Afterglow. And now for something completely different; being big and small
Next: Comparing current and decentralized model.
Alternatives
After so much fuss about the decentralised model it’s time to floss out alternatives because why not.
The Sky Is the Computer
The earth captures a miniscule part of all the energy emitted from sun. We have lots of problems that require more computing power than we currently have. One such area is calculating how proteins fold. This is important in developing new medicines. And by now its obvious that machine learning will eat an increasing number of computing resources in the future. Neither of these problem domains is specially time sensitive.
There is also plenty of mineral in rest of solar system – for example in the asteroid belt. And a lot of energy flowing out of the sun in all possible directions. Going out makes a lot of sense.
To capture these materials and energy, an automated robotic solution is needed that can both replicate itself to create more robots and mine the minerals. These minerals are then used by robots to build large solar cells arrays and computing facilities that reside in space, are powered by sun light and provide almost unlimited computing capacity for us. It needs to be said that no such technology exists today, but only real blocker is the costs with today’s methods.
This creates close to unlimited computing and memory capacity with the small disadvantage that there is round trip delay. It is assumed that the construction needs to be quite some distance from earth for safety purposes. But many of the functions of the state do not require immediately response and could be offloaded there as well a lot of wolds scientific calculations.
Another use of the automated robot army would be to build large solar panels to capture the energy from sun and then beam it to earth powering us up in the future.
The State in My Closet
Image from: https://calvinandhobbesagain.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/monsters-under-the-bed-2/
It’s customary to think of the society as some large entity out there somewhat far from a normal human providing all types of services. Would complete reversal be totally out of question? What if society was something intimately personal that would be a set of services running near you like in the closet or under your bed or on your body?
We’ve briefly discussed about the idea of automating many services society provides and allowing almost unlimited free access to them. Services in areas such as health analysis and education. We’ve also discussed concepts that more physical infrastructure elements like harbours, roads and fleet of automated traffic services could own themselves.
In future increasingly all devices have some format of processing capacity with them – home appliances, TVs, watches, phones, electricity and water meters, perhaps also lightning and it is possible to add intelligence to fabrics or wall papers with printed electronics. Many of these smart elements will be self-powering, harvesting energy from the environment such as light, temperature or radio signals etc. It is simply not feasible to draw electric wires everywhere.
This means that in future every room will be a data center with some amount of free processing power. And the clothes you wear will form a scaled down version. Biggest difference is that the amount of processing power varies greatly from element to element.
Putting these two things together – services of society are automated, and everyone has a data center(s) at home allows to think that these services could run in your living room or in the closet. What would this empower?
In the area of health for example all the monitoring data that you gather from yourself on wearables or other devices would be locally analysed using the same algorithms as the best hospitals. Only the results – if needed – would be shared with the outside world. For example, in case you need instant help or if it seems that the treatment being prescribed is not working. The gathered data would never be shared outside and could be immediately deleted after the analysis.
Natural language processing allows speakers to recognise what you say and provide services to you. When done at home these assistants can do their work based on your local, private information. All these interactions and your decisions being local, not known elsewhere.
Likewise, education might move towards more discussion and mentorship type method, where you just ask questions that pop to your mind like why are leaves green or why does sugar (and most other things) dissolve into water? The local agent might afterwards ask if you’d like to learn more of these chemistry and biology topics and drop a few pointers deeper and deeper into the quagmire of knowledge.
Technical implementation would be rather straight forward with today’s technology. You define in a text file what services you want to run at your home, and how you want to cache variety of common, open-source data such as digital designs form products that you often make at home for yourself or just want to cache locally to avoid information leaking out of you. Then you give this file to your local cluster services who is in control of your local data. It decides where to run these components. This representation would allow to change the service providers easily if I am dissatisfied with some of them.
The good part about this design is that it creates a level of resilience in society. Various malicious attacks on core infrastructure from large nation states are on the rise. When state is decentralized to closets or under the bed, services are up, even when the national central services are down due to an attack.