- AGI being cheap to develop, or
- finding funders willing to risk billions for capped returns.
Neither happened. And I'm not sure the public would invest 100's of billions on the promise of AGI. I'm glad there are investors willing to take that chance. We all benefit either way if it is achieved.
I am not sure that making labour obsolete, and putting the replacement in the hands of a handful of investor will result in everybody benefiting.
I believe that AGI will be a net benefit to whomever controls it.
I would argue that if a profit driven company rents something valuable out to others, you should expect it would benefit them just as much if not more, than those paying for that privilege. Rented things may be useful, but they certainly are not a net benefit to the system as a whole.
Information interconnection is meaningfully different from AGI, and the environment ATT and Bell existed within no longer exist.
Drop those assumptions and my point stands that throughout history, monopolistically-controlled transformative technologies (telephones, electricity, vaccines, railroads) have still delivered net benefits to society, even if imperfectly distributed. This is just historical fact.
Yeah, like I said, room for improvement. I find the argument that AGI or sAGI should be feared, or is likely to turn "evil" absurd in the best case. So your arguing against a strawman I already find stupid.
Telephones, increased the speed of information transfer, it couldn't produce on it's own. Electricity allowed transmission of energy from one place to another, and doesn't produce inherent value in isolation, vaccines are in an entirely different class of advancement, (so I have to idea how you mean to apply it to the expected benefits of AGI? I assume you believe AGI will have something to do with reducing disability), railroads again, like energy or telephones, involved moving something of value from one place to another.
AGI is supposed to produce a potentially limitless amount of inherent value on its own, right? It will do more than just move around components of value, but more like a diamond mine, it will output something valuable as a commodity. Something that can easily be controlled... oh but it's also not concrete, you can never have your own, it's only available for rental, and you have to agree to the ToS. That sounds just like all previous inventions, right?
You're welcome to cite any historical facts you like, but when you're unwilling or unable to draw concrete parallels, or form convincing conclusions yourself, and hand wave, well most impressivive inventions in the past were good so I feel AGI will be cool too!
Also, the critical difference (ignoring the environmental differences between then and now) between the inventions you cited, and AGI, is the difficulty in replicating any technology. Other than "it happened before to most technologies" is there reason I should believe that AGI would be easy to replicate for any company that wants to compete against the people actively working to increase the size of their moat? copper wire, and train tracks are easy to install. Do you expect AGI will be easy for everyone to train?