The current infrastructure problem mirrors the cabling problem the IT industry had 20 years ago. They needed fiber everywhere, and no one had fiber anywhere. So the software companies bought and laid their own fiber networks, charging everyone else to use the highways they built. That problem is mostly solved, at least in principle. Pretty much all copper comms lines will be completely replaced with fiber by 2030, but it took twenty years to build that out.
Now the problem has changed from moving the copper comms grid over to a fiber comms grid into the problem of re-building the electrical grid, which, ironically, requires more copper.
But here's the thing - the people who subsidized rebuilding the comms grid are going to be the same people who subsidize rebuilding the electrical grid. And these are also the same people who will control the AI that these two grids combine to create. Finishing this process will take about 20 years, but not much more than that.
The IT industry is vertically integrating the whole of modern society.
All of it.
Power, comms, information, transportation, and the automated AI process to control it all, all of it.
This is the end of the nation-state.
In twenty years, citizenship will not be the coin of the realm, stockholding will be.
National governments will be, like churches, vestigial organizations that some people will continue to believe in and bow before, but that won't be the locus of power.
The current infrastructure problem mirrors the cabling problem the IT industry had 20 years ago. They needed fiber everywhere, and no one had fiber anywhere. So the software companies bought and laid their own fiber networks, charging everyone else to use the highways they built. That problem is mostly solved, at least in principle. Pretty much all copper comms lines will be completely replaced with fiber by 2030, but it took twenty years to build that out.
Now the problem has changed from moving the copper comms grid over to a fiber comms grid into the problem of re-building the electrical grid, which, ironically, requires more copper.
But here's the thing - the people who subsidized rebuilding the comms grid are going to be the same people who subsidize rebuilding the electrical grid. And these are also the same people who will control the AI that these two grids combine to create. Finishing this process will take about 20 years, but not much more than that.
The IT industry is vertically integrating the whole of modern society.
All of it.
Power, comms, information, transportation, and the automated AI process to control it all, all of it.
This is the end of the nation-state.
In twenty years, citizenship will not be the coin of the realm, stockholding will be.
National governments will be, like churches, vestigial organizations that some people will continue to believe in and bow before, but that won't be the locus of power.