is sold in the same way that nowadays pricing is required that enables comparative shopping to take place, easily.
As this societal shift starts to take place there will be a growing need to run P2P supply chains that will ensure that goods that are manufactured locally do not need to be shipped to a central location just to be shipped back to a nearby retail point – which is the height of inefficiency in a high energy cost world. P2P will become the modus operandi for actually benefiting society in a massive way.
This will keep prices, and therefore inflation, down. It will ensure greater freshness – certainly for food. And more importantly it will lead to a resurrection in local manufacturing. When you start to look holistically at where goods are manufactured, taking into account the measuring of the carbon impact from manufacturing a silicon chip in one country, an electric motor in another, the wiring in a third and the assembly of the above in a fourth, you start to see huge carbon impacts – regardless of the price of labour.
The future is going to be about using P2P effectively to help both distribute and to see a rebirth in local manufacturing of goods that will also require a huge reskilling of the workforce.
P2P will be at the heart of this whole next societal growth curve.