> If the magnitude of changes that OpenAI and Athropic believe will be delivered with increasingly powerful AI (and robotics) comes in a time frame that significantly worsens a large proportion of people's lives, this is a different situation. Can super powerful AI not be developed in a way that minimizes such disruption?
It cannot. The problem is that everything gets automated, so there's nowhere for people to "transition" to.
More fundamentally, the problem is that capitalism is simply incompatible with this. Specifically: capitalism is a system of property rights which in the long run always results in concentration of capital in a few hands. What made it tolerable so far is that capital cannot produce wealth by itself - you need people to use it to that end. Which in turn means that you need to pay for labor, at least enough for it to sustain itself. So even if you pocket most of the wealth that is generated in the process, the workers still get the crumbs at least.
AI is not like automation in the past because its end goal is doing everything that humans can do. Taken to its logical conclusion, you get capital that doesn't need labor at all: those who own the robots live in a personal post-scarcity utopia, everyone else starves. A slightly better case is when everyone else gets a meager pension, just high enough that people have something to lose and don't try to burn everything down - this is why you hear so much about UBI from the likes of Sam Altman (this isn't to say that UBI is inherently a bad thing! but make no mistake, what they actually want would look a lot more like The Expanse and a lot less like The Culture). It "minimizes disruption" in a sense that there are no riots, and it might even be a material improvement for a lot of the globe, but it sure isn't an improvement for most people living in developed countries today.
So I would argue that, if anything, we need more disruption here, not less. All the way to the top.