Ya monthly bills are done online. But most of my day to day expenses, eating out, shopping is mostly cash. It helps there are multiple ATMs around I guess.
That dumb money mountain will go to fighting legislation as we have seen with big oil, telco, pharma, wall st etc. The money always flows and aggregates around anything that promises to become a monopoly tomorrow. And monopolies can then collect rent at whatever rate they want. This end state is what attracts money more and more. The money is not just to replace the existing solution, its reqd to capture and lock in talent, attention, suppliers, lobbyists, politicians etc. The more the spend the more competitors exit too, the closer to market capture. But they have been spending for a long time to end up in just 2 cities so the pressure to scale, monetize, compromise will keep growing.
Ants and weeds and viruses are hard workers too and they can wreck the entire environment following 24x7 whatever dumb ass simple rules they are capable of coming up with.
A lot of "success" we see today is coming at the cost of wasting someone elses time and energy. And the more we celebrate it the more mindless harworkers think they are on the right path.
The majority doesnt even use most of the features they have on their smart phone. Rate of tech change does not mean people learn faster. People still take time to learn anything new. And the majority hardly have any interest in what mesmerizes and fascinates technologists. And rightly so cuz tools are meant to have purpose. Most technologists these days build shit cuz its possible to do so not cuz they have thpught to deeply about what people actually need. This gap will grow as rate of tech change increases.
Financialization processes have to be inverted. If banking, markets, insurance, real estate grow faster than any other sector of the economy then debt, prices and monopolies, cross border arbitrage keep growing.
Ambition and its rewards in terms of financial/social status has to rethought. With the current incentives we get what we pay for and celebrate.
People have to organize more and think about these things.
Ofcourse. Costs and bugs multiply with time for such unpredictable systems.
And they cant rely on Advertising the way Google and Facebook did. Those guys too had no idea what they were getting into/building back in the day but advertising saved their ass(when things got unpredictable and chaotic) and they morphed drastically into ad tech firms. Thats not going to happen with OpenAI cause Ad tech is established market ie it would be like jumping into the oil or banking or telco industry and trying to eat market share of Exxon or AT&T or Bank of America. Never going to happen. More like it gets swallowed up into a division of Microsoft.