AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

AI (and computing technology in general) is an alien as it defies all wordly norms. It can have exact identical copies, can replicate, can exist everywhere, communicate across huge distance without time lapse, do huge work without time lapse, has no physical mass of it's own,, no respect for time, distance, mass and thinking work, not a living thing but can think.... Just the perfect alien creature qualities.

Why are they allowed to invade Earth? The business goals, of course. To get a temporary edge over the competitors, until they acquire the same. But once everyone has the same Ai, there is no going back. Ai has established itself through the weak channels that are filled with greed, that can bribed by giving toys (business edge), in return to the keys to the dominance of human race.

— in the 1960/1970s, when compilers came out. "We don't need so many programmers hand-writing assembly anymore." Remember, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) were marketed as human-readable languages that would let business professionals/scientists no longer be reliant on dedicated specialist programmers.

— in the 1980s/1990s, when higher-level languages came out. "C++ and Java mean we don't need an army of low-level C developers spending most of their effort manually managing memory, and rich standard libraries mean they don't have to continuously reimplement common data structures from scratch."

— in the 1990s/2000s, when frameworks came out. "These things are basically plug-and-play, now one full-stack developer can replace a dedicated sysadmin, backend engineer, database engineer, and frontend engineer."

While all of these statements are superficially true, the result was that the world produced more software (and developer jobs) than ever, as each level of abstraction freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level solutions. Mel's intellect was freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common.

While this time with AI may truly be different, I'm not holding my breath.

[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

They're doing things now that they either flat out could not do before, or if they did it would be an giant mess (I realize they still can't really do it now, AI is doing it for them).

Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.

Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the democratization of AI.