But, contrary to at any such developments in history, the people who are losing out aren't the "poor working class". They already have cultural and political power that they stand to lose. This might still go a lot of ways.
Some of them sure, but you're painting with the broadest brush possible. Do you really think the average artist is not "poor working class", that they have cultural and political power?
Maybe not the average but the power is concentrated in a few and they are also affected. I'm expecting many who collectively do have power to participate in shaping how these things are used and perhaps oppose the big companies.
You imagine there won’t be other limits, but maybe we just don’t know what they are yet? It tends to be true that some things that are easy for people are hard for AI.
It is a fair point and I hope you're right because I think humans being second best at everything will probably have bad outcomes for most of us but given the current trajectory, it does seem like a run away train for now.
But Microsoft doesn't sell to office workers, they sell to executives... who would relish the idea of getting rid of those office workers. And guess who owns "Open" "AI"...
Shareholders will replace executives immediately, and I don't think it's far off.
If you think executives are safe from AI, well I think you're crazy.
Imagine saving hundreds of millions a year in executive salaries by hiring a robot that has 1000x better strategic capabilities than you, is 10x cheaper, has absolutely zero empathy, never sleeps, just optimizes for money and just makes the required cold hard decisions ?
And the mountain of writing created by authors and uploaded to the web is putting them out of jobs.
And the mountain of music created by musicians is going to start putting them out of jobs.
Generative AI is an unprecedented transfer of wealth-generating capability from creative people to giant corporations.