I am not suggesting we don't adopt tech, it's how the tech is allowed to be sold and propagated through society. Using your analogy it's like if we allowed only a single company to manufacture cpus, hard drives and build the software such that there was no possibility of a competitive market. That's a policy choice that can and should be evaluated for the harms monopoly systems create. We as a civilization don't have to allow openai and anthropic to move into the app layer we can say as a condition of the ability to operate a commercial enterprise they are prohibited. We do that with antitrust law, utility regulations, telecom and countless other sectors.

I am not advocating protecting the management class, quite the opposite, I am saying their demonstrated greed in vertical and horizontal integration should be stopped because they have shown they cant be responsible with management authority. You use the word balkenized to imply that fragmented AI is a bad but fragmentation is the basis of free market capitalism and in particular the start up ecosystem.

Your advocating that society just capitulate to Sam Altman and grant a permanent monopoly and the status as permanent underclass because he did "hard work" but that is flawed for two reasons: 1. Hard work doesn't justify destroying the very system that allowed the conditions for that hard work and innovation to create wealth by letting winners convert a free market to a monopoly. That tension is the internal contradiction of free market capitalism, winners will become monopoly such that no more winners are possible. We solved this in the progressive era with utilities, oil companies etc, by either breaking up the companies that had too much market dominance, or making them divest vertical integration units (like standard oil having to sell its rail lines because owning transportation gave it an insurmountable advantage). 2. There is no AI without training data AI which was taken without consent or compensation from public and private sources created by civilization over generations. So the polity has a clear preceding claim to that work and if any industry lacks a right to the ownership of what they've created it's AI. Sam Altmans hardwork is trivial compared to the totality of civilization writing over generations and creating the internet and maintaining libraries and a mailing system so they could collect that data economically.

For those reasons it's totally justified and we'll within the legal and commercial precedents we've established to limit how a single company can develop and operate AI. We should not allow vertical integration across the stack. Openai cant manufacture chips, train models, and build an everything app from customer training data. I don't know ow what owners your think I am defending or representing but I would suggest you are arguing with a phantom opponent that isn't me or are misunderstanding my position. I am not suggesting nationalizing AI or giving the polity ownership, I am suggesting standard corrective regulation to preserve a free market with clear preceding examples from the last technology transformation. We suffered great harm when the electric grid and phone lines and oil and shipping consolidation was unimpeded and unlocked innovation and broad wealth creation when we broke them up.