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With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this.
And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario.
On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
It is not about getting machines to run faster, it is about buying new machines setting up a whole new line. And the ROI will never make sense until the scale and price reach certain point.
>Please show sources.
You can literally apply the same theory across all commodity industry. The problem is supply Chain was never understood by wider audience.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
One of these two things can be true.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
Tell that to Intel and how TSMC manage to outpace Intel. It was because Smartphone had a much bigger scale. The TAM of custom foundry went up by 10x.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
Only when the product is being given away for free or sold way below cost. It's still unclear how large the actual market is.
People does still believe this shit?
- I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
- We stayed in a short rent apartment, so we had to temporarily register with government. Of course that requires uploading photos of me, my kids, and all our IDs
- with a lot of apps banned there, you are essentially told which one you have to use
- you need VPN
- you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
- fences everywhere - don't walk on the nice lawn there, don't sit here, don't stand there. And the moment your kids do - the security / police will come
- lack of public spaces (we couldn't find a playground, the one we eventually found was behind the fence) make the environment hostile and it almost feels like they don't want you outside
Just transited in HKG, the gates are same but boarding at different levels. So you clear the security at a common area, get same PP checks done then go to departure gate which is one level above. IIRC Qatar etc are the same.
But PP checks do happen in both cases.
The false positive rate when doing this via passenger records alone is so high that airport law enforcement will generally only go out of their way to actively look for particularly interesting people.
US is out of control on KYC as well. If you're a nomad, as in you don't have a permanent physical address, you cannot have a bank account. You cannot have credit cards. And now you cannot even have a mail handling service, because the new USPS requirements include ID showing a permanent residential address.
Sure this doesn't affect most people, but it affects at least two groups: the very poor, and the perpetual travelers (which includes retired folks who bought RVs and live/drive around the country full time).
Before anyone comments with, "I'm a nomad and I have X bank/credit card", I'll just say that within one year you won't. Every one of those services is legally required to collect your permanent address info. They haven't all done it yet, but they are increasingly becoming compliant. The various services which previously enabled nomad life are becoming blocked by the financial verification services.
The usual (bad) suggestion is, "just use a family member's address". This is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is how the sloppy credit and data aggregation agencies will comingle yours and your family's data, resulting in all kinds of problems later.
Re: Apartment
You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles. And you can't stay in a hotel for more then 30 days at a time (without separate bookings). You can't check into a hotel without proving your ID and the IDs of everyone staying with you.
Re: Public Spaces
Few and far between in many US cities.
Re: Police, security, fences
I'm not sure where in the US you are, but lots of developed areas of Texas are like what you describe. Worse, you've got the occasional Proud American property owner who is just itching to be a manly man and brandish his gun.
Yes you absolutely can there are landlords that will rent you a crappy cheaper place that you can use to establish some identity chain within a month
I haven't had to rent an apartment since 2014, but my experience then was similar to yours. I don't think any of that is required by law, but if I were going to rent my house out to someone I'd absolutely want to do all that stuff too.
I've definitely checked into hotels in California only providing my own ID, not the IDs of anyone staying with me. And I believe the ID check wasn't a legal requirement; the hotel was using it to verify that I was actually the person I was claiming to be for the purposes of matching me to my reservation. I don't know if there are legal limits on how long you can stay in a hotel here without re-booking.
Credit card seems too much...have not seen that anywhere.
As for playgrounds etc, I guess this is to do with China being still lower income + much more densely populated.
They probably had to do away with it, with HTTPS becoming more and more mainstream.
Singapore still blocks numerous sites at ISP DNS level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Si...
Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.
> you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
My take on this is that because of high youth unemployment in China, there's a nationwide drive to hire young people as security. When I was there, I noticed how young many of the security people are.
But yeah, a lot of this security theatre probably has to do with having to manage their large population and keeping them gainfully employed.
Isn't that basically just an IPSec VPN?
I… don't know. If anyone knew exactly how GFW worked (and it adapts over time), and made something that would bypass whatever blocking or throttling happens when it does, they'd make a lot of money selling their solution.
I had difficulty using non-XRay VPNs even back to my home network, so for the most part I just used data roaming even with my laptop.
It's not so odd that the Chinese choose to use their domestic payment system over a US one. You probably needed a government ID to get your credit/debit card too (at least when you opened your bank account).
I'm not saying the Chinese surveillance system isn't horrible, but the western ones are catching up quickly with the adoption of Flock cameras everywhere and Palantir analyzing every bit of digital footprint you leave. Is there anyone who think there isn't a non-negliable risk that people will walk around with a "jew star" marking in the US in the coming 5-10 years?
> In China you have clean streets and low crime
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
And if it does take that long, why is it so great anyway?
Making labor hyper-interchangeable is kinda like the whole pitch here. It's two steps away from b2b SaaS labor if the PR is to be believed.
Maybe you can say you're an elite prompter or whatever, but it always kinda sounds to me like "I know the secret menu at taco bell." Like the whole point of the product here is precisely to not need such pretense or complexity. You are paying hundreds (at least) a month to use something, but also you are using it in a special way? I really don't get it.
Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.
I am describing the reality we are currently in. If I don't do some harness engineering then my bots crap on the floor and I start questioning whether I should delegate to them at all and if me doing it manually wouldn't still take less time.
And you are describing a desired reality. I sympathize, mind you, it's just not the one we are currently living in.
Like maybe step outside yourself for a second. We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore, but also at the same time we want to argue that its not easy, and you better know XYZ about it, and actually its not a magic bullet.
How can it be both? Where else do you allow this kind of dissonance in something you think?
And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it, and we're still putting food on the table! I am happy I am not in your reality I guess.
I do not know who "we" is but I sure as hell am not arguing this -- that's demonstrably false for like 95% of all tasks I threw even at frontier/SOTA models.
I am on the side of "not as easy as many easily-hyped-up people make it out to be". Some things Opus one-shots in 10 minutes much better than I could in a full day. Most of them though, I have to keep pointing out mistakes and it missing the forest for the trees... constantly.
> And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it
I can only roll my eyes here. How dramatic.
Like its nice to be in agreement if we are but surely you got something better to be doing if you don't actually have some counter argument to my framing here? this forum is getting quite odd I must say.
And yes was being cheeky at the end there but I guess you're a little too used to being on the defense with this stuff? Or not? Still not sure. But I think your agent just finished another task, better go check!
No idea why you are escalating and are trying to mock either, so I'll bow out.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
What's the point of all that, to me?
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door.
1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.)
2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.)
Your theory does not match reality.
But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.
Where is the horse buggy -> automobile transition of this AI age? Where is the industrialization that made clothes 10x cheaper to make? Show me examples.
This isn't the invention of the internal combustion engine, or the textile loom, or the internet. The way people are doing work has changed a bit, but from the consumer end, all I see is shit like 'your health insurance will be 30% more expensive next year' and $11 for a gallon of milk and another rent increase and when I ask Google a question the results are sometimes a bit better and sometimes a bit worse.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=4+day+week
(we get there eventually with structural demographics, it’ll just take longer)
Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.
And then you’re fired.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Key factors for me:
- Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.
This will never happen in the USA. Together with UBI.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
And even then people prefer blaming the prediction machine instead of recognizing their situation as the logical conclusion of capitalism.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965
...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers.
For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices.
---
rate-limited, so:
> Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".
I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.
How did we get from you saying that you didn’t understand the post that you responded to to neighbor chat in so few posts
I don't know what rock you're living under, but literally everyone is walking into stores looking for computers, or computer parts, and leaving with nothing, because all GPUs, RAM, and SSDs are triple in price. I don't know where you got the idea that this only affects servers.
What do you think precipitated Hetzner price increases? It was ram tripling for everybody
[1]https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/5917831...
I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_...
(edit: formatting)
I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it.
It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light.
One specific upside from ai?
I no longer have to write systemd unit files.
That alone may be worth the cost.
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
Look again in 1000-10000 years.
Not that I disagree otherwise though.
https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.htm...
I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
/s
Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?
In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.
And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?
Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
This is only sort of true. Plumbing is an improved version of a well pump, which is functionally (if not technically) an improvement over walking down to the river for a pot of water. Globalized food chains are mostly improvements on the supply chain we had (boats got faster, so things can travel from farther away places more quickly, refrigeration got added to existing modes of travel, etc.).
>Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
I didn't mean to imply that we can't increase housing density. But I think it's clear that having 2.3x more people than 1950 means that all else being equal, people will need to settle for less land. There's just more demand per square mile.
I think it's easier to see if you think in 20 year increments. The difference between 1920 and 1940 is way larger than the difference between 2000 and 2020, and I don't think it's particularly close. Going from "antibiotics haven't been discovered" to "antibiotics become widely manufactured" in 1945 is a huge difference, just as one example.
Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.
Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.
Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.
In every developed country whose numbers I've seen, the size of the average living space is up 30-50% since 50 years ago.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/real-estate-...
What’s your data source?
Keep in mind that the modern, mass middle class was created in the mid-20th century through government policies and post-WWII economic growth.
https://spp.ucalgary.ca/sites/default/files/teams/1/Publicat...
All the growth in our economy since the 70s has been captured by the richest. If purchasing power is a finite ressource, we're getting squeezed out by the 10%.
Still a win but not as big as many are selling it.
Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.
It's hard to know whether moving up in pricing just buys unnecessary features in a checklist, higher quality veneer, brand name, or actual quality.
There, fixed that for you.
So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.
Non-monetary costs are often a better indicator because good quality does cost you more: more time, more expertise, more judgement, more homework.
Plus we usually have narrow needs, which are hard to match. Price reflects a single average market scale, not how a product/service fits our individual conditions.
Finding the right compromises is hard work.
You might want to read *A Market for Lemons".
Thanks for the Reddit link. I'll absolutely use it.
And I disagree it's a minimal amount of research but maybe I'll come around. There are things that were trivial to research indeed, some -- very hard.
RE marketing, highly recommend ublock origin and SponsorBlock if you don't have both yet.
But yeah we don't disagree. I don't mind investing time and effort into becoming an informed consumer. But I just wish I did not have to.
But wishful thinking is nearly done wasting my years and money. If it has to be done then it does get done.
You just don't want that.
It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.
The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.