Building a world computer: but can we decentralize it?

Furaha Damién
Nov 3 · 4 min read

If you think of entities like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, one of their common aim is to provide extreme computing power over the cloud to people and companies that do not have what it takes to build their own infrastructure. My interest in IoT and 5G coupled with the recent advancements in cloud computing made me ask myself if there is a time when all the computation that we need will be done in the cloud and the 2.75-pound macs will be replaced by a 7-pound device. In fact, I attended Hack the North this year and I wanted to do a hardware hack with another student who had a shared interest in this field. It is a shame that we did not get to work on this project due to hardware and time constraints. In this article, I will detail the reasoning behind this idea and how decentralized it would be given the data violation that the above tech giants are known for.

Background

If you have worked with IoT devices, you will know that one of the key ideas behind them(especially small devices) is that most of these devices are made such that the computations that they do locally should be as least as possible. The rest of the computation should be done at a central server onto which all the smart devices on that network are connected to. The central server will usually have heavy software running on it and it will usually process all the data on behalf of the smart device. Think of all the electric scooters on the streets these days. For you to get a ride, they have to authenticate you first, but they do not have a whole database locally. They have to continuously communicate with Lime or Bird servers somewhere via some wireless communication protocol for them to get access to your information. This means, that another computer(server) somewhere does this for them and they just get the processed results. Usually, the speed at which these computations are done and sent back to the scooter will depend on the communication protocol being used(check out my other article on communication protocols).

How would it work

Based on the analog of the Internet of Things, a laptop computer or a smartphone is just one of the other many inter-connected smart devices. Looking at them in that way makes the logic of building a world computer easy to understand. Basically, what a world computer would mean is that we would continue having the same devices that we currently have. However, the device would be as simple as possible. This means that we would get rid of all those fancy processors that make up the computer. Any of the chips that help to increase the computing power would need to be gotten rid of as well. This would probably leave your LCD and the keyboard in the case of a laptop. Having removed all the components that make the computer as we know it, it won’t be able to do any computer-like stuff that we expect it to perform. This is where the world computer comes in. All these small computers that people use will have to be connected to a central supercomputer somewhere that has all the power to perform the task of a computer. In so doing, the local computers will delegate all their computations and retrieve them as needed. Is this even possible? yes, this is possible. In fact, that is what the internet already does and that’s what infrastructures like AWS and Azure provide, except at a higher level. However, this is still a difficult feat to achieve in personal computing. The biggest hindrance is not the cost, rather the strength of the current infrastructure. For this is to be possible, the word computer should be able to execute complex calculations like the ones done by a pc in near real-time speed(or even faster than that). At the time, this is really possible but very costly given the average latency and speed of the speed and the available wireless communication protocols through which our personal devices would have to communicate with the cloud-based servers. However, with the coming of 5G, all this will be easy. 5G promises latency and speed that is better by an order of magnitude compared to the current best wireless communication protocol(check out my article on 5G). What this means is that we can leverage the benefits of this technology to build a better computing infrastructure that will reduce the complexity of personal computers yet maximizing the computational power of the devices.

Issues with decentralization

One key component of this idea is that all the data that would have been stored locally on the PC will have to be stored on the cloud and retrieved just as a person wishes given the power of 5G. However, as someone living in North America, data protection and privacy is something that people have high regard for. People will always be reluctant to use a technology like this unless they are assured of the security associated with it. What does this mean? This means that this idea is something that is a possibility but it is very susceptible to abuse if we are to entrust it with the current tech giants given their track record. The companies are not the only issue here, the internet itself as we know it is a bigger problem as it can easily be compromised. For there to be even the slightest chance this idea’s success, we first need a new and decentralized internet that is not controlled by a one tech company. Once we have a decentralized internet, the feasibility of this idea will be just a few lines of code way.

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