Plenty of profit was made off feudalism, and technofeudalism has all the tools of modern technology at its disposal. If things go in that direction, they will have an unlimited supply of serfs desperate for whatever human work/livelihood is left.
If AI lives up to the hype, that will become possible.
> If all that remains of the economy consists of a few datacenters talking to each other, how can the ruling class profit off that?
I don't think it would be that. There'd also be power generation, manufacturing, mining, and construction, etc.; but all extremely automated. If you get to truly extreme levels of wealth concentration, things would shift out of our capitalist market system model, and concepts like "profit" would become anachronisms.
It actually might kinda look like the "economy" of Starcraft: you gather resources, decide what to build with them, and order it all around according to your whim. There will be a handful of guys playing, and everyone else will be a NPC.
I guess if the “players” are sociopathic enough they might decide to just wipe out the NPCs. The possibility of someone like Putin or Musk becoming the sole member of the post-singularity humanity does make me pause.
