We kind of knew it for the internet and we basically figured it out early (even if we knew it was going to take a long time to happen due to generational inertia - see the death of newspapers).
For LLMs it looks a lot like deindustrialization. Aka pain and suffering for a lot of people.
Arguably we already saw some of the socially destabilizing impacts of computers, and more and more Americans were forced into poorly paying service sector jobs.
I actually suspect that right now, if we wanted to, we could automate a large amount of societies needs if we were willing to take a hit on quality/variety. For example, what % of the food chain could be 100% automated if we really wanted to? Obviously most foods could not, but surely a few staple crops could be automated 100% to the extent of robo-semis and robots loading and unloading crops?
That will be the eventual end goal. The question is what do we do as a society then?
Soft fruit is probably furthest away. That depends on huge armies of immigrant pickers.
The first web browser was designed to be completely peer to peer.
But you are right about getting it wrong. The peer to peer capabilities still exist, but a remarkable amount of what we now consider basic infrastructure is owned by very large centralized corporations. Despite long tails of hopeful or niche alternatives.
That's packet switching, which is layer 3. Layer 7 is only ever getting more centralized.
This is a bit naive. Until TLS, TCP traffic on down was sent in the clear. Most traffic used to be sent in the clear. This is what makes packet filtering and DPI possible. Moreover things like DNS Zones and IP address assignment are very centralized. There are cool projects out there that aim to be more decentralized internets, but unfortunately the original Internet was just not very good at being robust.
Instead we have roads that go straight from suburbs to a few big city centers. Sometimes a new center rise, but it's still very centralized. I'd say that the prediction was correct. What they failed to foresee is that we don't connect to libraries and newspapers, we connect to Netflix, FB, Instagram etc.
