> Will every business/CEO do more of what he/they anyway want to do, but now supported by AI/LLMs?

Arguably, it already worked that way. The best way to climb the ranks of a 'dictatorial' organization (a repressive government or an average large business) is to always say yes. Adopt what the people from up above want you to use, say and think. Don't question anything. Find silver linings in their most deranged ideas to show your loyalty. The rich and powerful that occupy the top ranks of these structures often hate being challenged, even if it's irrational for their well-being. Whenever you see a country or a company making a massive mistake, you can often trace it to a consequence of this. Humans hate being challenged and the rich can insulate themselves even further from the real world.

What's worrying me is the opposite - that this power is more available now. Instead of requiring a team of people and an asset cushion that lets you act irrationally, now you just need to have a phone in your pocket. People get addicted to LLMs because they can provide endless, varied validation for just about anything. Even if someone is aware of their own biases, it's not a given that they'll always counteract the validation.

Microcontrollers are great. But a lot of people who use them were bridged over by an interest in PCs, hardware or building something that interacts with something they already use. If free computing goes away, how long until the interest in microcontrollers slumps far enough for them to turn from fun, cheap commodities into expensive, proprietary, industrial devices?

The ability to unlock the bootloader on most vendors has already degraded from "Do whatever you want!" to "Here, jump through these hoops here, give us all your data and wait a long time" to "What? No of course you can't do that!". Google can remove that functionality from Pixels at their first whim. I don't think this avenue will remain open for long. Smartphone hardware is powerful, but it's completely subservient to software that can't be removed or replaced.

The thesis wouldn't be "completely derailed", just slightly delayed. The reasons why the powers above are pushing for that dystopian model aren't contingent on AI. If it all went away, we'd have a surge of hardware availability and a drop in prices, followed by the same trends - a slow transition to 'cheaper' remote computing wearing down the more expensive custom PC market, higher prices further reducing demand and creating a spiral until people who want personal computing are a niche market segment that becomes almost extinct. The result is still the same. Everyone will be using thin clients or computers that are more like smartphones or Chromebooks than modern PCs, with most services provided through the tightly-regulated internet via subscription services. It just would take us more time to get there.

What are the upsides? You only listed a few things that you like, but not why they should take over all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are already widely available now without the need to hollow out the custom PC market.

There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start manufacturing components more easily and provide more competition. If you turn PCs into prepackaged proprietary monoliths, expect even fewer players on the market than we have now, in addition to a complete lack of repairability and upgradability. When you can't pick and choose the parts, you let the manufacturer dictate what you're allowed to buy in what bundles, what spare parts they may sell to you (if any) and what prices you will pay for any of these things. Even if you're not building custom PCs yourself, the availability of all these individual components is putting an intrinsic check on what all-in-one manufacturers can reasonably charge you.

The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.

That I agree with. I'm just also making the point that the silver lining had always existed, since similar fully-integrated products go back decades. The end seems inevitable to me now, and there's no good to be found there. We already had everything. Now is when that starts to be taken away.

I'm thinking of this like car radios. Most cars used to have this standard called DIN to put the radio in. Most cars today don't have DIN mounts anymore. We've gotten way nicer, bigger touch screens in our infotainment now since cars are not locked into one form factor. On the other hand, it sucks in some ways because vendor lock in. I hope we at least get a tradeoff like that - that there will be something in return for it.

There are systems like the NUC but if I want a super-high-end 5090 and top-end CPU, all of the options to cool them feel like... well, something kluged together from whatever parts I can find, not something that's designed as a total system. Maybe we'll get some interesting designs out of this.

I'm afraid the acceptance (and, more troubling, the seeming desire on the part of technical people who I see as misguided) of mobile computers in the smart phone form factor to be locked down and hostile to their owners has moved the Overton window on personal computers being equally owner-hostile. The bucket-of-parts PC ecosystem is less susceptible to an effort to lock down the platform and create walled gardens. If that market goes away it gets easier to turn all of our personal computers into simply computer-shaped devices (like Chromebooks and iPads).

I'm really fearful that PCs are going down the road of locked bootloaders, running the user-facing OSs inside bare-metal hypervisors that "protect" the hardware from the owner, etc.

I'll accept that I'm likely under the influence of a bit of paranoia, too.

I'm strongly of the opinion several unaffiliated factions (oligarchs, cultural authoritarians, "intellectual property" maximalists, software-as-a-service providers, and intelligence agencies, to name a few) see unregulated general purpose computers in the hands of the public as dangerous.

I don't think there's an overt conspiracy to remove computing from the hands of the public. The process is happening because of an unrelated confluence of goals.

I don't see anybody even remotely comparable in lobbying power standing up for owner's rights, either.

TCAS is much simpler than your proposal. Ensuring that traffic can't get too close to you in midair is a different problem from analyzing complex, non-linear movements at tightly-packed airports. How do you implement this system while avoiding false positives?

Imagine that you're landing at one of two parallel runways. There's a plane lining up on the other runway. You can't have proximity warnings like TCAS, because this is a safe situation even though you get close to the other plane. What if that plane is taxiing towards your runway? You can't predict its movements until it starts entering the runway because it may just stop at the hold short line, as it should. Extrapolate this simple scenario to anything that could ever happen at airports with a large variety of actors, and you'll start to see why everyone in the world is still relying on humans to do this.

This test is completely insane. What were the people making it thinking? It feels like half of the scored questions have point values assigned at random. Why does being unemployed for 1-2 months before enrolling in the program award you 10 points, 5-6 months is 8 points, yet 3-4 is a fat zero? There's so many questions with these random score assignments. Why does having real qualifications related to your job only give you a point or two, but some random factoid like taking unrelated courses or doing poorly in college history give upwards of 15 points? Why is child labor rewarded, with more points given the earlier you started?

Unless I'm missing something, this couldn't have been designed by a human being with normal goals in mind. This feels like a test that was created to act as a locked door that you could only pass by knowing the exact password, the sequence of lies you had to produce. That anyone's career was at the mercy of THIS is deranged. What the hell is going on in the US?

> I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?

I don't get what's illogical in this statement. If people are displaced, everyone will know that the value of other work will go down too, but they'll still try to get into those other fields because they may still offer better prospects and a paid job (even at a low wage). That doesn't sound bad compared to a situation where you can't get a job in your field regardless of your demands. Besides, if we get to that situation, basically every job will be impacted, so it's not like keeping the tight grip on your current career will be more likely to save you.

> Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?

That works well until an electrician who follows LLM instructions starts a fire or fries themselves. It's true that automation can still make their work faster, but the value of electricians isn't going to zero any time soon because there's a reason why governments still want them to know what they're doing. As soon as you touch jobs that could result in you directly killing others or yourself, there's usually licensing and regulations all over the place. All of that is additional barriers to being fully replaced on a whim. If this automation gets to you, at least you're all the way back in the line, and it won't be as bad as the others.

Some of the trades are non-negotiables that have to be done regardless of the current economic situation. They'll be hurt too by the overall cheapening of labor, but those have the best odds of making it through.

Why have fast food restaurants at all at that point? Just have everyone eat the same mass-produced, nutritionally-optimized substance, and use the AR vision to superimpose pretty pictures over that food. Varied meals are for the rich.