• wagoner
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    8 months ago

    How do you arrive at effective monopolies are going out the window, squaring it with what we see in the world today which runs counter.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      There’s diminishing returns on labor for large companies and an order of magnitude labor multiplier in the process of arriving.

      For example, if you watched this past week’s Jon Stewart, you saw an opening segment about the threat of AI taking people’s jobs and then a great interview with the head of the FTC talking about how they try to go after monopolistic firms. One of the discussion points was that often when they go up against companies that can hire unlimited lawyers they’ll be outmatched by 10:1.

      So the FTC with 1,200 employees can only do so much, and the companies they go up against can hire up to the point of diminishing returns on more legal resources.

      What do you think happens when AI capable of a 10x multipler in productivity at low cost is available for legal tasks? The large companies are already hiring to the point there’s not much more benefit to more labor. But the FTC is trying to do as much as they can with a tenth the resources.

      Across pretty much every industry companies or regulators a fraction of the size of effective monopolies are going to be able to go toe to toe with the big guys for deskwork over the coming years.

      Blue collar bottlenecks and physical infrastructure (like Amazon warehouses and trucks) will remain a moat, but for everything else competition against Goliaths is about to get a major power up.