I don't think that's what Ori is getting at. The ship has sailed on the illusion that the OS is in charge of anything other than what lower layers allow it to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
Management in most tech companies see dependence on skilled (human) workers as a risk and liability; their goal with internal use of Gen AI seems to be to reduce their dependence on skilled workers. They're also hyping Gen AI "efficiency" argument to their customers. Regardless of whether they really believe that Gen AI will replace the need for humans or they're overhyping it in order to create a panic buying stampede for their technology, the net effect is harm to society (waste of energy to produce AI slop, misdirected resources, etc.) But, there are useful applications of ML/AI: reducing or eliminating dangerous and/or repetitive work (robots, autonomous vehicles), increasing access to medical expertise (e.g. detection of trachoma using computer vision), etc. On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 6:18 AM <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mon, May 18, 2026, at 02:52, [email protected] wrote: > > > The tech industry is trying very hard to build an ugly future. > > I’m increasingly concerned about a broader architectural shift in which > responsibilities traditionally handled by the operating system are being > pushed down into firmware or firmware-adjacent layers, reducing the OS’s role > as the system’s primary and ultimate point of control. As that boundary > shifts, the operating system is no longer the highest practical authority > over the machine, but increasingly a constrained runtime operating under > policies, initialization logic, and security decisions defined below it. For > open source projects, this subtly but meaningfully changes their role. Even > fully transparent operating systems may depend on opaque firmware for core > behaviors like boot integrity, device initialization, power management, and > security enforcement. That reduces the scope of end-to-end auditability and > weakens the OS’s ability to serve as the final arbiter of system behavior. > Over time, open source systems risk evolving from sovereign controllers of > hardware into policy-bound execution environments where their openness still > matters but no longer guarantees full control over the system stack. > > If we reach that point, what meaningful agency would remain for the user in > operating a computer, and would that level of constrained control still > justify calling it a general-purpose system? ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T073a994fa2fd80d1-M381b1a1ecf589899ed40c23d Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
