The Uncertain Future of Smart Contracts

Abstract

In the context of the exponential growth of new technologies, any attempt to think about the future becomes enormously challenging. The conventional modern hope that we might learn from past experience and, by doing so, anticipate or otherwise predict future trends has faded due to the cognitive and normative uncertainties that surround today’s technology. As such, ‘prediction’ becomes much harder in an era of fast-paced, technology-driven economic, social and cultural changes. Things move so quickly, often in unknowable directions, leaving us incapable of even grasping the present, let alone identifying a trajectory that can form the basis for any reliable predictions about where we might be going. In thinking about an indeterminate present and undecidable future, we need to combine imagination (everyone is now in the business of science fiction) with the realisation that our predictions are very likely to be proven wrong....