We've come to the end of another season, but instead of talking about another computer component,

I wanted to talk about where I think computing is going in the next 5 to 10 years.

This is just me throwing ideas out there, so take it all with a grain of salt.

And as we know, the world can change overnight, so maybe these are accurate, or maybe they will never come to fruition.

The wrong thing to do is just go out and buy a computer and then learn about it.

You'll learn, but you'll learn a lot of things that maybe you didn't want to learn.

A computer that you buy today will likely be obsolete 6 months from now, and there's not a dang thing that you can do about it.

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members get early access to new videos, ad-free versions of everything, bonus content, and access

to a live monthly Q&A. Thanks for considering. Now let's get back to the show. Unless you've

been off-grid for the last few years, you might have noticed AI has seeped into every facet of

our lives. From support chat pop-ups on websites, to smart appliances, which were already a dumb

concept, shoving AI into them to make them smarter, but also at the same time dumber. And we also have

circular investment in AI, which has created a bubble just waiting to burst. I have four predictions,

theories, or just general gut feelings about where I think things are going.

AI will take jobs. We're already seeing companies firing developers, shoving AI in its place, and

hitting go. AI has the benefit that it can work 24-7 and scale very quickly. The downside of this

is that it's not the magic it has been marketed to be.

I use it quite a bit, and I pushed back on it initially, but as someone in tech who wants to see and learn what's going on, I would be doing myself a disservice if I ignored it on principle.

It does help, I can't deny that. I can dump a bunch of logs from my server into it, ask what happened at x time, and it does a great job piecing things together.

I'd also be lying if I said some of the models weren't pretty decent at helping code, but it has a level of confidence that makes me uncomfortable.

I know behind these answers are a bunch of GPUs and some AI models trying to provide an answer it thinks I want, but that confidence gives it a level of validation that I don't think a lot of people question.

They take the answers at face value and run with it, and that truly scares me.

We already have issues of headline reading, trusting random information from strangers online, but at least that was somewhat easier to analyze.

With AI, people can get the answers they want.

With AI, people can get the answers they want.

instead of the right answer. And that's a problem. The second is that you will own nothing and be

happy. I think that saying can sum up my next point. Companies want you to pay for everything

on a monthly subscription basis. And I think once the AI bubble bursts, all this hardware and data

centers just sitting there will need a purpose. And I think they're going to come for our personal

computers next. Years ago, Google had a product called Stadia, which they killed, like most things

they do. It was a cloud gaming service you connected into, and the games streamed from their server.

This was back in 2019, and one of the guys I worked with had a subscription to it.

So we tested it out at work, playing some games during the workday, because why not? It was pretty

cool and worked well. But years later, thinking about it, I can see the repurposing of AI hardware

going to this use. You'll buy a shell of a computer that can...

next to a data center where your supposed personal computer is running. You'll do all your work on

the shell of a computer, which is basically just a screen, keyboard, and mouse, and all your data

and processing happens remotely in the data center. A company I used to work at had something like

this set up, basically a terminal server that allows centralized management of workstations

and users. Fin clients connect in, usually over RDP, and give the employee access. It works great

in a corporate environment, but it seems like a next likely step if they want to monetize what we

used to purchase once and turn that into a reoccurring subscription. Just like Uber and Lyft

and every other SaaS startup in the last decade, it will start out dirt cheap, they will then kill

the competition, and once everyone's locked in, raise rates. The third thing is that I think we've

been spoiled with hardware. I think it made a lot of code turn to lazy code. Why spend time optimizing,

like they did better?

in the day when you only had one megabyte of ram when you can just throw cheap hardware at it and

make it work but since corporations are purchasing all the available hardware which is causing the

prices of gpus and now ram to skyrocket i think we might see a shift to making what is already out

there or maybe older hardware work longer which i am a big proponent of so long term what do i think

this means i think it'll lead to leaner simpler more efficient code and i don't think that's ever

a bad thing but we'll see and that brings us to the last item which is that i think we will see a

shift away from the cloud for corporations i don't know how many of you listening have ever interacted

with aws azure or gcp but the original promise was put your apps data and services with us and you can

essentially fire all your sys admins and save money well over the last decade or however long it's been

that

has not happened. AWS or any of those other massive cloud providers still require a massive

amount of administration and dedicated employees. It's not set and forget like they would make you

believe. Not to mention the extraordinary markup on hardware. From storage to bandwidth, the rates

are insane. The truth is that hardware has become much cheaper, if you ignore the RAM prices lately,

and it's a one-time expense. I don't think this will happen in the next few years, but I think in the

next 5 to 10, we'll see more and more companies bringing things back in-house. I think there's

been a lot of fear-mongering over the years about hosting things yourself and how difficult or

unreliable it is. The fact is, is that it's not. Enterprise hardware has many redundancies built

into it and it's extremely reliable. And at the end of the day, we still see AWS, GCP,

and Azure outages that take down massive parts of the web. So yes,

you can shift the blame to someone else when your customers ask what happened, but to what end.

So there's some of my thoughts. Again, these are just my opinions. Don't base any of your

decisions on them. But maybe they can give you something to think about. That's the end of

season three, and I'll see you next season with something completely different.

In the Shell is written, researched, and recorded by me.

And if you ever wondered how a computer gets drunk

and takes screenshots, that's it. Take care, and I'll see you next season.