> If AI keeps getting better and better and status quo socio-economic structure don't change, trillions in capital will be captured by the 0.01%.This is absolutely one of the things that keeps me up at night.
Much of the structure of the modern world hinges on the balance between forces towards consolidation and forces towards fragmentation. We need organizations (by this I mean corporations, governments, unions, etc.) big enough to do big things (like fix climate change) but small enough to not become totalitarian or decrepit.
The forces of consolidation have been winning basically since the 50s with the rise of the military-industrial complex, death of unions, unlimited corporate funding of elections (!), regulatory capture, etc. A short linear extrapolation of the current corporate/government environment in the US is pretty close to Demolition Man's dystopian, "After the franchise wars, all restaurants are Taco Bell."
Big data is a huge force towards consolidation. It's essentially a new form of real estate that can be farmed to grow useful information crops. But it's a strange form of soil that is only productive if you have enough acres of it and whose yield scales superlinearly with the size of your farm.
Imagine doing a self-funded AI startup with just you and a few friends. The idea is nearly unthinkable. How do you bootstrap a data corporation that needs terabytes of information to produce anything of value?
If we don't figure out a "data socialism" movement where people have ownership over the data derived from their life, we will keep careening towards an eventuality where a few giant corporations own the world.