Yeah, that's more my worry than "x-risk" stuff. Technology has no doubt made the world a better place in many ways, but lately it seems to be more and more of a trend that technology tends to foster consolidation of power. That worries me more than "evil AI" or "paperclip maximizer" scenarios. But I don't consider it a given that AGI must yield such an outcome. It's something I spend a modest amount of time thinking about though.
All industry still depends upon a massive amount of underpaid manual (often slave) labor that can not be automated easily. Automation would maybe cover 20% of what is done, the rest would have to be manual. Especially if the gains from cost reduction from importing raw material from third world labor are still of interest to western manufacturers.
The jobs involving manual labor are "safe", and so are the management / organizational jobs. So the mid-tier jobs would then migrate to whatever comes one step lower. In an optimistic scenario, it would lead to better efficiency in these lower paid jobs. But that's utopian.
Instead, what I see on the horizon is an increased interest in hardware optimization. Software is, for the first time, three steps ahead and hardware feels like it needs to catch up, like it's two steps behind. There are already orgs making this happen (tenstorrent) and specialist software in tandem would lead to very very quick prototyping. The generated hype for a "guaranteed upturn" would inject enough cash into these new industries to allow manufacturing of previously prohibitively expensive, specialist, one-off hardware for other manufacturers via non-standard manufacturing practices (like 3d printing). Most of this output would look "weirdly mathematical" and rather unnerving, similar to how the deeplearning image outputs used to a couple of years ago.
When we'll be close enough to this, the management will surely try to bite off more than necessary from the plebs. I fully expect robotic policing to be the norm by then, because policing gives the most training data and will likely be the first to be optimized for "your safety". So even if you don't have a Spot with a mg on its shoulder patrolling your neighborhood, you could be put in jail if you're caught removing the robot's battery on the 360 cam. Would likely lead to robot laws. Sorry if this is a bit alarmist but that is where I see it going.
I'm more worried about how half-baked "AI" will be used. Not very concerned with how a theoretically almost-sentient AI will behave. As bad as it sounds, if the utility of computing morphs from increasing human quality of life to something unto itself then retarding "progress" / freedom seems like the easiest, most rational call right now.
There are "delivery robots" on the campus near where I live that drive around on the sidewalk. I think they're partly run autonomously, but partly controlled by out-sourced human labor. They don't get in my way too much, but I deeply dislike the way some stupid delivery company injected themselves into the commons of the sidewalk. Maybe it's a little sadistic, but every time I'm in that area and I walk by one I fantasize about kicking it. I don't know for certain, but that's probably already illegal and I know that they would have good video evidence to file a police report with.
... I don't think it's alarmist. Even today, robots already have more protection than I'm comfortable with.
*edit: fluency and spelling