There is this talk about the civil war on general purpose computing by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

He gave the same talk at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI

It's slowly becoming reality.

We live in a renaissance of general purpose computing.

This is terrifying. If only a certain class of people has access to this technology (i.e. governments and huge tech companies), the temptation to use that technology to control the class of people who don't will be too much.

I mean Nvidia has already tried to do that with crypto mining

Good on them. As a researcher it is so disheartening when GPUs get hoovered up by people participating in proof of waste pyramid schemes.

Likewise, if google decides it wants to preserve its service for students and researchers, then I hope that people chewing up resources for malicious/questionable use-cases are booted off.

GPU manufacturers have been talking about splitting the GPU market with products that are locked into only serving specific use cases like PC gaming, machine learning and cryptocurrency mining.

That's to say manufacturers want to prevent someone who buys a gaming GPU from using it to mine crypto or for ML, and they don't want someone who buys a ML GPU to use it for mining, and so on.

That's a scary and realistic future.

Any good (fiction or non-fiction) book on this? By "this" I mean governments trying to control overtly or secretly the use of computing resources. Bonus points if it is not Charlie Stross (I can't stand his writings).

More likely the high end ML accelerators become so specialized as to diverge from GPUs. Carry on trying to use your gaming GPU for ML, with the knowledge that professionals are using hardware 100x as powerful.

Graphics is increasingly using ML, so I doubt it. But still, don't give them any ideas :)