[acje]

I look forward to the decline in interest in generative ML. There is a screaming need for secure online services to enable democracies to face off the threat from authoritarian regimes. To do this we need hardware that enables actors as in actor model with truly private state, not sandboxed where there is an external entity that can observe its state. Today pretty much all designs has a perverse von Neumann architecture where state is shared across different compute devices like network controllers and management engines. And the software stack is more of the same sandboxing. Apple includes a Secure Enclave on its SoC where you may only communicate with it by sending messages like a proper actor, but why aren’t servers made entirely of secure enclaves? If the memory of each enclave was private by design in hardware it shouldn’t be necessary to encrypt it.

[TeMPOraL]

How would that empower democracies more than authoritative regimes? The technologies you mention are means of control, and are used as such. Secure computing doesn't help you when the regime owns the keys (or can coerce them out of the vendor).

I may very much be wrong about it, but intuition and experience tells me that means of control usually empower authoritarian parties first and foremost, unless fully owned and operated by individuals - which, in computing, is very much counter the trend and the zeitgeist.

[acje]

Good question and I don’t have a good answer. My intuition is that democracies are more dependent on transparency and that lower complexity and higher security would enable more distribution in control.

[chucke1992]

I am pretty sure that democracies are happily pivot to authoritarian regimes because a lot of people just like to have a single choice they prefer.

[jjtheblunt]

or implementations of democracies can be gamed by groups with authoritarian inclinations?

[Dalewyn]

To be clear: It's not that the electorates like authoritarianism, they hate "democracy" which doesn't listen to them nor work for their interests and benefit.

[bobbiechen]

Server-side secure enclaves (confidential computing) are becoming significantly more popular for the exact purpose of providing secure online services, and a decent number of companies are already doing this today.

There are technical challenges in using secure enclaves correctly, and those limit adoption. At Anjuna (anjuna.io), we are working on those problems and seeing good results for our customers.