The emergence of the digital economy in the most developed countries will increase protectionism and sanctions pressure against all those who are not part of their ecosystem. Therefore, it is extremely important for Belarus and Russia to start building a digital economy to protect their national interests. The creation of digital platforms with artificial intelligence where smart contracts will be concluded, will allow Russia and Belarus to reach a new level of risk management, decision-making and economic planning.
Concepts such as the electronic economy, the network economy and the surveillance economy have already become widely used. But these paradigms were more concerned with the implementation of economic relations based on the Internet and mobile technologies.
The digital economy is something completely different, since two other technologies are already crucial for it: distributed registries (blockchain) and artificial intelligence (AI). They are only at the initial stages of development, but the potential of their impact on socio-economic life and security is so great and obvious that very often politicians and practitioners rather than scientists initiate conversations and initiatives about the digital economy.
It is extremely important for the state policy of Belarus and Russia to start building a digital economy in order to comply with national interests and priorities.
On the one hand, it is possible to take many progressive steps towards catch-up modernization of traditional manufacturing industries and services in accordance with current trends and endure expenses for a long time without significant returns. On the other hand, two decisive steps can be taken to introduce central bank digital currencies (CBDC) and organization-level AI, creating conditions for successful implementation of all other supporting technologies and the growth of incomes of the population of our countries.
Among the largest advanced economies - those whose currencies play a special role in domestic and global finance - change has been slower than in others. But even for central banks of these countries everything seems clear, and they have begun to lay the groundwork for the CBDC introduction.
At the same time, when the next global financial crisis, flush with COVID money, returns, we can be ready. In a situation where central banks lack the ability to use traditional policy tools, such as lowering interest rates to counteract the risk of a deep and protracted recession, the use of CBDC will make it possible to effectively introduce negative interest rates as a tool to "break out of the zero boundary." It is extremely important to stimulate domestic consumption and investment if we want to successfully implement the government programs we have announced related to the production of innovative and high-tech products. In this case, the “digital stimulation” of consumption of not just domestic goods (possibly quite import-intensive), but domestic added value, determined at the level of software design, will create conditions for launching high-tech B2C production without inflation risks.
Despite the partial use of distributed ledger technology in creating the CBDC (to maintain speed and scalability), the active use of cryptocurrency-inspired features (cryptographic constructs to ensure confidentiality and auditability, programmability and self-storage) will help maintain a space of trust to attract foreign investment.
Using economic platforms with AI will take us to a new level of decision-making
We will get a completely new level of risk management, analytics and decision-making through the use of economic platforms with AI. The goal of creating an ERP-AI (Enterprise Resource Planning, automated enterprise management systems - Ed.), given the industrial nature and openness of our economies, looks more preferable than creating a large linguistic AI models such as ChatGPT. The national inter-industry digital platform has a more obvious and predictable economic effect. This effect consists not only in a radical reduction in transaction costs, but also in a radical change in our approach to economic planning.
Unlike the traditional state plan as a set of directives for enterprises and organizations, the approval of which is implemented following the results of data collection and calculation of target indicators, ERP-AI will allow the practical implementation of a digital plan on a national scale. This plan will be a set of smart contracts concluded between the system participants in digital form. Such a plan, in fact, ceases to be a plan in the sense of some reasonable and desirable assumption about the future. For the proposed digital plan, it is more appropriate to apply a category such as the actual plan. It can become an optimal tool both for building large and globally successful sectoral state corporations and for implementing stable and predictable public-private partnerships. Achieving the result involves the use of the following technologies and models: inter-industry balance; blockchain; smart contracts; specific models for optimizing the goals of economic entities without end-to-end automation of goal setting ("management without a human").
Modern planning will take place on the basis of already concluded smart contracts
Each manager determines the target function of the economic entity at a specific stage (profit, development of the holding, implementation of the state program, etc.). AI is needed for simulation modeling and proposing possible contracts for their subsequent legalization by the manager. A far better is an idea that does not assume a single "intelligence" for the entire system: each manager has his own economic robot that implements planning and optimization of resources from the viewpoint of the target function specified by the manager, implemented in the ERP-AI system as a multi-level environment for organizing protocols for interaction of information systems of ERP-AI subjects, software solutions based on the reference implementation of the protocol with open source, distributed databases and knowledge, financial platforms for base, fiat and digital currencies, as well as the ERP-AI economic robots themselves.
The possible creation of national ERP-AI and CBDC systems in a harmonized financial logic and macroeconomic paradigm will allow our countries not only to build a single economic space based on high data completeness and low information asymmetry, but also to achieve actual success in economic prosperity.