It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.
That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.
4am@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
It sounds conspiratorial to say it seems like they are trying to crash the consumer market so that computing will be entirely dependent on their services, but I mean…
paultimate14@lemmy.world 2 days ago
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
I think that seems obvious.
They want to make their services cheaper for them to run, and they want to sell them for more money, while buying up hardware so nobody else can compete with them or not depend on them.
phx@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I was thinking on that yesterday.Mass local storage affordable? No no no, better to drive those prices way up so that we can sell you “cloud” services instead.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
My company is needing to go away from external storage for local only backups, as 2,4" 4TB HDDs are shit and unreliable and 4TB SSDs (like Samsung T5 Evo) are going from 200€ to 600€ (per disk. And we need 3 of those).
Instead we are pivoting to S3(-compatible)-Cloud as the main off-site storage.
I am certainly not thrillee but on the otger side, customers arent willing to lug around 3,5" HDD cases so…What else is there?
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 2 days ago
It’s because the average USA citizen is economically irrelevant. The money is in the to 10% and the big corpos, especially AI with all the money sloshing around there. The 90% consumer market doesn’t matter as much these days.
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us. We believe in our foundational myth that they’ll always need us somehow, even as they go out of their way to make it utterly obvious that they won’t be happy until they can replace literally everything us dirty poor working class people do. When they no longer need us, they will start to dispose of us. Arguably, they’ve begun doing that already. War is good for business, and for population control.
plyth@feddit.org 2 days ago
Of all the things to pick from socialism, expecting the rich to care should be the last one.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
The thing is, if they collapse the economy, and nobody can afford to buy their overpriced products, they’re going to suffer too - which is good, it shouldn’t be only us suffering.
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Are they going to suffer? That’s what we’re supposed to believe, but remember that money is a human-made concept that only has value because we collectively give it value, and the economy is built on that very important principle.
That situation you describe is real, it will disrupt their efforts a little and protect us in the short term, but in the long term, the meaning of money and economy is changing. they’re doing everything they can to use automation to build a new post-scarcity economy based on ownership, membership, services and control. And beyond that, it frankly doesn’t include us or even think about us.
That’s what the wealth divide is. It’s the way that money, as an economic representation of their values, is telling us that their motivations are not about making all existing humans on this planet more comfortable and productive and independent. In their vision of this future economy, they are instead hoarding humanity’s collective efforts for themselves, reinvesting it into their own technology, They focus their efforts on what they personally consider important for “progress”, chasing their own utopian ideals for the specific goals and groups they consider the best and most important, while the rest of us that aren’t part of those goals or groups are pacified and left behind and, if you really think it out, eventually eliminated. After all, a utopia won’t include teeming, growing masses of humanity using up all the available resources, that would be a plague, and they eventually will decide to cure it if they haven’t already started. Their vision of the future only needs to have enough room for them and the more utopian they make it the less of us there will be. They want to be the main characters, we’re just nameless extras who do chores and fill in the background for now and can be ignored to go wherever extras are supposed to go when they’re no longer on the screen.
Their view of humanity is abstract, and they believe what they are doing is right, all the way down to the core of their being. They simply don’t value humanity’s rich tapestry of lived experiences or the sanctity of every individual human life. They’ll never make it a priority. They care more about making sure humanity has become “advanced” or is multi-planetary than they do about making sure every human has a home, or food. That’s their vision. It’s about humanity as a whole, not about individual humans. We can all be sacrificed so the species becomes safer. Scientifically, I can’t even say they’re wrong. But philosophically, I hope we can all agree that this is deeply wrong and morally bankrupt. We need to start to reclaim our individual humanity and go back to putting people first. We need to care about people in the present, and always, not just the abstract idea of humanity’s future. We need to take our money back and use it for a different kind of progress.