Yeah, I’ve had the thought. ‘What are we going to do with all that compute now that AI as worker replacement is a bust? Why not run panopticon and get rid of that pesky general compute in the hands of the masses?’

Centralizing compute has been tried again and again, initially mainframes, then the home PC, thin client / server, cloud compute, arguably phones (as apps processing in the cloud), Geforce Now, AI. So far it’s always gone back to the edge for most of the population, except for niche cases (or not in the case of phones, but they turned into general, if locked down, compute), good chance it won’t stick this time either.