In a world where the majority of issues stem from collective action problems and incentive misalignments of one sort or another, it constantly amazes me that people continue to miss the point by such wide margins. Of course, there will always exist those who feel there’s nothing new under the Sun. That being said, it’s difficult for me to believe that you’re unaware of both the implausibility of such a bearish future for this emerging class of technologies, and how strongly this article parallels prior bear cases such as Paul Krugman’s embarrassingly incorrect predictions regarding the Internet. Perhaps the novelty and attention such bear cases draw within the exuberant phase of technological evolution is worth the later pie on one’s face in a world that has forgotten how to remember, or to discount the present opinions of those whose past predictions strayed so far from eventual reality as to become unrecognizable comedic fodder with the passage of time. If only there were some kind of technology that allowed for us to easily encode such predictions in a trustworthy and durable manner such that we might begin to hold one another accountable without interference from — or vulnerability to the ideological capture of — centralized organizations…
