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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a future where a resourceful computer will be unobtanium, because AI companies decided to outbid consumers. Your PC will be just powerful enough to work as a terminal, with all the heavy lifting done by cloud compute data centers.

Every functionality be will subscription-based. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

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“Heavy lifting” here being running 108 MB of JavaScript to render shopping cart of an online store, correct?

Or consuming 2 GB of RAM to have Teams running in the background doing nothing?

Yeah, if we got rid of that as a result of RAM shortages, that’d be great.

You are absolutely correct that much of modern software is extremely bloated. So maybe a silver lining is that less memory for the next couple of years will also force developers to produce leaner software. Electron apps being the first in line.

I'm struggling to picture how we get there from here? There's a huge pile of second hand PCs available, and almost all of them are massively more powerful than necessary for terminal purposes only.

I mean this is one of the risk factors in AI safety that's been communicated for a long time. It's not just computing, but potentially everything. Energy resources, land resources (like those used to grow food for us meat bags), transportation resources. Suddenly humans find themselves outbid by AI as AI has pushed us out of the economy.

The economy says nothing about requiring humans to exist.

That is the logical conclusion. The era of personal computers is coming to an end. It had a good run though.

Luckily Beelinks are still cheap, work decently, and can run Linux/Windows, so if all someone needs is to browse the Internet and do basic stuff, honestly? They’re fine. We’ll see how long that lasts though.

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