The failure mode you're describing is one I keep seeing in a very different context: individual decision-making. People often come to me having optimized everything locally, their habits, their knowledge, their relationships, but without any central principle that holds the system together. Every part is working. The whole is drifting. Decentralization fails for individuals for the same reason it fails for organizations: when there's no authority that can override local preferences in service of a larger coherence, the system doesn't collapse suddenly. It just slowly becomes incoherent. The question I keep returning to is not "how much structure is enough?" but "what is the structure in service of?" Without that answer, more coordination just produces a more organized kind of lost.
I was surprised to see Ruha Benjamin, AJL, and DAIR mentioned here by Cosmos and Chalmers. And yet, are all of these folks being bucketed as stochastic parrot type-whiners and a wonderful implication of "most anarchist thinkers?"
Help me out here, has Cosmos published much other discussion around such groups? I'm not the the most avid reader recently, but I'm curious what else has been said.
This might be worth a broader response. But at first pass, it's perhaps unfortunate for some of the valid points made about what layers need to be built "supported by" claims made in such a fashion. I guess Cosmos will inevitably draw such stoking phrasing given what it's dealing with, but, still. 'To speak "bluntly"', even.
Pretty good. The key move is replacing “community governance” with domain-specific institutional governance.
AI is too complex for one regulator, but too infrastructural for pure participation.
Governance has to move to the layer where operational knowledge is actually produced: medicine, law, education, insurance, procurement, open source, security.
That is the Ostrom/Tocqueville answer: not decentralization as romance, but overlapping institutions with partial jurisdiction.
The harder AI-specific problem is that deployment governance does not fully solve production concentration.
Compute, model weights, cloud access, APIs, benchmarks, and security thresholds sit upstream of most intermediary institutions.
So the future is not “centralized AI vs democratic AI.”
It is whether legitimacy can be rebuilt downstream while execution consolidates upstream.
Freedom in the AI age will not come from making power small.
It will come from making power answerable to more than one institutional authority at once.
The failure mode you're describing is one I keep seeing in a very different context: individual decision-making. People often come to me having optimized everything locally, their habits, their knowledge, their relationships, but without any central principle that holds the system together. Every part is working. The whole is drifting. Decentralization fails for individuals for the same reason it fails for organizations: when there's no authority that can override local preferences in service of a larger coherence, the system doesn't collapse suddenly. It just slowly becomes incoherent. The question I keep returning to is not "how much structure is enough?" but "what is the structure in service of?" Without that answer, more coordination just produces a more organized kind of lost.
I was surprised to see Ruha Benjamin, AJL, and DAIR mentioned here by Cosmos and Chalmers. And yet, are all of these folks being bucketed as stochastic parrot type-whiners and a wonderful implication of "most anarchist thinkers?"
Help me out here, has Cosmos published much other discussion around such groups? I'm not the the most avid reader recently, but I'm curious what else has been said.
This might be worth a broader response. But at first pass, it's perhaps unfortunate for some of the valid points made about what layers need to be built "supported by" claims made in such a fashion. I guess Cosmos will inevitably draw such stoking phrasing given what it's dealing with, but, still. 'To speak "bluntly"', even.
Pretty good. The key move is replacing “community governance” with domain-specific institutional governance.
AI is too complex for one regulator, but too infrastructural for pure participation.
Governance has to move to the layer where operational knowledge is actually produced: medicine, law, education, insurance, procurement, open source, security.
That is the Ostrom/Tocqueville answer: not decentralization as romance, but overlapping institutions with partial jurisdiction.
The harder AI-specific problem is that deployment governance does not fully solve production concentration.
Compute, model weights, cloud access, APIs, benchmarks, and security thresholds sit upstream of most intermediary institutions.
So the future is not “centralized AI vs democratic AI.”
It is whether legitimacy can be rebuilt downstream while execution consolidates upstream.
Freedom in the AI age will not come from making power small.
It will come from making power answerable to more than one institutional authority at once.