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AI industry analysis
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Updated the-silicon-industrialists-part-1.md
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the-silicon-industrialists-part-1.md
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AI is a groundbreaking technology caught in 19th century industrial economics, being forced through legacy capture mechanisms that the technology itself is dissolving. The industrial costs demand revenue while at the same time the value dissolution destroys the revenue models. And the result is regression to increasingly older methods of value capture because the double bind leaves no other path that the current capital structure can follow.
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The obvious counter-argument is that this is simply what capital-intensive technology transitions look like. Railroads had circular financing, consolidation, and regulatory evasion. Telecom had infrastructure monopolies and captured standards. Electricity had decades of brutal economics before the grid became a public utility. In each case, the regression was the mechanism through which the technology got deployed. The difference
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AI is a groundbreaking technology caught in 19th century industrial economics, being forced through legacy capture mechanisms that the technology itself is dissolving. The industrial costs demand revenue while at the same time the value dissolution destroys the revenue models. And the result is regression to increasingly older methods of value capture because the double bind leaves no other path that the current capital structure can follow.
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The obvious counter-argument is that this is simply what capital-intensive technology transitions look like. Railroads had circular financing, consolidation, and regulatory evasion. Telecom had infrastructure monopolies and captured standards. Electricity had decades of brutal economics before the grid became a public utility. In each case, the regression was the mechanism through which the technology got deployed. The difference with AI is one of directness and scale. The older technologies did squeeze their own customers. The railroads dissolved the geographic protections that sustained farmers' crop prices, electrical holding companies overcharged the customers whose bills funded the grid and AT&T's closed loop inflated every subscriber's phone bill. But those effects were indirect. The railroad changed the conditions under which the farmer operated. AI directly replaces the work its customers sell. The software company's product is not just worth less in a changed market. The technology is making the product itself.
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