Post by @TheFogan@programming.dev

2026-10-16 04:17 UTC

Sadly I fear worse, the bulk of people will adapt in the stupidest way… What’s coming… is obvious. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be an absurd amount more data centers than use for them… and all the hardware is in forms that aren’t going to be convertable into consumer devices. What’s going to happen is what microsoft, amazon, and google have been dreaming of for a decade… Remember google Stadia, Luna etc… People won’t be buying PCs… they will be buying, thin clients. Your PC will just stream your hardware from a data center. The music and movie industries will be happy because the providers can scan for pirated content… governments may flat out ban individuals from owning personal computers, that’s a security risk they can’t control, they are already looking into bills to prevent personal AI systems. No worries of people bypassing age verification, or running custom OS’s or firmware that can’t be controlled. Best of all it’s super profitable, instead of a few grand for a one time purchase, they can hit you up every month… and gradually raise the prices like cable, like movie streaming. Maybe even vendor lockouts… you gotta stream an MS computer to get access to office 365, but you’ll also need an amazon subscription to run some other applications, or games or whatever they locked in exclusivity for.

Replies (3)

@sealhaslupus@lemmy.world 2026-10-16 04:38

this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer. i think more or less that’s it’s difficult to foresee what will happen in the next 5 years. what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”. it only takes a handful of poor decisions for a company to fail, and many more better decisions for it to succeed.

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@Flower@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-16 05:46

At that point you connect your phone to a screen and use that to handle what is needed for paying bills and schoolwork instead of yet another subscription. It’s after the AI bubble pops, so Greatest Depression time and nobody got spare cash for more services.

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@Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 2026-10-16 08:10

What you describe needs continued investment into datacenters. The hardware doesn’t last forever (avg. life expectancy is somewhere around 6 years iirc), and running that hardware also isn’t free at all. Add to that that you can nowadays run Cyberpunk 2077 on medium detail with 60 FPS on a freaking Android Phone with FEX and Proton, and personal computing is far from dead, regardless of what they want.

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