Yeah, I mostly agree with your opinion. It's true that in the short-term there will be tons of disruption and likely more bad than good will come out of it. I guess my point was that ultimately how the upsides and downsides of a new technology will be distributed depend a lot on how societies organize themselves. The industrial revolution allowed the concentration of wealth and robber barons, but also unions and social democracy as a reaction to that.
I agree, it really depends on how society organizes. For this reason I tend to be a bit frustrated by how AI narratives are often framed. They are often described as only technological. As if a tool could wield itself without anyone behind to operate it. We talk about the impact of AI as if it was inevitable progress. Those issues are in fact deeply political, but the valley mentality doesn’t like to see it that way. Probably because it is uncomfortable to see our work as contributing to a complex system with winners and losers, it’s much nicer to see ourselves as stewards of progress. The question “the progress of what?” is often pushed in the background.
