Capital × Competence
A theory of power in the age of AI
If I think about the skill that is going to be important in the upcoming decade I keep coming back to this idea of “harnessing compute”.
You see, compute is the new form of power. Those with compute have the power to fuel artificial intelligence through LLM models but also coordinate the outputs of them through agentic sandboxes, databases and services.
The obvious conclusion people derive from this is that they need to go out and rush to buy hardware. That’s only half of the truth. Compute isn’t brute force power like physical violence, it is intellectual too. Which means, how efficiently and effectively you use compute is just as important!
As an example, people who buy Mac Minis to run OpenClaw are compute illiterate. They do not know their real compute constraint and are buying hardware that does not increase their compute capabilities in a tangible way.
OpenClaw is not compute intensive at all and can run on rented $10/month virtual servers. Spending $1k+ on a new machine for it is a waste of money. However someone who has pushed the limits of their OpenClaw on their local laptop and then gets a Mac Mini might be better off. That’s not the end though. To really push it, this same person might build specialised agents that run to do specific tasks on their Mac. More juice. To make it even more interesting, they then build tiered intelligence architecture systems to intelligently delegate LLM calls to an Ollama model running on that same Mac and the rest to OpenAI/Anthropic.
I can go on, but the average person running OpenClaw is basically compute illiterate and isn’t able to harness compute effectively.
On the other hand, you have startup engineers that have well architected systems but are fully reliant on cloud providers because “running your own hardware is hard”. This group is good at using compute but is compute poor because they do not own any means of production (hardware) and pay rent to their corporate overlords. Opposite to our OpenClaw normie.
Harnessing compute is a skill that requires capital and labour put together. Only having one over the other misses the full capability.
Society’s new elite class will be the techno-compute class.
