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Comment by magwa101 | Hacker News Reader

Like music, the internet supplied the dream of ridding us of the expensive middle man, instead, it was the dawn of the middle man. In time, software gets easier, and I'm still optimistic that the middle man will disappear and we will get very large, cheap distributed systems, with payments, that will allow peer to peer. Mix in UBI and the future will be bright, I mean, except for a couple of revolutions along the way.

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I used to feel that way. I’ve also expected much broader democratization of production from 3D printing.

It’s possible software is just not there yet, but I think network effects and de facto cartels are an equal or greater force against the natural progress of technology.

At this point I am pretty convinced it’s going to take a union or pact amongst ai devs, or a revolution, to prevent a couple players from basically “winning capitalism”, and rent seeking off infinite labor supply for eternity.

Well, I think the internet can remove all middle men except one. The one that remains is de facto a monopoly. So prices go down as long there is competition and more then on middle man. The less middle men there are the higher the prices. And then there is no way back neither, so the remaining middle man is running a global experiment on price elasticity until growth declines. Maybe 3D printing will be different due the physical aspects of it.

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