Josh
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 five to ten 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 six months from now, and there's not a dang thing that you can do about it.
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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 twenty four seven 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 a 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 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 buy a shell of a computer that connects 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 setup, basically a terminal server that allows centralized management of workstations and users.
Thin 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 back 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 sysadmins 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 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 five to ten, 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,
it takes screenshots.
That's it. Take care, and I'll see you next season.