Flying a drone around is easy. Identifying who is on the in group and out group and then moving them is the hard part.
I’m not sure you have really thought out what the drone part is meant to do. Militaries gave outgunned populaces for decades at this point. You don’t need drones to kill civilians.
It's actually quite easy. Whoever isn't in the bunker is the outgroup. You only needed to tell people apart when you needed some meatware to man the factories and work the fields.
Militaries can side with the crowd, or more likely decide to keep the power for themselves.
Yeah ruling juntas do need to "man the fields & factories" (1st order meatware), in order to produce and maintain those drones. Or nukes, or whatever "deciding factor beyond numbers" put them in power.
But they also need 2nd order meatware to support that 1st order: teachers, doctors, merchants… You need scientists to advance your technology against other militaries… You need leaders (3rd order) to keep the first two populations quiet and productive since that turns out to be more cost-effective than fear control through extermination…
Hell you need a certain level of genetic diversity so your own kids don't come out weird.
Give evolution a little more credit. The required number of humans for the in-group to be self-sustainable is definitely not billions, plus it's been shrinking with automation. But we are where we are for a reason – lots of alternative arrangements have been tried over millenia and found wanting.
"Keep my bunker + my drone factory and some farmers, kill the rest" leaves rulers with terrible quality of life (bad) and the next-door-junta taking over pretty quickly (also bad). It is a self-defeating, poor long-term strategy.
Automation tips the power balance further: fewer humans needed, more local autonomy. Which is, I suspect, why the ruling class are so terribly excited about AI, more so than some market valuations. Fewer pesky humans across all levels. Genetic diversity of bloodline remains the primary concern (unless you manage to live forever, which happens to be another evergreen of power ghouls).
As I said in my edit, "because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else."
Marginal improvements in quality which result in a marginal increase of cost/price often provide much better overall returns than just using a series of cheap substitutes that fail quickly. In some areas, this doesn't work, but I think shortsightedness is blocking truly better solutions in a great many cases. Particularly when true costs are being externalized.
The speed and scale are different. The power loom took a while to replace a subset of jobs. It didn't make "manual work" obsolete overnight.
"Going into trades" isn't gonna save you. Knowledge work is 40% of the workforce. Whose electricity are you gonna fix when people can't afford a house?
> If all you were doing is taking requirements from someone else and poorly coding them up
So, in your entire career, you've always worked in companies where you were a subject matter expert on everything the company did? Always knew the business domain inside out? You were running the numbers, sitting with customers, and determining yourself what they really wanted?
> If you push back on requirements when they are not reasonable. Etc
I did, because the requirements had a cost, which I had to balance with limited resources.
If widget A would make 10 customers happy, but would cost two weeks of work, that could be better spent making widget B that'd make 20 customers happy, then it would not be reasonable.
If widget A and B are free, then it becomes unreasonable to say no.
> So, in your entire career, you've always worked in companies where you were a subject matter expert on everything the company did? Always knew the business domain inside out? You were running the numbers, sitting with customers, and determining yourself what they really wanted?
You don't have to be the only person involved in the requirements for you to be involved. So yes, I've been involved from my very first internship where I pitched a new product to the CEO in my second month on the job and got told to go make that happen.
Yeah this is just trading largely known & controllable labour management risks for some fun new unknown software ones.
You can negotiate with your human engineers for comp, you may not be able to negotaiate with as much power against Anthropic etc (or stop them if they start to change their services for the worse).
If this is successful supply shock will kick in (because of energy/GPU constraints) and we could easily see a 2-4x price increase maybe more if the market will accept it. That's before taking into account current VC subsidies.
This is not a lot competition though. And you need to assume, that like other industries, mergers and acquisitions will happen over time which will put you in an increasingly worse position.
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba (Qwen), Nvidia, Mistral, xAI - and likely more of the Chinese labs but I don't know much about their size.
I guess where I was leading to is who owns the compute that runs those models. Mistral, for example, lists Microsoft and Google as subprocessors (1). Anthropic is (was?) running on GCP and AWS.
So, we have multiple providers, but for how long? They're all competing for the same hardware and the same energy, and it will naturally converge into an oligopoly. So, if competition doesn't set the floor, what does?
Local models? If you're not running the best model as fast as you can, then you'll be outpaced by someone that does.
If there are low switching costs, and if there are multiple highly capable models, and if the hardware is openly purchasable (all of these are true), then the price will converge to a reasonable cash flow return on GPUs deployed net of operating expenses of running these data centers.
If they start showing much higher returns on assets, then one of the many infra providers just builds a data center, fills it with GPUs, and rents it out at 5% lower price. This is the market mechanism.
Looking at who owns the compute is barking up the wrong tree, because it has little moat. Maybe GPU manufacturers would be a better place to look, but then the argument is that you're beholden to NVIDIA's pricing to the hyperscalers. There's some truth to that, but you already see that market position eroding because of TPUs and belatedly AMD. All of these giant companies are looking to degrade Jensen's moat, and they're starting to succeed.
Is the argument here that somehow all the hyperscalers are going to merge to one and there will be only one supplier of compute? How do you defend the idea that nobody else could get compute?
The starting point was that competition would prevent AI providers from doubling the price of tokens, because there's lots of models running on lots of providers.
This is in the context of the article, that paints a world where it would be unreasonable not to spend $250k per head per year in tokens.
My argument is the current situation is temporary, and _if_ LLMs provide that much value, then the market will consolidate into a handful of providers, that'll be mostly free to dictate their prices.
> If they start showing much higher returns on assets, then one of the many infra providers just builds a data center, fills it with GPUs, and rents it out at 5% lower price. This is the market mechanism.
Except when the GPUs, memory, and power are in short supply. The demand is higher than the supply, prices go up, and whoever has the deeper pockets, usually the bigger and more established party, wins.
A tri-opoly can still provide competitive pressure. The Chinese models aren’t terrible either. Kimi K2.5 is pretty capable, although noticeably behind Claude Opus. But its existence still helps. The existence of a better product doesn’t require you to purchase it at any price.
because in all of this change we can’t be bothered to imagine a world where people have money without jobs? Do you think billionaires are just going to want to stop making more money?
The best bull case for us reaching luxury gay space communism is that people not working and having near infinite capital to buy whatever they want to enjoy is the only way the billionaires get to see their pot growing forever.
>because in all of this change we can’t be bothered to imagine a world where people have money without jobs?
We can imagine it all we want, and a free pony too. What we'll get is most of humanity not needed, and living in the edges of society, plus some 10-20 percent still "useful".
>The best bull case for us reaching luxury gay space communism is that people not working and having near infinite capital to buy whatever they want to enjoy is the only way the billionaires get to see their pot growing forever.
Billionaires are about power. The money was just a means for that, if they can get it in another way, they will use that. People "not working and having near infinite capital to buy whatever they want to enjoy" is the last thing they'll want.
I mean it's kind of hard to say because almost all software I use is free, a lot of it is FOSS. The software I bought outright in the last couple of years was well priced because of competition (ex: Affinity Designer 2 for $63 - the new version is free although I stick with v2).
Maybe not worth using then. Your product costs 5x and delivers 0.2x of competing product in the adjacent product class (traditional server/VPS), why use it?
I'm understanding that you have no idea what high availability means, you only know that you need it and the cloud has it. Great marketing by the cloud.
All the big clouds are still in market share acquisition mode. Give it about 5 more years, when they're all in market consolidation and extraction mode.
There's clearly no difference whatsoever between a Toyota Aygo and a Hilux, as they both seat exactly four people. That's why most car brands only have a single model.
Robots that specialise in one thing already exist. In big factories, where they'll peel and dice tons of onions per hour, being fed via unsexy conveyor belts into massive dicers.
That's the problem with robots like Optimus. The "specialized" part (Cutting the onions) is 1% of the skills. You'd still need to other hard 99% (Prehensility, vision, precise 3D movement, etc.).
And if you sorted the hard 99%, what's the point in specialising in cutting onions, when the same exact skills are needed to fold and put away laundry?
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