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.