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.
Re:IPFS is the Distributed Web
by erikpukinskis on Sunday October 23, 2016 @04:06PM
(#12775176)
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.
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.