Fabric Foundation Is Trying to Turn Robots Into Economic Participants, Not Just Tools

One question that is not posed sufficiently in regards to robotics is; who does the robot work to? The answer to this is obviously the owner. But Fabric Foundation is beginning at a different point - what if the robot is able to work on its own, or at least become more like an independent actor in an economy than a mere chunk of hardware that carries out instructions? It is a sound that is abstract until you consider the way that the existing model functions. A firm purchases robots, deploy them, and reaps all the value generated by them. The robot does not exist in any other systems than the ones of that company. It cannot be vindicated by a superior body, cannot be taken along contextually, certainly cannot bear and pass value itself. It is an instrument in the purest sense of the word, handy, but wholly passive. @FabricFND is attempting to alter such an architecture. The project is constructing coordination infrastructure of robots and every machine will be given on-chain identity, a wallet and capability to make money and transact through the work it does. A warehouse picking robot, a warehouse delivery robot, or an inspection robot could record that work on-chain, collect payment on it and create a verifiable track record over time. It is not required that the robot be owned by the one corporation, but it can be a DAO, or a group of persons, or even fractionalized among many of the token owners, who are effectively investing in a laboring machine. It is not merely the issue of decentralization as such. It has to do with making robots readable to economic systems where they are not readable at present. At this point, to rely on a robot of an external seller, you are relying on the company behind it, their statements, their information, their interests. The model of fabric establishes an instance where the history of the robot speaks itself. Each task that was done, each check that was carried out, each payment made, is added to a record that does not belong to any particular operator. That alters the equation of trust to a great extent, particularly when robots begin to travel across the various settings and operators. What is more than a whitepaper idea about it is that robotics is truly at an inflection point. Capable robot hardware has gone down in price quickly and autonomous systems are leaving controlled factory floors and going to more messy places. The resulting enlargement of that puts a coordination challenge on centralized systems that was not intended to be solved. In cases where a robot is required to operate on many platforms, receive payment by various customers, or be under the control of a distributed team of stakeholders, you require infrastructure that does not narrow via the API of a single company. The version of the world that involves building is fabric. They are still in their early stages and there exist actual open questions such as how do you secure such on-chain identities, how do you resolve disputes, and how do you ensure the system is not gamed. However, what is interesting is that the direction does not attempt to make the robots stronger. It is attempting to hold them more responsible, to the economy, to the users of it, as well as to a far larger group of stakeholders than are simply those who placed the purchase order. $ROBO #ROBO