Comment by wyre
7 hours ago
The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.
What regulations do you feel protected common folk from capitalism during the development of computing, and how have they weakened?
I was also struck by this. We are a far more regulated society today than in the 1960s. The total body of codified federal law, statutory plus regulatory, grew from roughly 78,000 pages in 1960 to roughly 246,000 pages by 2020. The content matters of course, but I’m skeptical that under-regulation is the problem.
More pages isn't necessarily the same as more regulated.
Antitrust enforcement.
> The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
The computer market was also much smaller and society much more independent from it at the time.
> IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
The computer market was microscopic at the time.
> Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
Nvidia. 92% of domestic GPU market, 85% of AI datacenter market.
The AI investment bubble is exploding the cost of everything that contains RAM or SSD storage. This is having and will have detrimental effects on the global economy, as supply shortages enormously increase the cost of consumer electronics, cars, anything which requires memory.
Not because AI is making so much money, far from it - it's a money sink. Rather, it's because the global supply of money got so large and so unequal that it ran out of vehicles which would provide sufficient returns for the indolent investment class. So they jumped into speculation - first crypto, now AI and the tech that enables it.
To the benefit of whom? Mass layoffs, tech industry consolidation, new products being cancelled left and right.
Ironically there's no equivalent in the modern era. This is peak social inequality breaking the economy for everyone outside the .001%. And it didn't happen because of a shortage of a raw material, or physics breaking Moore's law. It happened because big tech centralised power into a handful of gigacorporations - creating a handful of ultra-billionaires - who are enormously incentivised to centralise technology itself.