> However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.

Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence human effort and society.

How exactly do you propose that AI will serve the wellbeing of the worker/middle classes after they've been made obsolete by it?

Goodwill of the corporations working on them? Of their shareholders, well-known to always put welfare first and profit second? Government action increasingly directed by their lobbying?

> What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.

Sure. How? We've not done it with any other technological advances so far, and I don't see how shifting the power balance further away from the worker/middle class will help matters.

There's a reason why the era of techno-optimism has already faded as quickly as it's begun.