Sounds like the WEF's 2030 "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" vision.
The tension between centralized efficiency and decentralized autonomy.
Nassim Taleb's antifragility (Jensen’s Inequality) models this mathematically to show how efficiency leads to fragility, and game theory (the Price of Anarchy and the Principal-Agent Problem) shows how the loss of autonomy leads to rent-seeking and exploitation.
Once you give up your hardware (autonomy), the agent’s incentives shift. The provider can now extract rent, censor etc. because the switching costs for the user have become infinite.
I imagine their arguments for efficiency are similar to their arguments for regulations: they sound appealing to normies but ultimately provide a competitive advantage to big established firms.
Just reading the title of the post made me think about this.
And I think that's the real intention. To bring us to a point where you have to pay to use everything and you own absolutely nothing.
Jeff Bezos is overestimating the quality of networks around the world, it is not just bandwidth, you need low latency for an experience that is close to local hardware.
We are going to see mainstream ARM PCs and chinese GPUs before cloud renting.
It could be argued, I suppose, that much of humanity leaves home in the morning, walks into an office, switches on their employer's pc, boots into windows (which the company rents) the fibre (rented) links to the cloud services (rented) etc..
I think the gambit for everyone wanting to get the same services at home and spend our lives doing just that is a joke. That's not to take away the points raised about hardware being problematic going forward, but 1+1 doesn't make 3.
They'll be need for cloud services and compute, for some people with some needs.
Your apps be slow af living in swap and you'll be happy.
Every tech trend of the past 10 years seems to be moving in that direction, so I don't even think it's an AI thing necessarily.