from cypberspace to necropolis

The Internet was dismantled as a space for humanity, first by the loss of community binding through person-to-person trust and group dynamics - 

blame blockchain/cryptocurrencies, but they are just one symptom of the alienation, that built environments like cities, then suburbs, then oneline social media and the web finally perfected.

As with crypto-currencies, so with AI, but this was foreseen by Mbemebe  in the analysis in the great book on Necropolitics

I was the Son of Sam, I contain multitudes, Now  I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

As with commons, land was enclosed, by Barons, by Kings, by Nation States - to keep people outbut camps and campfirewalls to keep people and ideas in and so with trade agreements, and the flow of information and knowledge, and so with the Interweb.

The Zombie Apocalypse is here and it is AI Voodoo, just as Neuromancer pressaged. And the zombies are the camp police. And we are interned. stoned. maculate, and soon not even dead.

p.s. a little machine learning is a dangerous thing...

fabless industries aren't exactly new

I'm reading Apple in China (see), which is interesting at the detail level (basically how they trained up with the help of Taiwan literally millions of skilled people to produce all their tech - it is now hardly surprising that china doesn't need the US's help any more to make new stuff...)

But the author seems to think that outsourcing tech manufacturing was something terribly new and clever.

Don't get me started on clothing and the east india company and the british empire...

Closer to home for the USA, however, is a much more instructive story - the electric guitar:

(Also lots of other instruments- remember Yamaha flutes were jolly good an way cheaper than Gemeinhardt)

but gibeon and fender both started manufacturing in mexico and japan then later in indonesia - sometimes trying to "brand" things different(ly) so western prejudice about "lower build quality" from those foreigners was offset by calling things Epiphone or Squier (actually its a bit more complex than that, but you get the idea)...

But in reality the outsorced products weren't just a whole lot cheaper. I own a japanese made custom shop fender strat and a 1982 squier tele (possibly/probably made in korea) - both are a very very good - better than instruments i've tried at 5-10 times the price (the tele was off a friend but if you look at the time they were £150. the strat was used so hard to know what new cost was but probably £1500.

And nowadays, i'd still buy a squier or epiphone (i had a beautiful 335 for a while) or just bite the bullet and buy an ibanez (actually, just did - £300 - fantastic quality - though i did recently buy a G&L Tribute (fretless) bass which was made in the USA and was very sensibly priced (unde £500).

Interestingly, just reading innovation in real places too which tells a similar story about bike manufacturing moving from US (schwinn et al) to Taiwan (Giant) for exactly the same set of reasons....

Anyhow, what Apple did (hollowing themselves out, bleeding to death) was absolutely nothing new. It wasn't even rock'n'roll.

Mind your Ps and Qs, and the K, M, G, and Ts will look after themselves....

• M I remember back in the early 1980s Sun Microsystems (old unix workstation maker of fine machines) said that the breakthrough was 3Ms - Megabyte of memory, MegaHz processor speed and Megabits of networking (I seem to recall 4Mb, 4MHz and 3Mbps) - prior to this, of course, we'd had 64Kbytes of RAM in PDP11s and 64kbps of network speed and some Khz process clocks).
• G A decade later, Craig Partridge published a great book on Gigabit networking,  and storage and processor speeds were, indeed, at least heading for Gbytes and GHz.
• T It took a bit longer, but it is certainly possible to get Tbps or close (800Mpbs) of networking, and Tbytes of storage (RAM is still a bit pricey for that to be common, but in cluster compute its a thing, but on my laptop, Tbyte SSD is totall affordable). While Moore's law ran out of steam fairly recently, so an individual core might still be GHz, I can have a lot of cores, so total processing throughput (including CPU and GPUs) might easily look like THz.
• P It's interesting to speculate what tech will look like for Petabits a second, but the optical fiber photonics folks definitely can do that and there are other transmission technologies which are fast and affordable. In storage, there seems to be no obvious reason - in fact if either of glass or synthetic DNA storage get on the market (and that is not science fiction) then Petabyte storage (at least write once/appeand) could easily be affordable soon too. So then there's processing speed - i think this will probably not happen in a simple way, partly because it probably isn't necessary in personal devices, but I could be wrong - I don't think it would come from neuromorphic hardware because that doesn't have to be fast, it is just massively more efficient than using tensor processors to do operations on neural network graph data structures. 
• Q - so what about quantum computing? While they don't really work yet, and also are not exactly going to fit in your new rayban specs or wrist-borne device, they might help speed things up (in some possibly rather limited, cases), however...

Many of those hyperscale companies led by personalities are guilty of massive hubris. Because they are hugely successful in one domain, their leaders assume they can repeat that in arbitrary other areas, and I think this has a massively negative effect on anyone else making progress (or even just getting funding) - 4 examples of over-claiming that have happened multiple times in recent years...

• Quantum Supremacy - multiple times there have been announcements that embarassingly jumped the gun on people actually making a working quantum computer that actually a) has enough Q bits to be useful and b) has Q bits that don't get overwhealmed by noise or decoherence so fast they are not even a ghost in the machine.
• Neural Interfaces - there have been beautiful experiments with bio-feedback systems that are now being used to treat various neurological conditions (and problems with phyisical consequences like Parkinsons) - but having an every day mind-computer interface is still science fiction really. Despite various people jumping the gun.
• Metaverse- we've (I myself included) being doing decades of work in immersive virtual reality. It was a staple of cyberpunk SF books 30+ years back (and more). But it is still a mess outside of games. While augmented reality as a tool (e.g. for repairing things or even surgery) will totally be a thing, I think the metaverse (as per Snow Crash, at least, let alone Neuromancer or Altered Carbon or even just the old Star Trek Holodeck) is not with us yet affordably. I think this is more a failure of use case/compelling application than actual technology, however.
• AGI - all the money in the world is being spent on better predictive text, but the same people getting the money promise AGI. Hah. Bunch of Marketroids (that's not an insult - they are very good at it given the levels of investment they are getting compared to the total paucity of actual usefulness of their tech beyond prompting governments to worry about their energy grids).