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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Electricity. Eventually, it was everywhere, used by everybody, and a background to society. Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world.

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Thanks! This answer was actually the one that I found most helpful. I feel like some of the other responses to my comment were talking about how we regulate lots of other tech, but that wasn't really my point - I understand that we regulate tech, but only when it becomes "economically convenient".

But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.

Edit: This reddit thread on AskHistorians has good info and links: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_f... . Again, thank you very much for your mention of electricity, because it looks like it actually was a pretty severe power struggle between electric companies and governments at large trying to regulate them, and if anything it has given me some hope that maybe "the people" will eventually win out.

> Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.

Yes. Electric utilities were at one time quite powerful, around 1900 or so. Read up on Samuel Insull [1], the early history of antitrust, the Utility Company Holding Act, and the history of public utility regulation. Many countries just nationalized the electrical power industry. The US didn't, but regulated it strictly for most of a century. As is typical, this followed a financial disaster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull

The electricity infrastructure where I was live was owned by the government. It's only in the last 15 years it was sold off to private interests [1]. I suspect you will find that the electricity systems in many regions are still government owned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_...

Should be noted that Australia, and even NSW, had quite a few different systems. Country NSW was largely done by the (local) county councils and they didn’t seek to profit by once the debt was cleared and instead wanted to give out cheap power until they had to take on more debt.

This was deeply offensive to the economists of the 80s and 90s and so they were taken over by the state government and turned into a for profit company.

It was corporatised before it was sold off. Privatisation of the NSW energy market began about 30 years ago at this point.

> Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.

The Stepchange podcast has an amazing episode on The Grid [1], walking us through the arc of history of how it became the utility it is today.

[1]: https://www.stepchange.show/grid

the arc of history

The history of arcs?

> But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.

I have for a while theorized that transport is what causes an (undue) aggregation of power. Cheap mass shipping was needed for the current industrial globalization to even work. Cheap communication is what gave rise to the internet giants we have today, and the power structures in general.

Transport of energy, especially electricity, is still relatively expensive, and so a distributed structure is naturally preferred. This, along with the ability to produce it in a more-or-less decentral way of course.

If we one day figure out really-cheap transport of electricity, I'm 100% sure it would only take quite a short time for a few global companies to stomp out all the competition.

But companies and governments owning the natural resources that powers the utilities took over the world.

US for example owns the LNG trade right now and that’s a major choke for power production across the world, China owns the rare earth metals that goes into solar and wind.

Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was the topic of a previous encyclical, which inspired this one.

RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR

http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docume...

Yes, but because electricity is mostly produced by gas turbines, and you could say oil & gas companies do rule the world. Utilities mostly take care of the distribution, and are naturally monopolic/oligopolic businesses which is why in most countries, they are regulated (or owned) by the state.

Nice answer! And thinking about it, isn't the telephone and maybe also the internet in the same category. In México the telephone company was first a public company and then a private one that made our biggest billionare (Carlos Slim), so maybe not so much here :-p, but you can argue that both have been a net benefit for the whole world.

Although there is not necessarily a cognate from the past to accurately describe what AI becomes in the future, I wonder if electric companies were once thought to have "better" electricity than others, like how AI companies have proprietary algorithms which are all basically very similar.

We may arrive at a point where standardized AI is a commodity, and since it was developed using reams of public data, proprietary rights become severely limited. (Personally, this is beyond my current level of optimism in law, ethics and humanity.)

Nice example.

I wonder though... it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat, broadly speaking, and so was commoditized. Whereas if one of the AI companies finds a proprietary breakthrough algorithm that won't be the case... at least until others catch up.

> it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat

Sure it does. You have to run a separate set of wires to each house to compete at the retail level. There have been regions which had two competing phone systems in the past, and there are areas which have two competing fiber systems now. But that's rare.

Right. And the only way to stop AI from ruling the world is to regulate it like a utility.

Fossil Fuel companies did end up ruling the world for a century (ongoing).

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