Silicon Economy: Logistics as the Natural Data Ecosystem

The “Silicon Economy” is synonymous with a coming digital infrastructure (digital ecosystem) based on the automated negotiation, disposition, and control of flows of goods, enabling new, digital business models (not only) for logistics. This infrastructure requires and enables the trading of data without losing sovereignty over the data. It is the digital infrastructure and environment for the highly distributed AI algorithms along value networks. In contrast to oligopolistic developments in the B2C sector (amazon.com, AirBnB, Alibaba, Uber, etc.), the Silicon Economy is a federated and decentralized platform ecosystem, the basic components of which are made available to the general public as open source for free use. The Silicon Economy ecosystem is becoming an enabler of supply chain ecosystems in which goods, autonomously controlled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), undergo orchestrated processes according to the situation. This article focuses on the origins and potentials but also on the technological foundations and challenges of the transformation toward a Silicon Economy.