This isn't a threat to civilization. Civilization already has the tools to solve this problem. They're ancient, and (for better or worse) they're re-emerging all around us: tribalism, aristocracy, credentialism, reputation. A hundred variations of "Trust is earned; suspect strangers."
The threat here is to the philosophical conceit that you can trust strangers -- not via a network where people vouch for each other, but just by averaging large numbers of them. Democracy makes good things happen. It's a beautiful idea, the philosophical gem of the last two or three centuries, and it works well in some contexts, and certainly is better than what it replaced... but its success has resulted in overapplication. It certainly can't withstand an army of malicious bots.
I have enjoyed the fact that the absolute political freedom of internet communities has allowed for myriad experiments in government on the sort of timescale that allows for lessons and improvement. The core conceit that people, in large numbers, are basically good and wise was the core philosophy that ruled the internet of ten or twenty or thirty years ago, with its open networks and upvotes. But it seems to me that we have all collectively been coming around to the fact that moderation, and reputation, and credentials, and curation, all have some serious up sides. Tyranny is certainly a problem, but maybe kings and aristocrats aren't all bad.
The bots are really only a threat to communities that haven't figured out yet that there is a balance here, a give and take between the individual and society. That zero contribution should equal zero power, that a high degree of influence ought only be achievable by long and faithful service, that trust is something real people have in each other and that proxies for it can always be gamed, that social status serves a very real and useful function, and that destructive behavior should be met with extreme prejudice... but at the same time, that outsiders can sometimes say very important things.
Lord Vetinari in Terry Pratchett's Discworld is an interesting study in tyranny. He is referred to in-world as a tyrant, but Pratchett frequently lampshades that that isn't a great word to describe what he actually does. Vetinari has no life outside running the city, no personal goals, no individual ego. In his words, "it is always about the city"[0]. He views the city as an organism and himself as its caretaker, and he does a remarkably good job. He can be ruthless and brutal when necessary to protect the city, but the city thrives under him.
Vetinari has a direct parallel in the Benevolent Dictator for Life in FOSS communities, or dang on HN. Individuals often hate these "tyrants" and wish them gone, but the community as a whole only thrives because of their careful, patient, and deliberate care. You can't easily replace a BDFL with a democratic process without losing the community's soul.
The problem with the BDFL model is that if your dictator isn't benevolent, what you have is a normal, flawed monarchy. And very few people are capable of being as ego-free as a benevolent dictator needs to be.
> Individuals often hate these "tyrants" and wish them gone,
Only the most deranged of individuals could possibly dislike Guido van Rossum. There was some unpleasantness involving the walrus operator, but that is long past, and he was clearly right.
The walrus operator incident was a big part of why Guido stepped down:
> He credits his decision to step down as partly due to his experience with the turmoil over PEP 572: "Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions."
I agree that Guido should have been immune, but even he wasn't.
Unfortunately, if there's one thing the world doesn't need at this point, with the amount of problems that can only be solved by cooperation, it's even more tribalism.
Nice to see a comment that's uncommonly thoughtful and nuanced. Thank you.
"Trust is earned; suspect strangers" and “a give and take between the individual and society” -- these seem to go beyond humans and even our scale of being. From a neuroscience perspective, all minds need governance, but we just know it as decentralized autonomy. There are no “decider” neurons or cells or decision-making councils of neurons or cells. And yet, we have had over three billion years of minds figuring out how to help their body/community/society autonomously navigate a complex world. This decentralized autonomy requires trust. It’s a more expansive definition of trust, but probably worth exploring.
One could argue that at every scale minds exist at, from the microscopic to the globe-spanning, they eventually face daunting complexity and information load, and the way forward is to figure out how to stably cohere into societies and divide up tasks. The early ones are often centralized, but the ones that eventually win out are ones that figure out real decentralization and also solve the free rider problem. We humans are still very early in our experiments with decentralization. Democracy is our first real attempt at decentralized governance, but a very early one.
Decentralization almost always requires a new form of communication to scale up the network size. Synaptic transmission got minds to one level; language got us to a whole new level, but it can't stitch together billions of very diverse individuals. The internet changed connectivity nearly overnight, but it did not change communication, and we are seeing the evolving impact of this imbalance in the form of conspiracy theories, fake news, echo chambers and what-not. One way AI could actually help is by providing a “selective myelination" that preferably distributes and accelerates trustworthy communication and slows down the rest.
A danger is there is a curated and trustworthy internet created and maintained to drive narratives to get a wanted result. Mass and pervasive media being what it is, you can see the potential it has in China where it has people's rapt attention. You have a smattering of dissidents and people who refuse to participate, but the mainstream majority thoroughly overwhelms them. The authorities get what they want.
The crowd isn’t wise, it’s dumb as rocks and social media was a generally terrible idea except for the heavily weeded gardens. AI is more likely to save it than harm it.
The threat here is to the philosophical conceit that you can trust strangers -- not via a network where people vouch for each other, but just by averaging large numbers of them. Democracy makes good things happen. It's a beautiful idea, the philosophical gem of the last two or three centuries, and it works well in some contexts, and certainly is better than what it replaced... but its success has resulted in overapplication. It certainly can't withstand an army of malicious bots.
I have enjoyed the fact that the absolute political freedom of internet communities has allowed for myriad experiments in government on the sort of timescale that allows for lessons and improvement. The core conceit that people, in large numbers, are basically good and wise was the core philosophy that ruled the internet of ten or twenty or thirty years ago, with its open networks and upvotes. But it seems to me that we have all collectively been coming around to the fact that moderation, and reputation, and credentials, and curation, all have some serious up sides. Tyranny is certainly a problem, but maybe kings and aristocrats aren't all bad.
The bots are really only a threat to communities that haven't figured out yet that there is a balance here, a give and take between the individual and society. That zero contribution should equal zero power, that a high degree of influence ought only be achievable by long and faithful service, that trust is something real people have in each other and that proxies for it can always be gamed, that social status serves a very real and useful function, and that destructive behavior should be met with extreme prejudice... but at the same time, that outsiders can sometimes say very important things.