Michael Ennis | Will Jamaica be left behind?

ADVANCEMENTS IN technology wait for no one. The Industrial Revolution bypassed many societies, and today, they remain low-productivity economies. The Internet revolution missed many also. Today they are forced to catch up. While the Internet revolution connects the world and allows seamless communication, bitcoin technology is revolutionising the way we communicate value around the world.

In the late 1990s, one bold Jamaican minister of government took on the old guard to de-monopolise the telecom industry at the dawn of the evolution of mobile phone technology. Though he took some licks for it, he persevered and today Jamaica has one of the highest telephone and Internet accessibility density in the world, a coveted infrastructure capacity requirement for foreign or local investment.

I am of the opinion that we are at such another crossroad in the financial industry. Bitcoin blockchain technology and digital assets are disruptive technologies. Over a dozen Caribbean and Latin American countries, including Curaçao, The Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Brazil, Panama, and, of course, El Salvador, already have digital asset regulations. According to sources at the Bank of Jamaica, the bank is investigating the development of such regulations. So hopefully in short order the market will have a clear unambiguous regulatory framework within which to operate.

Without such a framework, local innovation is stifled, investment in innovation is nonexistent, leaving the country as an importer of technology rather than a creator. This state of affairs only leads to brain drain where our bright young people seek opportunities to excel in foreign land.

Many government departments and corporate entities are lacking modern information systems infrastructure. It takes weeks to process requests that could be processed online in minutes by the public without the intervention of a staff member. Farmers suffer crop losses because we haven’t employed technology to track demand and supply.

Earlier in Part 3, I mentioned that not only fintech will be disrupted by bitcoin blockchain technology, industries such as logistics, health, hospitality, education, security and more will all be transformed and are being transformed, so how does Jamaica keep up? Do we need new bold legislators, enlightened corporate leaders, a proactive banking system, refocusing of our education system? Maybe all of the above.

The greatest advantage of this technology is that it is completely free and open-source. There are no financial or legal barriers to employ and deploy the bitcoin blockchain technology. What we lack is education, human resources and leadership. We need leadership in corporate, educational institutions and government to focus the country in this direction with the development and retention of human resources.

While funding is usually a problem, this is not the case here. In addition to the free tools mentioned above, there are dozens of foundations supporting education and product development. Non-profit organisations such as OpenSats (opensats.com) and Brink (brink.dev), to educational foundations such as the digital currency initiative of MIT which supports research initiatives.

We should focus our technology-savvy young people to take advantage of these opportunities and develop the required skills needed for today. The security forces, for example, could expand the training programme for recruits to include bitcoin blockchain technology training with the help of these foundations. These young recruits could create applications that would transform the very critical function of data collection and information management in the force. The same can be said for many industries. The government could contract the educational institutions to train developers to create critical applications needed in many government departments and agencies to make them more efficient and responsive.

Will Jamaica be left behind? Maybe not when it comes to the country, we may continue to buy what is needed from foreign shores that results in our current situation where a private foreign company controls the personal data of every Jamaican. Of course we are told there exist privacy contracts with such companies. However, we also know that the governments of the countries where those companies are domiciled can demand access to the data despite our protestations. Who will be left behind are our people. Without this knowledge and ability to innovate for ourselves, we will always be in a dependent relationship with the rest of the world.

It’s my hope that this series opened a door to the understanding of the tidal wave of the technology revolution coming our way. I have not mentioned AI or the massive energy demand that is forcing some countries which had abandoned nuclear power to now reconsider. Thus, it behooves us to educate and innovate, or risk remaining economic and technological dependents.

Michael Ennis BA, MBA is an information system consultant. He is not an investor in digital assets, including bitcoin. However, he is a director of a bitcoin technology company. Email: mail2michaelennis@gmial.com