You're really out of touch. Monopolies are not illegal. Anti-trust laws are not enforced, require proof of "harm" to the consumer for the courts to allow them to proceed, and can be dragged out for decades. Every industry in America has undergone enormous consolidation, starting in the Reagan era. The policy went from enforcing anti-trust in the name of competition to allowing any merger that claims to "improve efficiency" and reduce costs for consumers. However, there is plentiful evidence that these mergers basically never produce the "efficiency" gains they claim and just end up with job losses and price increases. The only winners are executives, top shareholders, and the banks who finance the whole thing.

Name one domestic industry that has dozens of competitors with comparable market share. You won't find one. Cell phones, wireless carriers, meat packing, car manufacturers, cloud providers, microchip manufacturers, seeds, farms, farm equipment, big box stores, soft drinks, beer, candy, pet food, car batteries, human food... The list goes on and on. Go to the grocery store and look at who owns all the "brands" on the shelves. It's a handful of corporations. Our world is dominated by oligopolies or near monopolies and has been for decades. We're all screwed.

Anywhere there are multiple brands competing successfully, you'll likely find that they are imported.

That is not true. Medical insurance margins are small, and they are legally required to spend a minimum of about 80% on care, higher for employer insurance with a high number of employees. The problem is the underlying costs, and the only way to fix it will be for doctors, drug companies, etc to take a massive haircut and earn less money.

Not even power. On multiple occasions I have used a couple of spliced computer AC cables and an old UPS to backfeed power to my garage circuit and open the door. (yes, after throwing the breaker in the panel)

They realized they could process more xrays, so instead of fewer people they ordered more, likely unnecessary, xrays. And you wonder why your insurance just keeps going up.

Your answer makes no sense, provides no examples, and just spews unsupported claims. In the US, companies don't compete, they buy their competitors. There is no anti-trust enforcement. When the FCC under Lina Khan tried, the backlash was legendary. Politicians throw money at floundering companies to "save jobs" because they are "too big to fail".

If you want to find the closest example to unbridled capitalism, you'll have to look at China.

Why are any American companies doing any business or providing any services in Russia to begin with? Dictators aren't toppled when everyone is too busy scrolling Instagram.

I have yet to see a concrete example of that supposed effect in anything but trivially small industries. Everything is an oligopoly now and they would rather just rake in the profit with as little capital investment as possible.

With an ample supply of specious, unprovable claims every day. There is a magic button to she every problem, don't you know, we just aren't smart enough to figure it out. But AI will be, "someday soon".

Cancer? Magic bullet. Climate change? Magic bullet. Income inequality? Magic bullet.

It's like the cartoon titled "software terminology" then/now, where everything is now an "app", except it's "AI".

How do you measure these improvements in a quantifiable manner to gage whether or not they are plateauing?

All pure speculation that improvements are exponential, just like it's pure speculation that "intelligence" is some kind of emergent property of an LLM?

I love all the YouTube clickbait videos titles "these jobs won't exist in 24 months". Yeah, right. If an entire class of job was going to "not exist" in 24 months it would be painfully obvious as businesses began testing the alternative in advance of eliminations. Which of course would not happen like flipping a switch, we would be seeing 10% or more losses now, with measurable increases every month.

LLMs excel at generating large volumes of text that appears moderately plausible and coherent. This is literally the job of every journalist on the planet. So, naturally, journalists think LLMs are going to do all the things and they write about it.

And they can't do that reliably or repeatably. They can't do anything reliably or repeatably, at anywhere near the level necessary to replace a human.

I've recently been using Chatgpt for assistance with typescript and css for a work SPA project. One time I asked it if a very small function - only 5 or 6 lines - was the most efficient, idiomatic way to do a thing. It gave me a response, then asked if I wanted an even "more efficient" way - which, duh, of course I do, that's what I asked. The "more efficient" way was a literal copy of my original function.

I despise CSS so much that I'm sure I will continue to use LLMs to tell me why a layout isn't working, but it still takes multiple iterations to get it right.

(Crazy that we are three decades into this whole web experiment and the mess of css is still the "best" thing we have. But why fix it when AI can write it for you?)

None of the "models" can reliably and repeatably do what they are claimed to do. Humans are still the only reliable choice, and there is absolutely no evidence that this will not be the case for the foreseeable future.

Several of the Walmarts in my area have similar "gates". It's clearly just to stop people from running back out the entrance with stolen merchandise. If you need to get out just walk around past the cashiers and leave.

I think we have a decade of empirical evidence that the complexity of the issues facing modern society has exceeded the ability of the average person to understand. In the past, you could just go somewhere else and "farm", not worrying about others. That world no longer exists.