But if we imagine the vast majority of internet and telecom infrastructure is also implemented this way, we can reason about information over time in general. Makes me think of 'earth is a big computer' type of sci fi trope. Neat!

We are used to thinking about software like in the article, a program that runs deterministically in an OS. Where we are headed might be more like where the LLM or AI system is the OS, and accomplishes things we want through a combination of pre-written legacy software, and perhaps able to accomplish new things on the fly.

In SW this is perhaps the easiest domain to counterpunch. Get young folks learning computer history and understanding how the hardware works down to a register level. We write most software with some mental abstraction of what the hardware is actually doing. That's the crux, I believe, and if we lose widespread hardware understanding then we truly do become lost at sea, practicing the mystic art of non deterministic incantations

Certainly from a raw game theory kind of analysis, an engineer who can monopolize information and has gained authoritative understanding of the design can be crazy powerful, for better or for worse. If this agent optimizes for good salary, lowish effort and high stability... yes I can imagine a senior engineer who fits the name in rate of technical output, not only pecking order order.

For me the freedom to own my computer means I can run any software I want on it.

Self hosting is predicated on some openness of computing in general. Interestingly it still does not practically allow you to use certain services like Google Maps, where even if the end user has great benefit, they get it for free because they give back their data.

Whether or not AGI is imminent, and whether or not Sammy Jankis is or will be conscious... it's going to become so close that for most people, there will be no difference except to philosophers.

Is AGI 'right around the corner' or currently already achieved? I agree with the author, no, we have something like 10 years to go IMO. At the end of the post he points to the last 30 years of research, and I would accept that as an upper bound. In 10 to 30 years, 99% of people won't be able to distinguish between an 'AGI' and another person when not in meatspace.

As most engineers realize right away, it is not going to be profitable to operate a regular datacenter in space, per the article (and I agree), so something else is going on here. Almost all the discussion is about feasibility, which is not by itself going to explain the situation.

It is clearly somewhat feasible to build Starlink level infrastructure and operate it profitably. I would posit that the narrative is a funding vehicle for a more conservative, incremental objective.

The very fact that the infrastructure is in space places the datacenter on the legal and geopolitical high ground. It's hard to raid servers if they are in orbit. It's hard to disable, audit, or arm-wrestle into submission. It doesn't have to have the scale we've come to expect in 2026 to be useful. And it's for inference, not training, of course. Useful levels of inference is computationally cheap. There are implications with the financial system as well.

In combination with PLTR technology, what I see is another intelligent and strategic move by Musk to enable and be part of hegemony. He is a central player not making decisions in isolation. They are playing a game with different rules, and therefore different unit economics.

What comes after the desktop metaphor and mobile? There is VR but... no one is sure it will get anywhere. It's cool but probably won't supplant tradition.

Maybe the ability of AI to accept somewhat imprecise inputs will help us get away from text. Multimodal gesture, voice, and touch perhaps?. So we would all be sort of body acting like players on a stage, in order to convey to a machine what direction you wish to turn its attention

So you are begging the question: Is it possible to compute a textual, or pure symbolic reality that is complex enough for consciousness to arise within it?

Let's assume yes again.

Finally the theory leads us back to engineering. We can attempt to construct a mind and expose it to our reality, or we can ask "What kind of reality is practically computable? What are the computable realities?"

Perhaps herein lies the challenge of the next decade. LLM training is costly, lots of money poured out into datacenters. All with the dream of giving rise to a (hopefully friendly / obedient) super intelligent mind. But the mind is nothing without a reality to exist in. I think we will find that a meaningfully sophisticated reality is computationally out of reach, even if we knew exactly how to construct one.

Making electricity so abundant and efficient is probably more solvable. You can’t solve stu… society

Good point about high speed networking. I guess that’s a lot more straightforward.