Technology is power moved to the edges. Five teachers worth reading on the digital architectures that decide who decides.
Melanie Mitchell, 2019.
Find the book →The information age is the age of the sovereign individual. Davidson & Rees-Mogg · The Sovereign Individual
Decentralization is most useful when it adds resilience that no central party can capture. Vitalik Buterin · Ethereum Whitepaper
Today's AI systems can be amazingly capable — and amazingly dumb in the same breath. Melanie Mitchell · Artificial Intelligence
Across the cypherpunk tradition, the protocol-design literature, and the AI-governance debate, the same observation keeps surfacing: technology shifts power. Sometimes upward, into platforms and states; sometimes outward, to individuals and protocols. Which direction is not preordained — it is decided, design choice by design choice.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg's The Sovereign Individual, written in 1997, predicted that digital cash plus strong cryptography would unbundle the nation-state in the way the printing press unbundled the medieval church. The thesis sounded crank-ish then. It reads less crank-ish now.
The most powerful institutions of the industrial era will be among the most vulnerable in the information era. Davidson & Rees-Mogg · The Sovereign Individual
Satoshi's nine-page Bitcoin whitepaper solved a thirty-year problem in distributed computing: how to coordinate disagreement without a central referee. The solution — proof-of-work plus a public ledger — has since become the substrate for an entire parallel financial system.
Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction. Satoshi Nakamoto · The Bitcoin Whitepaper
Mitchell's book is the clearest contemporary explanation of what AI systems actually do, what they can't do, and why both questions are easy to get wrong. Her central message: contemporary AI is impressive at narrow tasks and incompetent at the ones the press most likes to write about.
We humans tend to overestimate AI advances and underestimate the complexity of our own intelligence. Melanie Mitchell · Artificial Intelligence
The pattern is consistent. Print. Radio. The web. Each technology arrives with both centralising and decentralising affordances. Which set wins is a function of the incentives the protocol embeds — and the people willing to defend them.
Anyone can be a victim. I want everyone to be a private citizen. Kevin Mitnick · The Art of Invisibility