It's interesting to see that when China does things like that we all hate it but when coporations from the US dangle some shiny things it's all super nice and we should all just fall in line.
@qrsbrwn @jwildeboer I was also involved in such projects, although in much earlier stages in academic contexts. My take is that they tend to lead to centralised solutions just because we do not know any better *yet*. That does not mean that when the ideas reach full maturity (still decades from now, btw), they will remain centralised.
One thing I have confidence in is that in our contexts (western civilisation circuit), we very well realise fragility of centralised solutions and prefer more robust, albeit sometimes sub-optimal patterns (e.g., this thing called "democracy"). Just simple fact that we speak about a danger of centralised solutions becoming "big brother"-ish right now is a sign that we, as a society, have checks and balances set well and that they work (just a tad slower than we'd like to).
The realm of multi-agent systems and emergent behaviours is a difficult domain. My observation (we can speak plethora of examples around us if you wish to), it typically proceeds from firstly centralised ideas to more robust and decentralised ones.
Thanks for the good faith reply in the thread, it's refreshing :)
The problem of centralised services and data collection isn't handled by us talking about it. We (as a society) has just given up it seems, we accept mass surveillence not only from nation states but from private enterprise for the token pay of free service.
If this discussion had happened 20 years ago it would have been more timely.
As for centralisation vs decentralisation, yeah decentralisation is harder. The main push for centralisation is a monetary one though.
@jwildeboer