Technofeudalism where our tech lords rent out all the services we rely on. AI will only make it worse.

Why not stop renting? As experts, we are in a unique position to be able to make that choice. Regular joes and janes don't have much hope, but we do.

The one thing that wealthy people actually purchase is assets. They can’t possibly spend all their money. The extra money is managed by wealth managers. Those managers automatically use the money to purchase more assets. This drives the prices of assets ever upwards. Fortunate people like doctors, lawyers, and tech workers with high paying jobs might be better off than most, but they can not afford to purchase assets that the truly wealthy people desire.

I could afford a house, sure. In the boonies. Could I afford to buy the NYC apartment I live in? No chance.

While I appreciate the discussion on assets, I was referring mainly to LLMs. Everyone's paying to rent time on closed source LLMs instead of using open-source versions on their own hardware.

You must not be from around here. Most of us here on HN are lords, vassals, or nobles in this technofeudalist society. The technomonarch is currently giving us enough fiefs to behave appropriately.

I’m not sure of that. I expect most of the posters here are more like the equivalent of a skilled blacksmith.

I mean, it is a little weird because compensation these days usually includes stock, so, some ownership of the company. But not much real decision making power beyond the limited-scope decisions around we implement their will.

Maybe a consultant could be considered like a vassal?

I think this is the right analogy. A skilled blacksmith has influence in his village, but he is still operating at the mercy of his vassal lord, and by extension, the king of the lands. Speaking up against either would find him dispossessed rather quickly.

Not really. Renting will be forced via iterations of the prisoner's dilemma, and all it needs is a proportion of people who will rent at some point to keep the system going. A few standouts that make a break from renting will just be a mantlepiece that gives us the illusion of choice.

Well that's interesting and true. Looking at the OS landscape, the previous battleground, the software rent model has made a number of companies very rich. And yet, the few standouts gave us Linux and OSS. Do we need more than a few to achieve the same here? I'm personally not paying for Claude, Perplexity, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc... I prefer to obtain open-source weights and run them on my local GPU.

Yes, good idea. We should all go in together to build our own datacenter in The Dalles! Who's with me?

(More seriously though: the real challenge to this approach is that cloud compute resources are a game changer and they can be at best approximated with the high-latency connections of hundreds of distributed users. The problem to solve goes a bit past "everyone should host their own email..." And even that is a tall order if you want your email to actually be sent and received and to not drown in spam).

no, we are back to an oligarchy, which is the natural state of human affairs in the post-reformation anglosphere unfortunately