I think the anti-feature of LN that you're describing (and that is bothering nearly everyone that tries to solve mobile clients) is the liveness requirement. You can run an entire LND instance to manage private (non-routing) channels on your phone like with Blixt, but still, it's not going to work if you're out of network range or your battery dies. So this is not a normie-proof solution; agreed.

Of course, delegating responsibility to a custodian could be okay for a normie as long as they are properly informed about how to manage their exposure. But we all know that it's delusional to think that if on a good day 0.1% of normie users reads a ToS for a service before they commit to using it, people will actually inform themselves. Thus, i think that illegal banks, even if plausibly deniable, aren't a normie-proof solution either.

Right now, the only professionally ran custodial services at scale give in to the KYC pressure, agreed on that too. The ones of the past that resisted it (at least those I know or worked with) have all ceased operation, most of them "voluntarily" - i.e. where you hire the expensive legal advisor and a few months later and a few coins poorer, you're left with the legal narrative "you're fucked". This is also why the remaining services that don't KYC you will often do taint checks on your coins to reduce their exposure; think ATMs, but also Boltz. You're surveilled anonymously too.

So while I agree with the sentiment that overreach should be resisted, I think that custodial solutions are the worst at resistance: they create a single point of failure. Having an AI run it will in my opinion make it worse, but even if I'm just a doomer and it would make it better, all you need to do is kill the AI and the "problem" is gone. Even if its mutating like covid on steroids... there will just be a task force and when they meticulously kill it, your losses will be condensed into some PR stunt "we got 'em" - and you are just the collateral damage no one cares about. So it really, really makes no sense if what you're hardening against is potential state overreach: SkyNet is not the magic silver bullet that it is made out to be, unless instead of wasting time on ecash it just pulls us into the post-apocalyptic situation the movies depict.

Arguably though, mining centralization is an issue of the same kind and LN hub-and-spoke pressure too. But... these networks aren't fully centralized. If all miners need to solo mine tomorrow because all the pools are seized, it does not affect all my utxos but will affect the timing of any txs I need to do and their fees. If I need to (force) close my LN channels and reopen new ones because all my counterparties got seized, I can do that, and again it will take some time and some money to do it, but assuming I have a defendable amount of sats (i.e. more than 1M) i won't lose all my funds. The same is not true for ecash and no matter how sublime an AI is, it won't become better because of it.

One thought occurred to me: normies are the ones the politicians need to control most. But what normies need isn't politicians, it's a good Uncle Jim - be the mint?