"The coming wave of contradictions"

Um tema interessante retirado de "The Coming Wave" de Mustafa Suleyman e Michael Bhaskar, "The coming wave of contradictions":

"If centralization and decentralization sound as if they are in direct contradiction, that's with good reason: they are. Understanding the future means handling multiple conflicting trajectories at once. The coming wave launches immense centralizing and decentralizing riptides at the same time. Both will be in play at once. Every individual, every business, every church, every nonprofit, every nation, will eventually have its own AI and ultimately its own bio and robotics capability. From a single individual on their sofa to the world's largest organizations, each AI will aim to achieve the goals of its owner. Herein lies the key to understanding the coming wave of contradictions. a wave full of collisions.

Each new formulation of power will offer a different vision of delivering public goods, or propose a different way to make products or a different set of religious beliefs to evangelize. AI systems already make critical decisions with overt political implications: who receives a loan, a job, a place at college, parole; who gets seen by a senior physician. Within the decade Als will decide how public money gets spent, where military forces are assigned, decentralizing ways. An Al might, for example, operate as one massive, state-spanning system, a single general-purpose utility governing hundreds of millions. Equally we will also have vastly capable systems, available at low cost, open-source, highly adapted, catering to a village.

Multiple ownership structures will exist in tandem: technology democratized in open-source collectives, the products of today's corporate leaders or insurgent blitz-scaling start-ups, and government held, whether through nationalization or in-house nurturing. All will coexist and coevolve, and everywhere they will alter, magnify, produce, and disrupt flows and networks of power.

Where and how the forces play out will vary dramatically according to existing social and political factors. This should not be an oversimplified picture, and there will be numerous points of resistance and adaptation not obvious in advance. Some sectors or regions will go one way, some the other, some will see powerful contortions of both. Some hierarchies and social structures will be reinforced, others overturned; some places may become more equal or authoritarian, others much less so. In all cases, the additional stress and volatility, the unpredictable amplification of power, the wrenching disruption of radical new centers of capability, will further stress the foundation of the liberal democratic nation-state system.

And if this picture sounds too strange, paradoxical, and impossible, consider this. The coming wave will only deepen and recapitulate the exact same contradictory dynamics of the last wave. The internet does precisely this: centralizes in a few key hubs while also empowering billions of people. It creates behemoths and yet gives everyone the opportunity to join in. Social media created a few giants and a million tribes. Everyone can build a website, but there's only one Google. Everyone can sell their own niche products, but there's only one Amazon. And on and on. The disruption of the internet era is largely explained by this tension, this potent, combustible brew of empowerment and control."