Computational Power Sharing

As I hope I have established by now, I am a big fan of decentralisation. This anarchist philosophy extends to computing as well. It keeps striking me how much cool stuff we can do with the internet, and yet we are squandering that potential by introducing chains of middlemen in between individual users. To me, a peer to peer system in which users communicate directly instead of going through a third party seems ideal. Retroshare is a program which allows this type of communication in limited ways, and torrenting seems to be an even bigger step forward, as far as content sharing techniques go.

Furthermore, it's worth considering that some very bright kids out there have limited access to computing power, as computers cost money. Companies like Google and Pixar are able to do amazing things with server farms, but they aren't sharing their computing power, and a creative individual can hardly be expected to purchase a building full of servers in order to pursue his/her programming visions.

So, what if there was a way to draw computing power from all the computers connected to the internet? Most people don't use their computers for anything CPU-intensive anyway, so they could certainly spare a small fraction of that power. If all this combined power was available to anyone with a good idea, we could have real progress in computing and software.

What I'm proposing is this: A voluntary computational power sharing network. Let's call it PowNet. PowNet, like torrenting, would be accessible through a PN client downloaded from the web. Also like torrenting, there would be many sites users could visit to download (or torrent, for that matter) a "driver" for whatever program they wish to donate power to. In this way, only ideas supported by users would get power.

That's the basic idea. It could be combined with torrenting, effectively a storage-sharing system, to spread out a large lump of program data over many users. It could also feature some sort of interface-sharing system in which the main user would have the normal program interface and the power contributors would have a secondary interface, through which a contributor could submit content, or other forms of input.

The goal of this kind of system would be to utilise the vast amount of computing power which is currently connected through the internet and is mostly sitting idle while its users browse Facebook. Secondarily, it would allow someone using a low-power device such as a tablet or a phone to run programs which would normally only be able to be run using a server farm. This could have social justice implications, since low-power devices are cheap and through a network like this could run software which could educate the user dynamically or perform any number of other high-impact processes.

This concept has been implemented to a limited degree, with p2p, grid computing and volunteer computing, but in order to have something that works like magic, which is how it should be, I think we'd need to work on the physical infrastructure of the internet. High-speed would be the name of the game, since a PowNet program's speed would be limited only by the speed of the user's internet connection. This calls up the recent net neutrality issue and also our government's role in public infrastructure (it's mostly neglecting it, basically).

We have passive media, we have interactive media, and now we have dynamic media: that which is influenced by an ecosystem of users across the world. Most of our current dynamic media is trifling (Twitter comes to mind) compared to what we could achieve with a sturdier soft and hard infrastructure, especially given the kind of data-gathering sensors we put into mobile devices these days.

What it comes down to is this: using PowNet, I could run a program on my tablet computer which could understand me and my environment and use that understanding to deliver content accordingly. Sounds like talking to a person, yeah? To a poor kid living in the inner city, without access to quality educational systems, that kind of program could be life-changing.

Is the internet ready to start raising children?