[LarsDu88]

I think people's imaginations are overfitting on current reality or the past 20 years where people's vision of technology is something like Facebook (a multibillion dollar college yearbook app) or Netflix (TV, but on the internet), and the economy needs a horde of subscriber consumers binging on a buffet of digital mind slop to keep the whole system running.

The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer never had most of the wealth in the first place. Not since the 1970s at least.

Just like Nvidia makes a lot more money selling GPUs to megacorps rather than to people playing games on their XBox, future corps can make plenty of money serving each other rather than retail consumers.

An autonomous fleet of delivery vehicles needs an autonomous fleet of vehicle service robots, etc, etc. At some point the entire stack will be automated.

Will the working classes be at the bottom of the pyramid and wealth inequality skyrocket. Absolutely. It's practically inevitable. But will the economy collapse? No way.

Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens, at some point armies of robot servants built by the "tech companies" will be integrated into every facet of human life, from the lowest plebians to the wealthiest patricians.

[joquarky]

> Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens

Do you have anything resembling a source on that claim?

[greycol]

He's roughly wrong if you're pedantic, a pc with 4mb of ram in 1993 cost about $1125 (bottom of the premium market as only premium pc's had 4mb of ram) which has about the same value as $2600 usd today. Really though considering the development speed at the time (going back even a year and you'd pay a higher price for similar specs) and that someone buying a "premium pc" when doom was realeased could easily spend twice as much without being able to blow away dooms requirements I wouldn't argue the point they made.

Plenty of stories about doom on a vape pen. Here's one:

https://www.thegamer.com/doom-running-vape-usb-connection-pc...

Other notables include doom on a pregnancy test, and doom on a sbc powered by a potato battery.

Some actual pc prices in 1993 if that's what your after, look at premium pcs for 4mb ones https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/1993.php

[LarsDu88]

Look up DOOM Esp32 for numerous examples of doom running on a $2 microcontroller.

Also see this article on the types of arm cortex chips actually found in a disposable vape pen: https://blog.jgc.org/2026/01/theres-ridiculous-amount-of-tec...

If someone hasn't gotten native doom to run in a vape, I think I have my next weekend project.