The biggest reason humans want AI to succeed however is so that they can stop spending their time serving other humans in repetitive, mundane, and boring work.
Wealth distribution is a problem that can be solved better or worse with or without AI. Better with AI looks like things along the lines of low working hours with good pay, UBI, or so on, things we simply can't afford without automating the work. Worse without AI looks like things like slavery, something we don't even have incentive to resort to if we do automate the work.
Let's not confuse our current political issues with how we distribute wealth with issues with AI. They're issues with our institutions, some of those issues are exacerbated by better technology, but they can and should be solved.
Do you not feel it naive to assume that those that currently hold the vast majority of wealth and power won't continue to do so and exploit the rest of us? I mean, they will own all the AI's, right?
I don't think it's likely that inequality will go away, a minority will likely continue to hold the vast majority of wealth.
But, as technology gets better the incentive to exploit the bottom end of the wealth and power spectrum goes down, technology does the job better than manual labor. Moreover people don't actually like to see other people suffer as a rule of thumb, so given the absence of other incentives the QOL for the bottom end of the spectrum likely goes up. UBI is a much bigger ask when it's 30% of the GDP than 3% (made up numbers).
Especially given that we have reasonably functional democracies in many countries today, I think it's pretty likely that the social problem works out well.
It's also not like I expect AIs/useful programs to be a rare resource, the best one might be, but like all computer programs they're infinitely clonable, there are only artificial sources of scarcity, and scarcity of (more or less fungible) computational power. This isn't a setup that lends itself well to the hording of resources. Moreover maintaining the technology will probably consume some humans in frankly not that exciting jobs like "maintenance programming"... and those humans probably won't come from the high end up the wealth/power spectrum, but will be high leverage. That points to a society that is likely to have reasonably good class mobility. The cards are stacked in favor of democracy working reasonably well.
That is a way more optimistic outlook than I have had for the last 15 or so years. I sincerely appreciate your response and outlook. Not sure if I agree or disagree but, that's just my opinion, man. :)
