If we see the AI bubble as a proxy war being fought for control over planetary computation, licensing an unprecedented build out to maximally expand the handful of existing planetary scale computers, it raises the question of whether there could be an ultimate victor here. Could there be one cloud which ultimately comes to host all the world’s computation? Or two clouds for rival empires split along geopolitical lines? If so then this week’s Amazon Web Services outage in which a great number of platforms went down for a significant period of time could herald a much darker vulnerability to come.
What happens if/when there’s a single point of failure for all the world’s digital infrastructure? Will the digital asbestos, to use Cory Doctorow’s amazing phrase for fragile or erroneous LLM-generated code increasingly built into our information systems, make this failure more likely to happen and harder to correct? In his last book he talked about the security promises tech giants make to their users, protecting them from barbarian hoards at the cost of remaining within their walled garden? Are we moving to a situation where the thing that protected us instead becomes the source of our vulnerability?
Mark Carrigan 