That is not how capitalism works but love an optimist.
Like Elon Musk, the richest man ever who is best friends with the president?
Insane take.
I hope I’m wrong, but this seems very naive. Just as an example, we just had a report released here in Denmark this week, that stated that AI could replace 100000 civil servants. Denmark is a small country of only 6 million citizens.
Who will run the servers for those AI services? Probably Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.
The truth is the tech Giants are getting bigger and more powerful, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, TSMC.
These companies are all bigger and more powerful than they were a decade ago.
And just because we can run Linux, and have found a sliver of freedom there, doesn’t really help in the big picture of modern technology.
When your government chooses to use proprietary solutions, there is little that is done to prevent it. It shouldn’t of course be necessary, the politicians should be smart enough to know dependency on proprietary systems is costly even dangerous in the long run. But lobbyist always manage to shoot down open source initiatives.
So here we are, chugging along to ever more dependency on and power to big tech, as individuals and companies and in public services.
I use Qwant search, I used to use AOSP (Android Open Source Project) for my phone, and I use Linux. But that doesn’t prevent big tech to take more power. The current and next big play is AI, and all the above companies are fighting to dominate that within their fields, and no small player has a chance anymore. Because the cost of entry is in the billions.
EU is taking up the fight, and is regulating all these companies, with the exception of TSMC which AFAIK hasn’t been shown to play dirty (yet).
Hopefully governments across the world, will cooperate to put a lid on the amount of power a single company can attain.
There is no way this AI bullshit will replace 100000 people, no need to worry there.
Incidentally, we were in Denmark a month ago and your country is awesome. You all have a lot of things figured out.
Compared to most I think we have it pretty good here. But that doesn’t stop us complaining, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves that it could be worse. We could be living in Sweden. 😋
Jokes aside, we are lucky that we also have good neighbors, and of course we love our Scandinavian brothers.
Yanis Varoufakis views Big tech as digital landlords in his book 'Technofeudalism" . He argues that they extract rents from owning the digital space as landlords did in the Middle ages while monetising our attention. They are not capitalists in the sense that they don’t sell goods and services for profit but rather control the environment where others buy and sell.
It’s an interesting take on where we are and how dystopian big tech has turned out to be.
I would love for this headline to be correct, but it seems far more likely that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. /Drcox
