In modern society, the decisive things determining life-direction are determined by human ostensibly using objective criteria. Educators have conditions for grades, bosses write progress reports, courts use etc. This situation is term bureaucratic society and the rule of law.

Authoritarianism is one kind of interaction that we all know - when an individual can issue orders without recourse. There's everything from abusive bosses to dictators here. It's a common part of human relations too, just a less desirable side.

For me the centralisation is at the search engine and the content generation; both have narrowed and narrowed and narrowed.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb

All we need to do is democratize AI. It can be well argued that it is happening.

I had never thought of this, but it seems to make sense.

“The right of the people, to code, maintain, and develop weaponized artificial intelligence shall not be infringed.”

The moment complexity on the web goes up, your need for governance structures goes up and the web becomes a force for centralized control of entities on the web: Human or otherwise.

The higher the level of complexity, the better the tools required to manage and analyze data. Therefore the better the tools available to analyze and manage humans.

I guess, if you project this, then the highest levels of the web probably are fully centralized and firewalled networks,.

At some point you have to deal with attackers, inimical and hostile networks and attacks to take over your "stack" of complexity/society. With the internet and high enough complexity, You can finally attack some subset of human behavior, privacy, brains, or information with automation.

The internet is probably the equivalent of flight based damage to fortresses.

And this is before people discuss something like singularity AI.

I don't see why "AI" as we know it now is any different.

I regard democracy (and capitalism) as being an industrial-era approximation of solutions to the institution-alignment-problem (analogous to the AI alignment problem, but for governments and corporations). Both of these have their own failure modes; In the case of democracy, the failure mode is that people do not know objective truth, and can be fooled by propaganda. The Internet allowed cheap mass propaganda for as long as spam has existed, and this has become worse as propoganists learned to use internet friendly memes.

If you take away (or corrupt) the electorate’s knowledge, I do not think it is okay to continue to call it “democracy” even if they all still vote.

When searching for that boots quote to put here, I found this reference with excellent 18th century quotes about the issue: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

There's the possibility that the internet has made it worse, but that's a theory I've yet to see evidence for. You could spread fake news a day before the election in ancient Rome or Greece, what would stop you? Today at least we have most people doubting candidate cannibalism stories because if they were true they would be on mainstream sites. What did they have back then? It was normal to not have access to a second news source to seek out at reasonable effort for months.

Even with all the garbage out there, I think the cheap mass access to information was a net gain. Lies can be made up on the spot, while the truth must be carefully researched. Being able to put a well-researched rebut on a blog where someone might read it is something, something they didn't have before. Everyone would just go home after the people who could produce information on the spot had shouted it.

But this is exactly what we're saying is not new.

It only appears new to some because the 20th century was characterized by both expensive, government-licensed mass media (radio and television) and by the consolidation of the media industry. These factors had the effect of taking media access away from the common man and giving authority to a new set of gatekeepers, as well as (we've increasingly seen), the government, which the media depends on, and which is also much more easily able to control the output of the media than previously.

In the past, there was an incredible proliferation of newspapers, not by any means all or even mostly owned by the rich, and even the common man could afford to take out an ad or have some pamphlets printed. By doing this he could easily achieve obtain a regional and even a national audience.

And in pre-printing press societies, most non-state news traveled by word of mouth, which was free and could not be controlled by the state except with difficulty. You might object this wasn't mass media, but the objection is moot - one person speaking in the Assembly in Athens was sufficient to move the entire state.

It appears that Internet media is quickly moving toward the 20th century model - owned and controlled by a small contingent of very wealthy men. The difference is that yes, the content is produced by the people, rather than generated by an editor and his staff, but nevertheless, it's clear that with government and established media pressure, social media networks are all too happy to control what opinions are allowed on their platform.

> Mr. GERRY. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governmt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had he said been too republican heretofore: he was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levilling spirit.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_531.asp

Outright propaganda, foreign 'interference', and yellow journalism were extremely common in the era that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were created! The media of the day was substantially less centralized, even a medium-sized town had multiple newspapers, and political pamphlets of all natures were common.

Complaints that the people are voting 'wrong' because they're misinformed by 'designing men' are absolutely nothing new and date back to our earliest democracies. Really, the only interesting part is that the complainants are almost always defending entrenched, powerful interests. In American history, it has always been populist and/or socialist movements decried as the result of a woefully misinformed populace, and it was always analogous movements in e.g., Athens and Rome (the Gracchi, for example.) Propaganda supporting the entrenched rich and powerful and their policies is, somehow, never seen as an issue.

Going back again to the early years of America, the hysteria about 'propaganda' led to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were used to suppress the Democratic-Republicans and their press outlets...which ended with the Federalists being crushed in the 1800 election. When I hear complaints about propaganda in democracies, what I hear is the complaints of the rich and powerful that the common people might be voting in their own interest, instead of those of the rich and powerful.

(Saward in his Democracy says that Schumpeter in the mid-20th C simply redefined 'democracy' as 'whatever they now have in countries we call democratic', thus avoiding the worrying about democracy that produced the fascinating books of the early 20th C on problems with it. e.g. Lippmann's, Michels' Political Parties)

Internet really promotes anarchism. Even today with most of the discussion going trough few choke points.

Internet is an anarchist force and as such it's prone to informal elites. They are cliques that control people without well defined responsibility, and often without peoples knowledge or consent. The controlling groups can be rich individuals, corporations, foreign states marketers and political operators.

What are the traits of money and billionaires?

But that makes literally no sense. You can’t fabricate solar panels in your backyard. You need a factory handling toxic chemistry and a supply chain of rare earth elements from open cast mining! Solar is no less centralised than nukes.

a very simple example is the technology of guns. this technology leads inevitably to a state of the world that is characterized by the presence of gun-utilizing nations. this is because the world is a kind of market, and when guns exist the only entities that are competitive are those that use guns.

right now, market economies dominate the world. even china utilizes markets for its own internal economic affairs. when AI comes, this will turn on its head -- market economies will no longer be competitive and centralized ones will replace them. this will be a pretty shocking change.

also, rather soon, humans will stop being present. this is because they will no longer be competitive, their existence will be vestigial and therefore fragile and vulnerable to the slightest perturbation. it will be similar to endangered animals in the present -- no longer competitive, their existence no longer perpetuates itself and therefore is terminated for any old reason, such as condominium developments or pollution.

Assuming that the AI's have accurate and timely information. I suspect that one of the (many) reasons why modern economies can be dysfunctional is that the information feedback loop is often either inaccurate, incomplete or lagging badly. Solve that problem and you're gold.