There's the million-dollar question. I've been bashing my head against it for a few years now.
I think an important thing is to give everyone a say in how these large computer networks affect their lives. How to do that in the context of a broken political system isn't clear to me at all.
You are clearly fond of democracy as a solution to conflicting social goals. Democracy has some nice properties, but also downsides: notably it can only try a single solution at a time.
The idea behind decentralized architecture is: instead of trying to find a better way to agree on one thing, how about we assume from the start that different people will want different things? What do we actually need to agree on?
In the old days we had to agree on everything, because it was technologically infeasible to coordinate plans more than a few times per year. If you need to move bodies to communicate, democracy is what happens.
But we live in a new time where messaging is close to free, so we don't have to agree on everything ahead of time. In a totally decentralized world, we wouldn't have to agree on anything ahead of time. I would meet you in the forest and our respective AIs would go to work helping us quickly and safely negotiate an entire legal framework and set of treaties governing our interactions.
I don't think we will ever get there, I think it will always be a mixture of decentralized and centralized norms. But right now the decentralized architecture is brand new, so it has a huge headroom for growth, so it just makes more sense putting effort into it.
This image of AIs in the forest is really arresting. It reminds me of something Joi Ito said recently about us nerdles all trying to pass the thorny problems of living with one another as human beings up to a higher intelligence, which is a way of reducing them to (the world's hardest) programming problem.
I imagine that our AI companions in the forest would just play hyperdimensional space chess with one another, or talk shop about how best to make paper clips, and leave us in the same position we are now. They'll have their own cares and woes.
I don't know if in 2016 I'm a big believer in democracy, but I do believe in community, particularly now that everyone regardless of technical ability is using the web.
That said, I think you make a very good point about variety and trying multiple avenues at once.
I'm not talking about autonomous AIs, I'm talking about controllable AIs.
And I absolutely don't consider it a programming problem. You'll notice I said they will help us negotiate, not negotiate on our behalf. It is a design challenge, which makes it partly a social problem and partly and engineering problem.
I'm slowly realising a fundamental truth of economics: whatever it is you're making cheaper, you're going to have one hell of a lot more of.
And as you increase the quantity, you'll start bumping into limiting factors elsewhere. E.g., cheaper transport => far more congestion. Cheaper communications => more advertising. Cheaper storage => vastly more surveillance and monitoring. Cheaper telecoms => vastly more phone solicitations and scams.
There's the question of what people really need to access -- and here I think it's key to go back to Maslow's Hierarchy. And to acknowledge our human limitations of information capacity per day. Several sources I've seen (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest about 150 - 300 email messages/day, and something less than even a cursory glance at 800 comments (The New York Times's comments moderation team). How do you provide a manageable and significant set of information to people?
I've also started noting that our-so-called discussion systems themselves (Slashdot, Facebook, Reddit, even HN) are pretty poor at self-supporting useful user feedback. Almost as if that's not their true function.
We wanted to turn around the incentive structure where right now senders have a lot of power and receivers have basically nothing, they have to eat what they're fed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE&t=23890
The solution does not have to be technical. If you want to restore control to as wide a group as possible, start by running a centralised service with a membership structure. Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff, but almost everyone can use a website or an app. Allowing them a role in governance rather than operations is the key factor. I wish more people thought so.
> "Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff"
It's possible to make home servers easy enough to use they're effectively plug and play. I've got my own ideas of how this can be done, others have different ideas, but the goal of easy home server infrastructure is the same. Once you have that, it becomes painless to take part in IPFS or similar.
I used to think that home servers could be the best solution, but I see more and more obstacles in the way of adoption. First, even if you can create a plug and play home server box, it will still need some configuration to make it available from the internet, which while very obvious to anyone a bit techie can be difficult to even explain in layman's terms. Secondly, it is not clear if there is an acceptable solution to security issues. In such a system that by design will be accessible from the internet, this a major problem. Auto updates could be part of the answer, but it seems that human intervention would still be needed from time to time and that imply an effort of the user to keep informed and aware of such operations. Or an entity could offer a remote administration service but that would displace entirely control of the system and create a single point of failure. At that point you might as well have that entity administer a single server used for a moderate number of people. If this entity is a non-profit where governance is shared between all members it could very well be an ideal solution. In France the "association loi 1901" legal structure is a good fit and is known and understood by the vast majority of the population.
> "First, even if you can create a plug and play home server box, it will still need some configuration to make it available from the internet"
Will it? The device I had in mind would plug directly into a router, occupying two LAN ports for connectivity, and one USB port for power (USB ports are increasingly common on routers these days, even the free ones ISPs give out). In addition, IPv6 removes the need for NAT and port forwarding. The device could even come with a default DNS name setup, so it could be literally plug and play.
> "Secondly, it is not clear if there is an acceptable solution to security issues."
You build the security into the device, e.g. firewalls and process isolation. You could also design the device so that flashing new firmware required a physical button on the device to be pressed to enable this feature for a short period of time, limiting the window of opportunity for the device to be infected with malware.
> "Auto updates could be part of the answer, but it seems that human intervention would still be needed from time to time and that imply an effort of the user to keep informed and aware of such operations."
Information about security updates could be done via email or SMS, which are both easy enough for mass market users. You would enter these details at the point of purchasing the device, so you'd have nothing extra to setup once you had it. If you had to update your contact details, this would be easy enough to set via the home server GUI.
