> In Snow Crash (1992), Neal Stephenson depicted a cyberpunk "metaverse", which became The Metaverse™ in 2021.
I think the author either didn't read Snow Crash, or never used The Metaverse. Perhaps both.
> AI will continue to equalize. Low-performing individuals are already reaping gains across many disciplines:
I'm not sure how much this is going to equalize opportunities for people, vs. end up causing a lot of unemployment. Which, fair, the chandlers & lamplighters professions suffered as we advanced, too.
I also assume that to continue the Samuel Colt analogy, the people calling the customer service lines are the Indians.
So I don’t buy this, and I’m trying to figure out why, while it’s technically true, for all the “democratization” of everything, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I think the problem is, when you “democratize” a thing you devalue it, so now, for instance, the labor of a software engineer may lessen in value, but capital can still exploit it at a lower price.
I’m curious if something similar happened with guns, I imagine it’s yea, maybe every individual can have a gun, but big institutions can manage bigger weapons in ways individuals fundamentally can’t.
> In Snow Crash (1992), Neal Stephenson depicted a cyberpunk "metaverse", which became The Metaverse™ in 2021.
I think the author either didn't read Snow Crash, or never used The Metaverse. Perhaps both.
> AI will continue to equalize. Low-performing individuals are already reaping gains across many disciplines:
I'm not sure how much this is going to equalize opportunities for people, vs. end up causing a lot of unemployment. Which, fair, the chandlers & lamplighters professions suffered as we advanced, too.
I also assume that to continue the Samuel Colt analogy, the people calling the customer service lines are the Indians.
So I don’t buy this, and I’m trying to figure out why, while it’s technically true, for all the “democratization” of everything, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I think the problem is, when you “democratize” a thing you devalue it, so now, for instance, the labor of a software engineer may lessen in value, but capital can still exploit it at a lower price.
I’m curious if something similar happened with guns, I imagine it’s yea, maybe every individual can have a gun, but big institutions can manage bigger weapons in ways individuals fundamentally can’t.