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The 2020s vision is more like a totalitarian transport network where you don't own the vehicle, you don't own the network, there's constant propaganda telling you how to structure your journey to the standard destinations, and deviation is becoming increasingly impossible.

And this is where the geopolitical aspect comes in and where an increasing number of studies calls this 'Digital Authoritarianism' with the stated goal of a nation or company (or both in cooperation) keeping control of the population, the narrative and the access to information.

An overview of the literature and studies on the subject: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02681102.2024.2...

A recent study that implicitely inverstigates the role of corporations in the trend: Digital Authoritarianism: from state control to algorithmic despotism https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5117399&... It's a bit long(ish), 29 pages (the last 10 are references) but worth a read.

by trhway4 hours ago|

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>The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further.

The device becomes a magic artifact. Like a palantir. Many fantasy stories look like there were (or still are somewhere out there) great people who made all the magical stuff in the story while the people in the story have no idea how that stuff works.

That is possibly the way our civilization going. Especially when the datacenters will be in space, and only the "dumb" Starlink like terminals on Earth.

by vrganj14 hours ago|

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> Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres.

There's one way to deal with this, but I doubt it'll be popular in these parts: Communal ownership of the means of production.

Don't use the oligarchy's AI. Your personal hardware is going to be too weak. But together, we can own our own server farms.

by jpk12 hours ago|

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"Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs, or something, which is probably why it sounds unattainable. But if you reorient that to something more along the lines of, "the Mullvad of hosted llama.cpp", then it actually doesn't seem that far out of reach.

by antonvs6 hours ago|

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> "Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs

The quote is a direct reference to a core tenet of Marxist theory, socialism, and communism.

Historically, communal ownership at scale has almost always been implemented via a centralized state, which has tended to gravitate towards authoritarianism. The Soviet Union and East Germany, and many other countries along those lines, didn't really fit the "hippy co-op" image very well.