[skybrian]

This seems implausible. Moore's law is over and phones are limited by size and power. There's no reason to believe progress will continue until a phone is the same speed as a typical desktop machine, let alone a server rack.

[adventured]

Interestingly it's the centralized network that will grow radically more powerful, while the home devices continue to stagnate.

The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants.

Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role.

The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations.

It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.

[skybrian]

That sounds very plausible to me, but I still think decentralized server-side infrastructure has some potential. Sandstorm didn't take off and maybe Mastodon isn't it, either, but it seems like someone's going to have consumer-friendly, <$10/year, general-purpose server accounts for running apps. Maybe some game will make it popular?

[imtringued]

Especially if you consider how much of a lead apple had over ARM and the custom designs of SoC vendors like qualcom then you will realize that the easy growth is already gone. 2 years for a 50% increase in performance just to catch up with the strongest competitor is very far away from doubling performance every year.

[eswat]

True. Companies are hitting a lot of friction getting node sizes down to 7nm when compared to sizes from years or decades ago.

[dboreham]

True but you don't need much of a server to run many of the "server side" things a single user needs.

[eswat]

Until we find ways to add more bloat to the user requirements that will require a server-of-the-future to be more than a server-of-the-present.