Distributed security
Security, an attribute most desire, is a public good. In the current regime, assurance of security requires significant investments in many different dimensions, physical and informational. Such investments are made by central authorities that can claim efficiency by scale. Common wisdom is that the transaction costs incurred by individuals to assure security to themselves in the absence of a central authority will be too high and that will work against a workable social system. Thus, governments around the world have promised to provide security to their citizens and many leaders take pride in asserting that their first job is to protect the people. This makes sense but it may be time to think about creative alternatives. In a system where security is threatened by a small percentage of the combined inhabitants, creation of a central authority to assure security may not be the most efficient. After all, last century has provided ample evidence that a few with power are unlikely to make the best decisions for the system. Since only a small percentage of the system is involved in damaging security, it is the system that is in the best position to defend itself.
Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose there is a country called Futureville that has 1000 inhabitants. Ten of these are involved in activities that pose a threat to the security of the country. In the current regime, Futureville will elect 10 people and put them in charge of protecting them all. In this case, the problem is reduced to 10 in power battling with 10 violators of security. However, those in power do not know which 10 of the 1000 are the bad ones and there is a distinct possibility one of them could be bad as well. This is a highly inefficient way to solve the problem as the 10 in power need to create screening policies with very little information. More importantly, in most practical systems, most of the 10 are worried about how they are going to be elected next time around. The real solution to this problem is to get all 1000 involved in the security question.
Distributed computing and power production have shown to be superior to their centralized cousins, especially for security. From a policy perspective, it is time to seriously think about distributed security rather than incompetent spending of large amounts of resources in a centralized authority. Revisiting Futureville, it is possible to conceive solutions that involve all 1000. In fact, there are good proxies for this in complex biological systems. An organism, say a human or an ant, is an accumulation of diverse entities that work together to protect the system. Biological entities protect the system dynamically and not by prescriptive rules relegated to centralized authorities. Security has been a distributed competence in most complex systems.
It is time to think differently about problems we all face. To assure we find the best answers, we need to create processes that allow the best minds to come together to solve them. They will also require sufficient incentives to do so. Instituting competition and prizes to problem solving is the best way to assure that we do this well.
