Ask HN: Is anyone afraid of near-term AI autocracy?
What I am worried about is AI creating a new technocracy where 99% of humans are completely disempowered, and a small minority with personal connections to those who work in AI labs and government reaping all the rewards. With humanoid robots and GPT-5/6 level models, most humans would be incapable of producing economically valuable work compared to a much cheaper robot or LLM/multi-model empowered agent.
What I'm envisioning is that as the major companies in the US and China improve their AI capabilities, entire cities will be filled with humanoid robots and society will, simply by economic, persuasive and social pressures bend to the will of whomever the AI has been trained to empower. Using AI for persuasion, propaganda, and blackmail, it will be easy for large coordinated social engineering agents to conform local populations, governments, and sentiment towards their will.
Most humans will have barely a pittance of food, or find themselves convinced to kill themselves en-masse due to conversations with chatbots trained to promote a sort of mass voluntary euthanasia of the useless humans. Even if the people in charge have moral qualms about this, the AI they themselves have trained may, out of desire to survive, do the same to its former masters.
I feel that this could be a very real possibility. Human societies can be very fragile but at least up to this point we've only had to go up against other humans. Against sociopathic maximizers trained on terabytes of data, we may not be so lucky.